Re: Help obtaining GrandView

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2003

Posted by thompson.chris
2004-07-04 16:46:15

Re: GV’s document view

Thanks for the info. Very interesting. I was imagining it slightly differently… sort of like switching from Word’s outline view to document view.

Re: GV category/assignment losing parent outline items

That’s surprising to me (Ecco preserves this), but understandable given the screen real estate on an 80-column text display.

Re: GV being a better outliner

Apart from much better keyboard shortcuts, can you elaborate a bit more on some of the specific features that make GV better for outlining (over Ecco).

Re: Difficulty running under recent versions of Windows

Have you tried DOSbox? (There are also a couple more programs like it.) DOSbox is an open source program that emulates an old DOS machine as closely as possible inside Windows. It looks just like the standard Windows DOS console, but behind the scenes the implementation is more compatible. It was developed to let people run old DOS games on recent versions of Windows, but it works great for applications too. I suspect GrandView will run perfectly in DOSbox.

Re: Agenda

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out Agenda too. It’s incredibly hard without the manuals (you were lucky to find them), but I did puzzle out the gist of the program and most of its operations after a while. It’s a nice program, and I’m actually pleased I spent the time learning the concepts, even though I didn’t really agree with the workflow and believe that Ecco surpasses it in most (nearly all) important ways. This is part of the appeal of GrandView to me; even if I don’t end up using it, I think I can get something out of learning the concepts. I’m a programmer and I’ve had an ongoing mental model of what kind of PIM I’d like to build for myself for quite some time, but it gets continually refined and refined. Even MIT’s Haystack project, which is useless as a tool, is very interesting to me for the decisions they made. e.g. Contrast the “suggested categories” AI, where the user gets to make the ultimate choice, against Agenda’s behind the scenes category assignment logic.

Re: Mark and gather in Ecco

Yes, Ecco does this very gracefully. Create a new category. Mark all the items you want by placing them in this category. Open a new notepad based on that category, and voila, all the marked items are gathered (cloned) into the new view. The gathered view is “live” too—if you switch to another view and mark more things, then go back to the gathered view, the newly marked things will now appear there too.

By the way, Steve, I think I saw you mention in an earlier post that you did some equation writing in GrandView. Just FYI, if you ever give Ecco a whirl again for outlining, you can place equations directly into Ecco outlines, using the Insert Object command. Microsoft’s Equation Editor works fine, as does a freeware equation editor that handles LaTeX style equations (its name escapes me right now).

Thanks again for the info!
—Chris

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