Re: ndxCards v. 1.92 Re: Lessons from the World of Clip Mana

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2718

Posted by zeoli
2005-02-12 17:09:39

> The issue perhaps is that the eyes need to move to the text pane whereas in a one-pane outliner the heading and the content are contiguous.

First, I want to make it clear that I think the proof is in the pudding… if an application works for you, then it works. So, I am not actually disagreeing with you, Daly. But I do want to point out one significant (and, to me, deadly) drawback of the two-pane approach. A two-pane outliner belies the fact that your writing project is an organic whole. The paragraph you’re working on currently in the editor pane is related to and flows from the paragraph preceding it in the editor pane of the previous item, which is not now visible to you. To reference it, you need to click out of the item you’re working in and then click into the other heading… then back again to continue writing. Call this discontinuous reference static (DRS).I find this a very disturbing way to write.

I will concede that there are ways to approach working in a two-pane outliner that can mitigate DRS. You can export all of your text into a word processor and do all the fine tuning at that point. If you do this, however, you lose your ability to reogranize and rethink the project in the best tool for that, your outliner. Another way to minimize DRS is to include many paragraphs in each one entry (each entry could be a section of a chapter or a whole chapter). However, if you do that, you are beginning to make anything but a very broad outline unnecessary—you might as well write in a word processor from the start. Good outlining should parse your ideas and topics into small pieces that can be shuffled to your heart’s, or at least your mind’s content.

Going back to our old favorite, GrandView allowed you to expand all inline text (or selected topics) so you could view your writing in a more holistic way. You could see if you were being redundant in paragraph three and paragraph six. It was easier to see if paragraph five should really follow paragraph three. Without this “big picture” ability, an outliner loses a lot of its advantages as a writing environment, as far as I’m concerned, and becomes a repository of segmented information that then must be stitched together in another program.

That’s my two cents on the subject.

Steve Z.

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