EccoPro: Why has nobody developed a clone so far?

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Sep 1, 2007 at 07:25 PM

That was my first thought in when I read Steve Zeoli’s post: it is a variant of Folding or Shrinking, with approximately equivalent functionality. Personally, I have preferred the “Notes” approach, but is this only because my Word/More “early software experience” (on the pre-X Mac)?

“Notes” and Folding/Shrinking are close to functionally identical, and including both probably only makes practical sense (as opposed to marketing sense) if, like MS Word, you allow “Notes” to be folded to the first line of each paragraph.

Elegance of design surely involves avoiding functional redundancies, dictating or at least encouraging a choice between Folding and Notes, as opposed to including both features. What are the arguments for one choice or the other? To me, traditional Folding/Shrinking is arbitrary. Who cares what’s on the first line of the paragraph? Maybe the important information is on the third. Of course, you can engineer your first line so that what appears is a viable heading. This is really a workaround, though, it seems to me. It restricts the size of headings to one line, or at least requires that useful information occur in the first line. The workaround, in other words, does not completely eliminate the arbitrariness of requirement.

Does the Folding approach have compensating virtues?

David Dunham wrote:
>Stephen Zeoli wrote:
> >>the ability to create content for a heading that is not in
> >>itself a heading.
> >Right—I think MORE called this “notes,” and I think a number of
>other outliners have this as well. (I think in some early outliners, topics could only
>be one line, so notes were the only way to get multiple lines of text in a topic).
> >Opal
>does not (since in my opinion shrinking multi-line topics to the first line gives you
>very similar functionality), so I forgot about it.