Heh, sorry! But yes, it does boil down to a philosophical issue, perhaps, and Zavala is similar to Outlinely, in that it positively encourages one to create lots of outlines sitting together in one big outline (the navigation bar). In that sense, maybe extraction is better than focusing. On the other hand, maybe you're making it too complicated and you ought to use a Workflowy-like approach based on an extended left-hand touchplate – click the arrow and the outline folds/unfolds; click the area to the left (in European languages) of the arrow and you "focus" on that particular item (i.e. raise/lift it to a "virtual" top level).

Having just opened up Zavala and played with it alongside DynaList/Workflowy, however, I tend to agree that you could make your special thing extraction rather than focusing. Focusing can also, just occasionally, be really, really annoying! ;-)

However, if you're going to do that, I strongly suggest that you also introduce support for nested tags, so you can create a folding outline in the navigation bar as well. That would turn Zavala into a very powerful tool.

Cheers,
Bill

Maurice Parker wrote:

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.