Re: OmniOutliner Pro 3.0

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2517

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-01-11 19:05:48

What are you seeing that I’m not? I like the inline text, but if that were overwhelmingly important, we would be using Word’s built-it outliner.

There’s no mention of improvements to the core outlining functions. I understand that there were limitations to mark and gather in version 2 and clumsiness in its implementation; I don’t know the details of this criticism.

Granted it’s a more elaborate single pane outliner than anything on Windows. If its mark and gather is impaired, I’d take NoteMap and especially BrainStorm over it. Do you really need columns in a single pane outliner? Even Ted the Mac outlining guru has proclaimed that columns are not important in a writing outliner.

The developer seems to regard columns as the product’s crowning achievement. “Here’s where OmniOutliner really stands apart from other outliners, word processors, or even spreadsheet applications. You can create documents with multiple columns that contain different types of information - like pop-up lists, checkboxes, numerical values, dates, durations, or just plain text. Columns can even dynamically calculate sums for you, or produce averages.”

But I understand there are more elaborate outliners on the Mac than this one. Tinderbox is often seen as the apex, even though it can’t even wrap the lines of a heading. Outlining in Aerial View.

What is true, unfortunately, is that an outliner like this one on Windows would cost two to three times as much as Omni. Why is that? While equivalent hardware costs significantly more on the Macintosh than on Windows, the reverse is true of software. I think it must have to do with the dominant player on Wintel developing mainly software, and the dominant one on the Mac mainly hardware.

Stephen R. Diamond

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