Big improvement in Outline

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 9, 2014 at 09:21 PM

The OneNote competitor for Mac, Outline (a.k.a. Outline+ on iPad), has improved significantly in the latest release.

First, it’s introduced Dropbox compatibility (just as well, given the vagaries of iCloud, which really isn’t working well at the moment).

Second, they’ve sensibly given users the option of creating notebooks in Outline’s own format (rather than OneNote format), if preferred (OneNote is still an option).

As a result of both the above, Outline notebooks are now a very pleasing alternative to OneNote.

The advantages: the synchronisation is quick and reliable, on both Mac and iOS. Both apps are markedly more stable, especially when syncing notebooks in Outline’s own format (OneNote syncs are still a little… unpredictable). I’ve not experienced a crash yet using Outline’s own format over Dropbox.

I’ve been cautiously using Outline again after a period of using OneNote by preference, and have been very pleasantly surprised. As a quick notetaker, it’s actually superior (OneNote’s irritating habit of syncing everything in sight with no option to restrict synchronisation operations to a limited number of notebooks is seriously annoying because it takes so much time/bandwidth!).

Outline certainly works much better than Apple’s own apps, which all use iCloud and appear to have slowed down markedly. Also, their file sizes are ridiculous! Very disappointed in the evolution of my former favourite, Numbers – almost totally unusable on an iPad 2, especially when trying to exchange files with a Mac.

The advantage of OneNote and Outline over most other cross-platform notetakers is their powerful ‘blank canvas’ approach to notes. This means you can have multiple texts arranged side by side in a note, which is very helpful when you’re comparing (short) documents on an iPad. There are, of course, a few other options, such as MagicalPad.

But not Apple’s own iWork apps. They’ve all taken a huge step backwards. I’m very disappointed, having been a happy iWork user since the iOS apps first emerged.

Cheers,
Bill