Meta trends - what have we learned?

Posted by 22111
Dec 25, 2013 at 03:38 PM

“sitting here with relatives who are watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”, which i already saw two days ago! So I am browsing about with my trusty laptop.”

That would have to be called “more general crimping”, for input, too - well, that’s what all those non-outlining people out there do all the time, right? (We just enlarged this general concept to being unhappy with unsifficient sw.)

Cloud, collaboration, multiple platforms

I don’t want to appear negative here, I fully acknowledge that all this is going cloud in the end since that, yes, will greatly facilitate collaboration (at a price, but I shut up here). I simply would like to remind that Petko, who seems to be willing to spread MI to slates now, after all, could better concentrate on his core work, optimizing MI, had MS ever had the obvious idea to put some money into the development (together with the processor maker of their choice) of processors and “peripherals” by which your regular Windows application would run on a slate with both the weight and the battery consumption of an iPad or an Android device, so many, many developing hours are lost to work here that should have been unnecessary in the first place.

Text bits processing, “Atlantis”

Also, and this has been mentioned here in the past, what today’s outliner offer with regards to text processing, both within their editors (intra-item) and within their tree (inter-item), is quite basic (or outright non-existant, for the latter category); both myself and “Dr Andus” insisted on the importance of such functionality (and of which you speak here, “between the lines”): re-arrangement of info bits, between/among those items, is not supported by most outliners (and which makes additional appeal for 1-pane outliners for some, and rightly so, or for traditional text processors having good outline functionality superimposed, as in Word (! with or without add-ins for that) or in Atlantis (of which Prof. Kühn raves, and with good reason, even when that fine sw lacks important functionality by other criteria, e.g. cross-referencing - in fact, you can do 10,000 pages files with Atlantis - people report to have done this successfully -, but then, any cross-reference there will only be done by external mark-up surrogates; no search result “tables” = lists either (which, again, would be so helpful in a text processor being able to process texts of any size) (a “table” would mean something more, showing meta data like “within which chapter/sub-chapter”, a “list” just showing the immediate contexts of those “hits”, and even a simple “list” would be of tremendous help here); but then, for mimicking a basic (an even not-so-basic) 1-pane outliner, Atlantis is outstanding sw!!!) With today’s outliners, if you shuffle MINOR bits around alot (and academic workers necessarily do this), Atlantis might be a VERY viable solution (as for most of them, Word is, not unexpectedly), so all our crimping is caused by the inability of current outliner developers to listen to us (and yes, I do a lot with external macros to fill up those gaps, but it’s all so unelegant when you have to do it from outside of the native code body of the sw you use).

Developers not listening as much as they should (but doing cross-platform translation work instead, sometimes)

No content here, I’ll spare you my rant and shut up. ;-)