MaxThink

Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 14, 2007 at 07:24 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Ecco was a great application, but it was only a servicable outliner.

Yes, Ecco’s outliner is elegant, but limited - about the level of PocketThinker (but prettier) maybe, and probably as good as its designers thought it needed to be in the context of a PIM.

The quality of outliner one gets seems to depend - not surprisingly - upon the overall purpose of a piece of software. We’ve all seen programs that start as single-function ones, then morph into complex multi-function ones. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But the likelihood of getting a fully-featured outliner as a later addition to a program with a quite different core mission does seem to be rather small (viz, Ecco, InfoSelect, OneNote).

Unless you start with outlining as a central organizing goal then it when it does finally arrive as another feature, it tends only to be as “good as it needs to be” for whatever the core purpose of the software is. GV clearly started out - aka PC-Outline - with the intention of being a powerful outliner, and then added PIM features to it. That way the core mission of the software never got lost or compromised. (How good its PIM features were is another interesting debate.)

Maybe this also accounts for the difficulty of providing an attractive writing environment in a PIM - or, indeed, in many two-pane “outliners” - given all the other goals and distractions. With all these programs, writing per se as a creative activity demanding its own set of essential features seems to get lost among all the other priorities.

Derek