The reviews provided by Steve and others of Mac outliners and information programs was very helpful.

I am much taken by Scrivener, and it appears inexpensive enough that it is no real risk, if it is even half as good as Hugh, Steve, and others say.

Just spent some time checking out OmniOutline. It appears to me as perhaps the most general of the outline tools - the Swiss army knife, say, allowing for information linking and management, but with the main focus being on outline capabilities and variety, largely supported by the columnar structure.

If that is a correct assessment I am thinking it might be a good choice as well - perhaps leaving other programs such as DEVONthink, Curio, Yojimbo, etc. until I am more familiar with the Mac environment, it having changed much in the seven years I have been away from it.

I still remember Attain's INControl, which was my first real experience with an outliner that offered columns; my first Mac outliner was MORE, but it was the approach of INControl that won me.

In the PC world I never really found something comparable, with the exception of ADM. My experience with INControl influenced many of the suggestions I made to Eric, and in fact I photocopied and sent him documentation on INControl.

MyInfo has done a good job of developing columns, but to mind still falls short and, though I may be a little unfair to the developer, who is a truly nice and responsive guy, I find the overall vision somewhat lacking.

UltraRecall has a really convoluted - to my way of thinking - of getting to the same place, though Kinook has done a good job nonetheless. My gut feel - realizing I know next to nothing about programming - is that K may have relied too heavily on off-the-rack sub-programs to put UR together. I never had that feel with ADM, which seemed to me to be a built from the ground up, built from scratch creation.

Having said all that when I review OmniOutline's web site, my sense is that what turned me on to INControl in the first place, and caused me to appreciate ADM, has been allowed to evolve and grow so that it becomes a workable, yet elegant, program.

I'm not sure if this line of thought makes sense.

AND, with OmniOutline and Scrivener would I still need a program for capturing information from the web and elsewhere the way that Evernote and Surfulater do?

If so, would that be more the role of DEVONthink or Curio?

And then there's the hardware: Desktop or laptop?

I prefer the protability of a laptop, and have recently realized that a 13 inch screening isn't all the limiting, and that the advantage is greater protability.

Vanilla plastic MacBook or MacBook Pro?

Is 2 G of ram sufficient?

Is 2.26 GH sufficiently fast for most of the surfing, researching, writing things I want to do?

For work at home, how practical is it to have a MacBook power a 24 inch monitor (now selling for about $250 Canadian?

Lots of questions that go beyond the forum's central outliner focus - yet all related to allowing me to do the stuff that is my main focus now: research and writing.

And one last question, how well does Windows operate on a MacBook? I have heard conflicting reports.

Thanks for your patience with all my questions and rambling opinions.

Daly

Daly de Gagne wrote:

And then there's the hardware: Desktop or laptop?

I'm typing this on a MacBook Air, with a Dell portrait display attached.

Vanilla plastic MacBook or MacBook Pro?

For what it's worth, I have a used first generation MacBook Air I want to sell. (I'm still waffling over whether it's worth the risk using eBay.)

Is 2 G of ram sufficient?

For most things. Maybe not for running big Mac apps next to big Windows apps. For the stuff you mention next, definitely.

Is 2.26 GH sufficiently fast for most of the surfing, researching,
writing things I want to do?

Definitely -- the 1.8 GHz MacBook Air I'm selling was fast enough for surfing and researching. I wanted something a little faster as a software developer.

For work at home, how practical is it to have a MacBook
power a 24 inch monitor (now selling for about $250 Canadian?

The monitor I'm driving is 1024x1280 pixels. I'd have to look up what the original MBA does (I used it with this monitor), but the weakest MacBook now available does 1920x1200 (or presumably 1200x1920).

Lots of questions that
go beyond the forum's central outliner focus - yet all related to allowing me to do the
stuff that is my main focus now: research and writing.

Yes, but you'll be using Opal on it, right, so it's totally related. (As always, forum members can contact me for an Opal discount.)

And one last question, how
well does Windows operate on a MacBook? I have heard conflicting reports.

Some say better. My developer says he will never buy a Windows machine again. (I like using the 2-finger trackpad gestures when I boot into Windows. But I don't boot into Windows often enough to know about any problems.)

