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Re: Should Brainstorm be part of a multi-faceted outliner
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 4416
Posted by srdiamond15
2005-10-26 03:23:14
<Would you consider hoisting a version of this same approach to focussing on a single subject? If so, NoteMap also provides this facility, and, UltraRecall is scheduled to add hoisting to its next upgrade, I think.>
No, I think hoisting is distinct from focusing. (I’m at a loss for a good term for the Brainstorm/MaxThink process. “Focused mode” is an ADM term, but ADM doesn’t really perform the key BrainStorm function). To simulate the focused mode with conventional outlining operations, like in NoteMap, you would need to hoist and then ‘collapse all.’ That would yield the structure of the focused mode at a given time, but still not the key functionality, because in a conventional outliner, to refocus on a topic invisible in focused mode, you would first need to unfocus. That’s also true in ADM, if I recall. ADM just telescopes hoisting and collapsing into focusing, which I suppose you could set up a macro for in NoteMap, with the aid of a simple macro application. Probably Maxthink is the only full-fledged outliner that basically includes BrainStorm as a subset of its functionality.
To me it isn’t clear that Brainstorm would be improved by including its functions in a multi-faceted outliner. (But neither is the denial of this clear to me.) To implement the focused mode properly, you need a broad set of commands—like in Brainstorm. I don’t know whether these could avoid compromise, if the application also outlines conventionally.
Maxthink could be instructive about the limitations of implementing the whole works in Windows, particularly to a reviewer conversant with the DOS MaxThink application. Each time I’ve downloaded it, I have gotten annoyed with trying to figure it out. It’s pretty idiosyncratic (as was Brainstorm, but Brainstorm gave me something to read); its terminology includes terms unknown to conventional outlining, terms like ‘fence,’ that seem to refer to creating classes of topics preliminary to labeling the class with a parent topic. But what you actually _do_ to use this function has never been clear to me.
(MaxThink lacks some features that we have come to expect in an outliner, such as the ability to mark and gather items from different levels in the outline. Neil Larsen’s position is that gathering over disparate levels is bad outlining practice.)
Neil Larsen also contends that Windows is an inhererently inferior environment for coding his program.
Stephen R. Diamond