EccoPro: Why has nobody developed a clone so far?

Posted by sracer
Sep 1, 2007 at 08:25 PM

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>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?

In using an outliner for its intended purpose (as the skeleton for the eventual document), BOTH folding AND notes are required. (unless I’m misunderstanding the use of the term “note”) When an outline entry is folded, only the “Note” for that entry should be displayed…. when expanded, the “note” should be hidden.

When I initially create an outline, each entry is a “note” that will NOT appear in the final document… or they become/tweaked to become the “heading” for that section.

Using this approach, an “expand all” function will hide the underlying outline and simply display the document, while a “contract/fold all” function will reveal the outline structure.

If you are talking about outlines as data organizing/PIM functionality, then feel free to disregard what I’ve written.