Daly

To deal with the (only, I think) one of your questions David didn't cover: will you need an application like Surfulator to clip material from the web? Well, no and yes...

One of the features of the Mac platform that as far as I know has no real equivalent on Windows (though my experience of Vista is sketchy and 7 non-existent) is the `Services menu that is added to every application and which essentially allows text and/or images to be clipped from anywhere in the universe and transferred to most places on your computer. (There are also launchers such as Launchbar and Butler available - equivalent to Launchy, I think - which make this process even easier.) So clipping isn't the issue.

The question is storage. As Steve Z. said in the other thread, DevonThink is the heavyweight data/manager, info-dump here, with Together and Eaglefiler as the simpler possibilities. There are also several others of varying power. I wouldn't bother with Yojimbo, whose development has fallen behind as Steve also said. Curio is a hybrid, as concerned with expression and depiction, but it also conveniently provides quite a good level of storage (or material can be easily moved or copied to it from the more specialised data-stores).

HTH

H

P.S. Omni products get a whole-number upgrade every year or so. OmniOutliner is likely shortly to go to version 4.0 I think, and my (completely uninformed) guess is that this upgrade will add clones, the most obvious hole in its armoury at the moment.

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Vanilla plastic MacBook or MacBook Pro?

Is 2 G of ram
sufficient?

Is 2.26 GH sufficiently fast for most of the surfing, researching,
writing things I want to do?

I have the MacBook and have found the processer and memory to be more than sufficient (I don't have it up at the moment but I may well have increased the memory to 4 Gig. Its the type of thing I usually don't skimp on no matter what anyone tells me.). Despite the features and the fancy graphics, the Mac OS seems to be substantially lighter in weight compared to Windows, especially Vista.

The only limitation for me was the MacBook's small screen. You have stated that doesn't bother you. In addition, the Mac has configurable virtual desktops of the type which those of us who use Unix are familiar. This effectively increases the screen space.

And one last question, how
well does Windows operate on a MacBook? I have heard conflicting reports.

I use Sun's Virtualbox virtual machine (free) on mine. No problems whatsoever. I have heard good things about Parallels but have not tried it. No idea on Boot Camp.

Cheers,
Tom S.

Dave, thanks so much for your reply. It was helpful.

Daly

Hugh, thanks for your reply dealing with software for the Mac.

You mentioned "DevonThink is the heavyweight data/manager, info-dump here, with Together and Eaglefiler as the simpler possibilities."

Is there any advantage going with DEVONthink rather than the other two?

How do Eaglefiler and Together compare with each other?

And am I write to assume that OmniOutliner could do the same kind of storage the others do - I ask that because of an example on OO's page?

With the Mac products available, is the need for Evernote made obsolete? I recently saw Evernote on a Mac, and it didn't appear to work as well ont he Mac as it did on the PC.

Thanks.

Daly

Tom, thanks.

I like the notion of Sun's free PC emulator.

Daly

Daly de Gagne wrote:

Hugh, thanks for your reply dealing with software for the Mac.

You mentioned
"DevonThink is the heavyweight data/manager, info-dump here, with Together and
Eaglefiler as the simpler possibilities."

Is there any advantage going with
DEVONthink rather than the other two?

How do Eaglefiler and Together compare with
each other?

And am I write to assume that OmniOutliner could do the same kind of
storage the others do - I ask that because of an example on OO's page?

With the Mac
products available, is the need for Evernote made obsolete? I recently saw Evernote
on a Mac, and it didn't appear to work as well ont he Mac as it did on the
PC.

Thanks.

Daly

Daly

As you probably know, DevonThink comes in four flavours of increasing complexity: DevonNote, DevonThink Personal, DevonThink Pro, and DevonThink Pro Office. Pro Office has an OCR function and will also archive email, and is probably the best Mac route into a paperless office, using a Fujitsu ScansSnap.. Pro seems to be the most popular version for most writing and research purposes.

DevonThink's key feature is that having indexed documents you ask it to import, it draws up a concordance table for each one, recording the frequency of each word used. This allows it to compare the concordances of every document in its database. So not only can it classify and categorise new documents automatically using your existing classifications as a guide, it can also suggest "overlooked" documents it thinks are similar, if you select an existing document and ask the software to "See also." This - I think - is the core of its so-called AI.

