Poretable Application Combinations

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 12, 2008 at 08:00 PM

Ken,

My reference to simbust was just to make the list of outliners complete. I really have no knowledge of the quality of their products, I’m afraid.

As for Debrief, I haven’t had any stability problems—although I haven’t used it heavily either. I like the comprehensiveness of the feature set, but overall it isn’t as convenient for me as my Zoot/OneNote combination. However, if I wanted to work from a USB stick, I think I would make Debrief a serious contender, because it is one program that does almost everything (notes, journaling, task and project management, address book, outlining)—the exception being the capture of PDFs and web pages.

The one feature that most separates Debrief from other applications is that it supports dedicated, single-pane outlines as a document style. That is, you can have a hierarchy of outlines. Admittedly, the outlines are not the most robust, but they are genuine single-pane outlines. Each item of which can have an associated note, which adds an additional dimension to the information.

I’ve found the developers to be fairly responsive. I commented that the editor panes could use some white space between the start of the text on the left and the left border, and they added that in the next release. There has not been a new release in several months, so I do not know how much further it will be developed, but it seems a fairly mature product now.

Truth is, I’ve been surprised the Debrief has not generated more enthusiasm from this group. I can only attribute this to the user interface which is definitely not the most intuitive.

Steve