Zavala - An open source outliner for Macs, iPads, and iPhones

Posted by Maurice Parker
Nov 18, 2021 at 05:42 PM

MadaboutDana wrote:

>You can see where this is going… A + B = hurrah!

I deserved that. :-) I should have framed the question as an either/or thing.

I’ve really run out of space on the Editor row context menu. In fact, I’m stripping out Indent/Outdent from that menu in Version 2. (We’ve got plenty of other ways to Indent/Outdent and don’t need another). If I add both Focus and Extract functions, I would have to add 2 more things to that menu. If software design wasn’t a system of trade-offs, I would just implement both and stop wasting so much mental effort on it.

I had something of an epiphany today while reading up on Dave Winer’s Drummer. He uses really large outlines with lots of different things in them. For example, one OPML file equals one blog with multiple days of entries in it. What is more common these days is to build your outlines into a knowledge graph, (Roam, Logseq, etc…) where each day of the blog would be a separate outline.

I think it boils down to the difference between a library type application (Zavala, Roam, Logseq, etc…) that manages the outline storage for you vs. a file based approach where it is easier to put as much as you can in each OPML file. You can expect smaller, interlinked outlines in a library application than you can in a file based one.

That leads me to believe that Extract is a better fit for Zavala than Focus. It encourages smaller, interconnected outlines that work well in a library type application. I’m not saying that Focus isn’t still valuable. I just believe that it is less valuable when you aren’t feeling like you have to stuff as much as you can into each OPML file.