You will see from this that the software will work best with relatively large databases (which incidentally it also seems to search as quickly as, and handle more efficiently than any rival Mac database manager). Large databases throw up the mass concordances that enable the AI features to work best.

Not only that, it's probably only with a relatively hefty database that you're likely to need such features. If you have only a couple of thousand documents, you're not likely to forget what they are or the relationships between them. But go much bigger and the AI functionality could be helpful. Some users have gigabytes of data, tens of thousands of documents and millions of words in their databases.

DevonThink also has numerous other helpful features which I'm short-changing, but I think I've summarised its USP.

Neither Eaglefiler nor Together offers features of this sophistication, though to be fair I'm less acquainted with them. Together has possibly the smoother interface, but on its forum there've been some reports of slowdowns with big databases. Eaglefiler has been developed by Michael Tsai whose website suggests he has a highly reliable product with a clear development vision.

I regard OmniOutliner as an outliner-with-columns pure and simple, rather than a data-store like the three mentioned above. I use it for structuring rather than storing, and that seems to be what it's designed for.

EverNote does of course have an advantage the others lack - it operates in "the cloud". So for accessing documents from more than computer or for filing notes from a mobile phone, it has no rival (DevonThink Pro Office has a web feature though not on an ever-present third-party website like EverNote's). But as a straightforward datastore EverNote can't compete with DevonThink, Eaglefiler or Together.

H

Hugh, thanks for the discussion of DEVONthink. It makes sense.

Must say that the developer's web site, to my mind, leaves much to be desired in terms of providing a good overview, and making a rapid perusing of screenshots possible.

Thanks again.

Daly

Daly,

I feel compelled to defend Evernote on the Mac. I started with Evernote 3 on the PC, and brought it with me when I got my Mac in March 08. I much prefer using Evernote on the Mac, and I continue to use in on both platforms daily, for both work and personal notes.

Re DevonThink vs Together vs OO. I have all three, and continue to use DT and OO. I don't see any overlap in how they're used. I see DT as an incredibly robust document repository for documents of any type, from web snippets/web pages to internally created RTFs to scanned docs and PDFs. Superb tool for archiving and information retrieval.

I use OO for outlines. As you said, it's very easy to get started with simple outlines. I graduated to multi-column outlines recently. I also use it to draft longer documents, since I like to start with outlines.

I bought Together more than a year ago when I ran out of trial time, but I abandoned it for DT, as DT allowed multiple windows and Together didn't at the time. I'm not sure whether it does now.

I've a few asides on stuff I've seen mentioned here over the weekend. I use Curio for project management, and find it quite useful. I use OmniFocus to manage both work and personal tasks, both on my Mac and iPhone. It's a phenomenal tool.

Tinderbox is another tool any CRIMPer should take a long look at when moving to the Mac. It's a phenomenal tool, but has a bit of a learning curve. I think of it as the Mac equivalent of Zoot; it's an incredibly powerful text tool, and it can be used for many of the items we've discussed here this weekend. It rivals DT in archiving and retrieval; it rivals OO in single-column outlines. Its map view is a great and unique visualization tool. If you get interested in TB, read Bernstein's The Tinderbox Way; it lends great insight into how the tool was designed to be used. I've had it many months and read the book, and I'm still just barely scratching the surface.

VoodooPad could be considered a lite ConnectedText. While VoodooPad may be the best personal wiki on the Mac, I've not yet found any tool that is equivalent to ConnectedText. I continue to look.

Yojimbo comes free with Tinderbox; I use it as a very light clipboard manager. However, I've not yet found anything approaching ClipMate, which I love, and miss on the Mac.

The Mac platform has a marvelous, free text editor in TextWrangler. It just revved to 3.0, and inherited the powerful search tool from its big brother BBEdit. TW is a phenomenal value.

Finally, I wanted to mention NovaMind. I brainstorm into this tool, and I use it often in presentations. It's another phenomenal tool that I find unrivaled and indispensable. I often use it in conjunction with OO and TB when organizing my thoughts.

Regards,
Wes