Columned Outliner, like ListPro & Omni Outliner, that crosses the iPad/Windows barrier?

Posted by MadaboutDana
May 18, 2012 at 09:58 PM

Hi folks, sorry, been a bit busy. On List Master - you can embed lists to more or less any level, I believe, but it doesn’t have a conventional outliner “tree”. But each list can contain other lists (containing a completely different set of columns). It’s actually surprisingly powerful, albeit a little confusing.

On Numbers - perhaps I erred in calling it an “outliner” as such - it isn’t. But it does allow you to create interlinked tables on any one of a large number of tabs, so you can effectively use it as a rather powerful info/data management engine. It’s the closest thing to OneNote for the Mac, in my view, because the tabs function as “pages”, and the many different kind of media you can store on each tab (page) - plus the fact that each page effectively functions as a giant whiteboard - give it enormous flexibility. The fact you can also put tables (complex spreadsheets, even) on each page - and then link them together by various means, including cell references/ranges - makes it even more sophisticated than OneNote in many respects. Okay, so it hasn’t got quite the same powerful search function, but within each workbook (as Excel calls them) the search options are quite powerful enough.

Oh, and for those who like to synchronise Android with Windows (easily); avoid nasty SimpleNote (okay, not nasty, but if you’ve got Dropbox, why bother?). Use something like EMA Personal Wiki instead (free on Google Play and for Windows), or use Epistle to create Markdown documents and then use MarkdownPad or Gonzo or WriteMonkey to edit the files on Windows after synching through Dropbox.

I’m still looking for something really convincing that would allow me to synchronise stuff between Windows, Android and an iPad - although I’ve got a variety of Markdown apps on all three, in truth it irks me to resort to such crudity (sorry, Markdown lovers - so okay, I like Markdown too, but it’s not as good as whatever they’re using in TiddlyWiki). So I tend to use OneNote (which has reasonably competent clients on both Android and iPad), or sometimes Evernote. And for task management I find, rather to my own surprise, that I’ve resurrected Wunderlist, which does a very good job of synchronising between all the various platforms I use. I’m even toying with resurrecting Outlook, which I haven’t used for nearly 10 years, but that’s the CRIMPer in me looking for an excuse… Resist, Bill, I tell myself, try one of the other impressive alternatives instead (mainly German, funnily enough - like Pimero, which is also cross-platform, or eM Client, which you can get standalone or as part of the awesome SoftMaker Office 2012 suite).

I have a lot of sympathy for whoever was writing about the good ole’ Psion 5mx the other day - I have two of them (actually, they’re OEMed Ericssons, built by Psion towards the end of the 5’s lifetime). Amazing machines, even now, and with some impressive software. Mind you, I still have an old NEC MobileNote Pro (Windows CE) and the machine my handle is based on, the AlphaSmart Dana running PalmOS 3.0 (I believe). Occasionally I dig out one or the other of these fine old machines and weep gently into my tea. But times have moved on, and I wouldn’t exchange today’s thrillingly interlinked environment for those oldies, even if I could. Yes, it’s flawed - no, not all the solutions exist (yet!), but there’s so much excitement out there, especially for us CRIMPers!