Outlinely in action

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 16, 2017 at 09:33 AM

Well, Outlinely is gradually taking over from Bear as my everyday to-do manager. Currently I store lists of stuff to do in Bear, then put the most urgent stuff into an outline in Outlinely.

But the redundancy means I’m gradually moving over to the latter exclusively.

I love Bear for its sheer elegance, plus the many thoughtful details like the outstanding hybrid preview, highlighting of search results in previews AND body text - the list goes on.

But Outlinely has two hugely useful features for task management: proper outlining/folding, plus the extreme ease with which you can move each section of text using a simple drag-and-drop panel on the right-hand side of the editor window. The first feature makes subtasks a piece of cake. The second feature means you can easily move completed tasks down to the bottom of the pile as soon as you’ve finished them.

Unlike Bear, you do have to explicitly tell Outlinely to save changes to files. But I can put up with that. Synchronisation between platforms is fast in both apps.

Outlinely for iOS still doesn’t handle tags properly (although the desktop version does). Conversely, Outlinely does have folders, which Bear doesn’t. Personally, I like having both, and prefer the Outlinely for Mac approach to handling tags over the Ulysses approach (you can simply click a tag in Outlinely to see all relevant entries - in Ulysses, you have to define a filter).

Them’s my thoughts to date!

All the best,
Bill