OmniOutliner 4 is finally available

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 21, 2015 at 04:14 PM

I will justify my comment (even though I don’t fully believe it), just for the sake of examining our ideas of how software is defined. Many apps have multiple functionality. For example, Tinderbox, which is a really fine outliner, but which would never be called “an outliner.” Or, as another example, Word, which can also be used to do light document design, but we would never call it a desktop publishing app, because its real strength is desktop publishing.

So my theory of OmniOutliner is that—though it is in fact an outliner—it is more accurately called a hierarchical spreadsheet, because that best describes its strengths. So I didn’t mean it isn’t an outliner—I meant it is not primarily an outliner.

To put it another way, if I wanted to simply create an outline, I would surely choose OutlineEdit over OO. If I needed a table of data, I would choose a spreadsheet. But if I need a table of data that also has hierarchy, I’d choose OO, because it does that very well.

Anyway, this is all just intended as food for thought.

Steve Z.

Paul Korm wrote:
If “OmniOutliner is not primarily an outliner at all”, then what is a
>canonical outliner?