Outlines of outlines

Posted by Derek Cornish
Sep 26, 2006 at 05:25 AM

Although I don’t use a Mac I have always been interested in their software, which seems to offer a much greater range of writing tools. (Zoot and Grandview are probably my main reasons for not having swapped over.)

For example, I was looking through some of Ted Goranson’s columns on the “About This Particular Macintosh (ATPM)” website at http://www.atpm.com, and noticed that the concept of an “outline of outlines” seems well-established in the Mac field (Ted mentioned Arrange, NoteBook and NoteTaker as using variations of the feature). This is the two-pane notetaking layout where the lhs pane contains an outline tree of topics and the rhs notes pane can be used as a single-pane outliner as well as just a place for notes.

It’s hard to understand why this feature is not implemented more widely in Windows information managers, since the process of thinking about the information collected, rearranging the ideas into logical arguments or narratives and so on, would seem to be important next steps, and most easily carried out within the same software that contains the raw information. I’d particularly like to see this in Zoot.

Incidentally, I was tempted to buy a Mac (one with an older OS) just to try out some of the legacy software he describes at http://www.atpm.com/10.03/atpo.shtml - including David Dunham’s Acta, and Dave Winer’s More.

Derek