Outlines of outlines

Posted by Chris Thompson
Oct 8, 2006 at 09:53 PM

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>The presence of MS OneNote in the market is the avowed reason
>that at least one developer of a Mac product with outlining of outlining, Circus
>Ponies NoteBook, admits it will not port to Windows. This at least suggests they don’t
>have something beyond what’s available on Windows.

I agree with your observation that OneNote scares off developers of competing outlining products for the Windows platform. It has always been this way in so many areas of software—Ecco for instance was killed only a year after the debut of Outlook because NetManage saw the writing on the wall.

However, your conclusion about Circus Ponies NoteBook not having anything beyond what OneNote offers, feature-wise, is not correct. The two products use entirely different metaphors. NoteBook is a pure outlining app, whereas OneNote is an “arrange boxes on the page” app, where some of the boxes may contain outlines. The former product is highly structured, the latter is more loosely structured, and they would appeal to different users. This sounds like a minor distinction, but it isn’t. OneNote isn’t really suitable for the type of collapse/expand outlining most of us outliner fanatics do (unless one restricts oneself to a single box), because as you expand and collapse outline items, you may need more or less space further on down the page, causing other boxes to shift around, or requiring you to use the “add space” tool. I may not have explained this clearly, but the distinctions between OneNote and traditional outliners are pretty obvious after using OneNote for a while. Circus Ponies Notebook (and its sister product, Aquaminds NoteTaker) is also a more mature product, feature-wise, having been actively developed for a lot longer (since the NeXT days).

I don’t even consider the two products to be aimed at the same target market, really. The closest OneNote competitor on the Mac is a product called ZenGobi Curio, which uses a similar “boxes on the page” freeform notetaking concept.

That said, there’s probably no question that OneNote’s shadow has a chilling effect on outline software developers for Windows. It’s hard to explain to average customers how your product is different, except by targeting specific vertical markets as NoteMap has done.

>At least when adjustments are
>made for size, outlining has seemed more popular on the Macintosh, as noted in this
>thread. My theory - just a speculative guess, really - is that outlining’s popularity
>on the computer depends a lot on the ability to use drag and drop. It took Windows a few
>iterations to get drag and drop really smooth. And the mouse has traditionally been
>more important on the Mac; the Apple II, I think, introduced it.

There certainly is more good outlining software right now for OS X. I think it has more to do with the type of users who gravitate towards the platform (writers, university researchers, etc.) but also with the fact that no single leader has emerged, capable of crushing the competition. Vibrant competition gets more users introduced to outlining, willing to explore what software is out there. All the competitors have different spins on what an outliner should be, and that’s a good thing in my view. It’s great to compare Opal, OmniOutliner, and TAO (unrelated to the Windows TAO) for example, seeing where each developer chose to concentrate resources.