Cloud Outliner 2 for OS X

Posted by Luhmann
Jan 23, 2016 at 02:13 PM

MadaboutDana wrote:
There’s still a dearth of really good outliners for MacOS and iOS. There
>are excellent outliners for one or the other, but very few for both.

Indeed. I have a thought about why that is.

The key feature of an excellent outliner is the user interaction paradigm. At the very least one needs to be able to quickly indent, outdent, select, and move items around. But there is much more than that as well. An outliner is a text manipulation tool whose functions differ from those of a word processor. The user needs to be able to split paragraphs into separate items, merge multiple paragraphs, move items from one list to another, duplicate lists, etc. A good outliner makes all of these actions so quick and easy that you don’t even have to stop and think about it.

Now, here’s the rub: the ideal user interaction interface for all of these tasks will be very different on a touch screen interface than it is on a keyboard. Some developers, like those behind Workflowy, seem to have really thought about how to work well with a keyboard, but not really put a lot of thought into how to work with a touch screen. I have not seen any outliner that works as well on the iOS interface as Workflowy works on a desktop.

It frustrates me because the app store is full of hundreds of copy-cat task managers, “minimalist” markdown editors, and even mind mappers, but the outlining category is still very weak, especially on the phone. There are lots of great ideas out there, with Cloud Outliner perhaps being the best so far, but none of them are as well executed. (Tree seems like it would be particularly well suited to iOS, but the developer doesn’t seem interested.)

Another problem is sync. Even with iCloud and Dropbox, it seems hard to implement cross platform sync well, and so any developer who wanted a cross-platform solution would also need to become an expert on sync which makes the whole project quite daunting. Still, I’d be willing to pay good money for a top-of-the-line cross platform outliner. Too bad that Omni Outliner doesn’t seem like it’s that solution…

PS: Mind Mapping is IMHO completely useless for dealing with large amounts of text. I have yet to see a Mind Mapper which can handle more than short phrases in a way which makes it easy to see what you are working on.