OmniOutliner 3 for iOS

Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 19, 2018 at 05:05 PM

Of course there are some amusing workarounds.

Editorial for iOS is a good outliner. But you need an equivalent on the Mac to turn it into a viable cross-platform option. FoldingText will do the job very nicely. In principle, SmartDown will also do the job, but hasn’t been updated for quite a while (mind you, neither has FoldingText, although there is now a variant of the latter for Atom).

Findings on the Mac is a very good outliner, although dedicated (alas, despite my efforts to persuade the developer to open it out) exclusively to science experiments. I don’t think Findings for iOS is much of an outliner, however - but don’t take my word for it, I haven’t used it.

Agenda is an outliner, although not a multi-level one (well, not quite true - you could argue it’s a two-level outliner, in that you can expand/collapse categories in the left-hand navigation bar; you can also fold notes in each project from the title line). This should be useful once Agenda for iOS appears.

It surprises me how few Markdown editors support folding: you’d have thought the slight interface tweaks necessary to view/hide headings at different levels would be fairly minor (but then IANAP). FoldingText still does this best, by the way, in that it layers folding by hierarchical heading (so top-level headings will assume second-level headings are part of the text block they should fold, until they reach the next top-level heading).

Another folding Markdown app is Write! (https://wri.tt), which is rather good, but doesn’t do headings as well as FoldingText. But it does fold headings! However, there isn’t an iOS version (although you can use it to complement Editorial on iOS). It’s a very nice app; one of the few that supports an always-on-top setting, so it’s ideal for making notes on stuff (and also has a special “compact” mode for precisely this scenario). Keep-It is one of the only other apps I can think of that does always-on-top, but sadly it doesn’t fold.

Finally, the latest versions of TiddlyWiki fold each Tiddler (if you switch the function on). TiddlyWiki is, of course, very broadly cross-platform, although it’s best to use something like Qwine if you’re running it on iOS.