two-pane outliner that can show more than one note at a time in the viewer/editor pane?

Posted by 22111
Oct 20, 2013 at 09:09 AM

“The problem is that tagging everything is time-consuming and not necessarily worth it”

That’s why some applications try to (half-) automate the tagging process, for example RightNote, even when RN’s way of doing does not seem to be that smart to me (the children can get, as tag, the title of the common parent, which means that often, you would have to rename the common parent into something adequate for a tag, trigger the children tagging command, then rename the common parent again: in most cases, it would be better to assign a common tag, or in practice, to assign ONE of the tags the parent items has got already, to the children, too.

“There seem to be t[w]o different types of need here: 1) how to capture, store, and find notes. And 2) how best to use selected notes for outlining and writing. I don’t think it’s necessary to do this all in one software.”

This is only an excuse for permitting laziness to developers, and for crimping. In fact, ONE program should permit GOOD storage functionality, AND good editing/grouping/evaluation/use of stored data, all the more so since for most of such combinations of several programs, all such fiddling around will transfer your data in ONE direction only, but not in both directions, or just with lots of additional, “manual” work from the side of the user.

A blatant example of this being EN and then an outliner: I perfectly understand the interest of EN’s capturing capabilities since most outliners do NOT have those. Here, if you use EN as your “inbox” only, then transfer groups of things into your outliner, no problem here since you will not want to transfer them again into EN (where your grouping/sorting efforts made upon this content in the outliner, will be lost again), so this might be a very valid combination, but the above example - “1) how to capture, store, and find notes. And 2) how best to use selected notes for outlining and writing.” is devoid of sense since here, data transfer is supposed to function in both directions, and with most current software, this is not a valid workflow.

As I have explained here some weeks ago with outliner data THEN exported to an “analysis editor” like KEdit, combinations are ok when transfer of data is done just in one direction, and if you can optimize (half-automate, by macro for example) this transfer. But whenever you need your new data again in the former program, such a concept bears lots of unnecessary, additional problems.

Btw, the “add-in” concept, which has been very well realized with Outlook, is a possible solution to such “why pay for additional functionality only some users will really need” problems.