Noteliner adds tables

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jul 7, 2011 at 10:59 PM

Sam, I began using Noteliner this week as an alternative to Planz http://kftf.ischool.washington.edu/planner_index.htm

What I realized once I got using Noteliner is how nice it is to have a one-pane outliner. So your contemplation of the possibility of using two panes causes me a little concern, and I’ll tell you why. Two reasons actually.

First, everyone seems to do two panes - there’s a lot of competition out there.

Second, a lament that has been made here from time to time is that there is not a good one-pane outliner in the Windows world. People who make that lament often have had experience with an old program of DOS days - Grandview - and/or MORE, an outliner in the Mac world.

As OutlinerSoftware members Cassius wrote here 16 Mar 2011: “There are far too many two-pane outliners to begin to list them, but I thought it might be worthwhile to try to put together a list of single-pane outliners, indicating if Windows or Mac, and Text only or RTF-like.

“GrandView was probably the last great DOS-based outliner; RTF-like. Worked well through Win 2000, and for some Win XP.
NoteMap for Windows had promise but development discontinued and it had bugs, including one that could lose your material.”

The high end of single-pane outliners is an over-priced product from LexisNexis called NoteMap. It’s not clear from their site how much effort is put into developing it.

I think it’d be worthwhile to continue developing Noteliner as a single-pane product. There is still much scope to add new features, without causing bloat or losing speed. It’s possible you establish a good niche market by developing a modern, easy to use, single-pane outliner that could be readily sold.

For example, beneath a bullet point it would be nice to have in-line paragraphs that belong to a particular point. That would allow for additional information to be added to a point, or to use Noteliner as a writing tool. In-line paragraphs could be collapsed or expanded, in other words, so the user would have the choice of seeing the bullet point(s) only, or a point(s) plus the in-line material beneath it (them).

A small point: I think the look of Noteliner would perhaps be better if the second line of a bullet point was alligned with the first line, rather than being outdented to align with the bullet above it.

I would also like the links in Noteliner to open a file in one step without having to click on the link, and then to click on “open.”

One feature that Planz has is that it provides a date heading for each day in the year. When a particular day turns up, the date heading adds the word TODAY. It is kind of a nice feature, very handy.

I enjoy the way you have the filter set up, as well as tags. I wonder if there is scope for expanding the filter feature, or allowing us to define new filters.

The application of tables in the current beta is quite clever.

Anyhow, thank for your work on Noteliner, and for being so responsive here.

Daly

Sam Hawksworth wrote:
>Hi Jim,
> >I agree that there is always a danger that existing users have become used to
>the current approach. However, if there is an industry standard that switches things
>around a bit then it is probably better in the long run. The “hoist” concept is a better
>way of thinking about “focusing”. I put the two changes that I mentioned on the site
>this morning.
> >Steve Zeoli was kind enough to send me some screen shots of Ecco so I
>understood what you were referencing. It made me think that, in some ways, Noteliner
>has outgrown the original concept of a simple single pane todo-outliner. It’s being
>used in many ways that I never originally envisioned. As such, I think it probably does
>need an improved navigation system, like a pane of folders on the left. It is a shame to
>move away from the single pane outliner (although that would still be an option), but I
>think that is what I’m going to try to do for 3.3.
> >Sam