Best of Both Worlds, Twice - I think this was the missing element to a perfect system: The "one db, one tree" nexus is dead.

Posted by 22111
Dec 22, 2013 at 05:27 PM

Pierre Paul, see below.

Jim, thank you very much for the consolidated download link of yours, very useful for getting some INFO on that mythic program at least (even though I don’t intend to put real stuff into it).

I also intend to have another look into IQ (no screenshots showing it’s a 3-pane outliner the way I conceive them), as well as looking again into Zoot.

Thank you, Cassius, for reminding me, I just left out some technical developments that weren’t but in an early stage anyway. (You know, just as a year ago, I’ve not found a solution to the problem how to best cut up info into bits, then semi-automatically recombine it again, yet; some extensive general discussion of this core problem here would help our “industry” enormously.)

Please let me say here that in the end, I just want a “much better, and scalable, 3-pane outliner”, but with dedoubling of the outlining. In fact, 1-pane outliners’ “original idea”, if I dare say, were to “treat one subject”, not two, not 200 or 2,000. Then came 2-pane outliners, and they were originally intended for doing the same, but with a different visual repartition of the “construction info” on the paper, then on the screen.

Then came pc’s, and especially, more power to any such pc use (for this and anything else), and then both users and developers fell into a trap: Since from the purely technical pov, it’s possible to have a monster tree where the 2-pane outliner now contains 2,000 different subjects, with any possible number of items and the conceptional chaos that comes with that, whilst this concept had never been invented to store massive amounts of (and then not even coherent) info: The big mistake here was, yes, it all can be placed within one tree of exploding size, and technically be managed, but you use the SAME tree for navigation within your current subject (as in what you “naturally” would have placed into a 1-pane outliner), AND for that “upper layer” in which you then manage your different subject (and their various interaction).

So the problem here is that today’s 2-pane outliners are used in a way their conceptual construction was not meant for (because conceptually, they are 2 piles of paper: the content sheet to your left, and the content sheets to your right: just as 1-pane, but to be handled concurrently, not consecutively, bot both for “one thing only” that is to be developed).

As you will remember, I tried to get the 3rd pane, the “PM pane”, into MI, then UR, to no avail, both developers never introduced it. I had been put off by existing 3-pane outliners, though, because they (as much as I saw, i.e. my possible bad by overlooking important variants), because of a very important detail many people possibly are not aware of:

My basic 3-pane concept (and I very much hope the IQ concept, too, but not the current Zoot concept I’m afraid of?):
1) Tree 1 for PM, and which only contains references to trees
2) Then, multiple trees which are conceptually “equal” (= equal by sw design, by sw architecture, not at all by “importance” or such)
3) Then, the content of the items in the respective, current 2) item

(That in my concept, 2) and 3) are doubled, for independent 2)‘s or, in 3) for some “sub” of 2) (and then, what’s 3) here, would become 4) and 6), see my original post http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5198 , is not important here, neither it’s important that in my system, files from the file system would be “mixed up”, in real-time, with those “internal tree items” (cf. what does UR, e.g., except for the fact that they only resynch manually).)

Now for what I know from 3-pane outliners (which are very rare anyway):
1) Tree as above, but NOT for PM, because
2) NOT a tree here, but a flat list only
3) As above 3), the content of the item currently selected in 2)

This is a very important difference; traditional 3-pane outliners do NOT offer independent trees (in 2) held together by sort of a “super-tree” (in 1), but if you try to use a traditional 3-pane outliner “my way”, you lose the outlining function and end up with a PM tree giving access to multiple flat list, and whilst it’s right that I always advocated my “hold hierarchy as flat as possible” philosophy, I certainly never came to outliners in order to give outlining up!

And as we all know, there could/should be a third outline, the “inline” outline, within the above 3), but it is the missing outline in 2), in the traditional 3-pane concept that makes that this concept, traditionally, isn’t but a variant of the 2-pane concept, but not a really new one.

Pierre Paul:

I installed the current IQ, will run for 8 days; most trials permit more, but then, it’s obviously because the Year ends in 8 days, no prob.

I did “new file”; I did “new item”; I did not even see the new item; ditto for a second one. Initial problems even with item creation are blatant with UR, but with IQ it’s much worse.

I don’t need a “grid”; I tried “Projects”, “Journal”, etc. - my 2 newly created items appear nowhere. I see there are different “intros”, nothing concise (hello, Cassius ! ;-) ), lots to read, no hint where to start.

Would you be so kind and to perhaps start a new thread here, in order to give a step-by-step intro what to do in order to have IQ as a 3-pane outliner, with an outliner in the first pane, and then an outliner in the second pane (and then the content for the current item in the second pane within the html content field)? Also, how to create a second outline (= a second entry within the outline in pane 1) if there is any problem to it? And all this in the CURRENT beta, please?

Or did I misunderstood you? Was your hint about “individual outlines within a common db” only (as is with CT), and in your current beta, there is NO succession of two outlines, on “first” AND on “second” “level” (attention, this denomination could be misleading since the first outline in itself should have multiple levels, and that second outline is “second level”, though, in my concept, whilst the “real content” is “third level”, even when in a traditional 2-pane outliner, it would be “10th level” or anything).

It is NOT my intention to “be right” here, it’s just that I spend 30 minutes with your program and do not want to spend 3 hours with it, just to then discover it does NOT fulfill my “new” 3-pane outliner concept - just tell me how to find out if it does.

And please allow for a short remark: Even when I am in one of those “grids”, “To-Do’s” tab, where I have the full menu, and if I here “am” at the last entry, “Have lunch with Mary”, then do “New item”, there is no child, no sibling, no new item within the whole list. Are you aware that from such an experience, most prospects would say, “Ok, I could trial for 8 days, but these 8 minutes have been enough for me, thank you.”?

Again, it’s not a play “who’s the better sw architect” here, but such non-accessibility to sw in a trial situation is strictly unbearable (and immensely harms your potential business).