Horizontal outlining

Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 13, 2013 at 09:06 PM

MadaboutDana wrote:
>If anybody can think of something convincingly outliner-y that works
>vertically AND horizontally, why not step up and tell us about it?

This topic has also come up here:
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/771/20

The suggestions were TreeSheets and B-liner.

There is also Outline 4D, except that they’ve implemented the horizontal index-card outline the wrong way round, turning it into another vertical one (http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/18059), which just doesn’t work too well.

I haven’t been able to find an outliner that can do both vertical and horizontal at a switch of the button.

For now I’m most excited about Gingko because it corrects O4D’s mistake. However, it’ not a fully-fledged horizontal outliner because it only supports 3 levels of hierarchy right now. (But they seem to be planning unlimited levels, which would be just great.)

But 3 levels are still very useful exactly because of its scrolling columns feature, which allows you to keep one hierarchy level fixed, while you can scroll much longer and detailed texts in the other two columns. It’s good for the snowballing-type text development described in their video:
http://youtu.be/J4prcx0jZ9M

Another advantage of Gingko is that it uses “cards,” so one can write full text, one is not restricted to a “headings-only” outline. Now I just wish that Gingko cards were collapsible, so that one could view them as a real titles-only outline as well.