Are we, outliners fans, just a bunch of outlined mind maniacs?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 8, 2013 at 06:11 PM

Interesting thread; not sure whether it can lead to any conclusions, but here’s my 2c:

Like Cassius and Steve, I had never used outlines prior to encountering them in software form (when I did, I was enamoured). However, for as long as I remember myself, I’ve been looking for ‘my own’ ways of organising things, e.g. during high school, in my agenda I didn’t keep my contacts in one single alphabetical list, but on different sections depending on where I knew a person from, and only with their first names. So there would be a John from French lessons and another John from my school, and it would be obvious to me who was who. I guess that was a primitive filtering system.

In my first proper job I worked a lot with flat file and relational databases (FileExpress and Paradox 4.5 for DOS; those were the days); they were very useful for direct marketing, but I realised quite soon that they were not much help in making sense of things—at least not in the way I wanted to make sense of things. I’ve loathed classic database entry forms ever since; talk about losing the forest for the trees. It was around that time (mid ‘90s) that I encountered Idealist—unfortunately it did not work with Greek which at the time was my main working language. In fact I found that a large part of such innovative software was severely crippled in terms of non-Western (or even non-English) language handling. How ironic that now, in the days of Unicode and full compatibility, I work mostly in English.

But I digress. A third example of my ‘misfitting’ in respect to the way that ‘normal’ people organise information-centred work is from today: while working with a colleague on a complex proposal in MS Word 10 I had its wonderful navigation pane open on the left. Well, she asked me to close it because ‘it was getting in the way’. Sigh; now that Microsoft got it right, I hope that it won’t kill the feature because mainstream users ignore it. .