Re: Opinions on Treepad, ShadowPlan? New user.

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1718

Posted by rpkellig
2003-11-02 16:02:08

Hello again everyone:

Thanks for the comments. I’ve been reading up on your suggestions.

First, Steve: what is the importance to you of RTF? For me, exporting capabilities are important insofar as I can generate a backup file that preserves the collapsible nature of the outline, and preferably one that can be imported into other outliners should the first one go belly up. When I save Jot or TreePad outlines in RTF, they don’t open as Word documents in outline form. I’ve tried to export Jot files in XML, but they don’t seem to save right; there seems to be a lot of junk code floating around on the page. (Anybody understand OPML/XML? is there something I’m missing here? Shouldn’t exporting to XML creating a page with a clickable outline matching the one in the outliner?)

I’ve heard good things about Zoot, but it’s only available for Windows 2000 and ME, and I’m running 98.

As a non-techie, it would seem to me that allowing for multiple views or multiple parents for a child doesn’t seem overly complex. I looked at the multi-centric website, and the programmer seems to have grasped the principle that creative, “lateral” thinking involves regrouping and reclassifying on the fly. Yet for the prices he’s asking, I could hire a personal secretary.

Clearly, if MORE and Multi-Centric and ShadowPlan were able to create open-ended organizational structures, then the technology is within reach.

If you’re an outliner programmer, please listen

: The ideal outliner I envision would revolve around basic elements - notes. Each element would have a “tag file” of unlimited size. The first tag would indicate its position within a traditional tree. The second might be a time stamp. The third might classify it as a task, contact, indicate its position within a secondary tree structure, etc. A simple filter would sort the elements according to any user-defined order - tree, alphabetical, etc. And, oh yeah, it should have a Palm version that can sync with the PC version :)

I’m not a programmer, so maybe I’m glossing over various technical obstacles. It seems like programmers of all types of software are intent on customizing programs where they should be leaving decisions up to the users. Arnold, I looked at TakeNote from Academix, which looks like a fine piece of software if all I want to do is take research paper notes in the way they expect me to. I’d rather find something more open-ended that I can customize myself.

There seem to be a million basic outliner programs on the market that are basically equivalent to each other. Somebody! separate yourself from the pack. Excuse my diatribe, but its frustrating to see things evolved 9/10ths of the way.

Finally, everyone seems to prefer Jot to TreePad, for reasons that aren’t clear to me. I’ve tested versions of both, and them seem largely equivalent. There seems to be a bit more activity at the TreePad site however. The only advantage I see to Jot is the XML exportability. But given the problems I described above, is this really a benefit? Does XML export mean that the outline is in OPML format?

I’ve been looking at Natara Bonsai outliner for Palm (http://www.natara.com), and it’s manual claims its desktop version can export as XML. Hopefully this will allow me to swap between my Palm and whatever outliner I settle on. Anyone have experience with this type of thing?

Again, thanks for all your advice, and for bearing with this long post.

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