Cataloguing the Different Ways the Mind Associates Itself with the Outliner Presented Screen

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 10, 2012 at 01:50 PM

It seems to me that outliner and overall information management software development has been as much influenced by ICT capabilities as by theoretical models and approaches. E.g. the fact that Microsoft and others at some point released a hierarchical tree control is probably the reason that so many two pane outliners are out there, with trees with identical capabilities and limitations (e.g. no styling and metadata).

Another example, in respect to #5 The Pacer (The Foot Soldier), is Trello http://trello.com/ You could say that it is rooted in Kanban, but it is so much powerful than any Kanban board implementation than I’ve seen, precisely because it has departed from the original paradigm. Was this done on purpose or along the way? No idea.

Do users suggest features based on some mind set and mental model, or simply because they miss something in everyday practice (and which they might not even be able to describe)? Do ideas stem from a broader background or are they disconnected from any common underlying concept? Again, no idea.

Sideline: it would interest me to know who are the outliner ‘experts’ that you expect to take up this challenge. As far as I remember, only one person in this forum has called himself an expert, and that was in a recent thread. I believe that the majority of contributors here refer to themselves as ‘power users’, which is something completely different.