At last -- my review of ConnectedText as an outliner

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 24, 2012 at 11:22 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Thanks also to Dr Andus for the very useful
>complementary tips.

You’re welcome…

> I believe that CT would have actually faired rather poorly in
>such a comparison, as its wiki features (which represent its core functionality) are
>mostly irrelevant to outlining.

...but I respectfully disagree :) Although wikis are often hailed as our liberators from hierarchical thinking, it is possible and can be even useful to view a wiki as a hierarchical structure.

As I said in one of my comments on Steve’s blog, the wiki’s homepage is basically level 1 of a hierarchy, and any outbound links are level 2. Links from those are level 3 etc., etc. You have cascading parent-child relationships like in an outline.

I find CT’s Navigator tool particularly helpful for constructing specific hierarchies purposefully. CT thus allows you to freely switch back and forth between a flat and a hierarchical experience, and you can completely forget about your hierarchy until the next time you need it again.

In the beta v. 6, Eduardo has now introduced a feature that allows one to remove individual topics from the Navigator view, so even if you have a particularly dense network of topics, you will be able to construct selective views of your hierarchy.

As I said on the blog, there seem to be at least 4 different ways of outlining in CT at the moment, and I have the nagging suspicion that there might be some other ways I haven’t yet thought of (given CT’s modularity).