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Opal -- new outliner for Mac OS X
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Posted by apb123
Jun 13, 2022 at 03:13 PM
This little program still works and is quite useful.
Posted by satis
Jun 14, 2022 at 02:15 PM
I purchased this app in 1986 and used in with a double-floppy Macintosh Plus system to write my college papers and thesis. After David Dunham sold it in 1993 to Portfolio Software and they renamed it Dyno Notepad I bought the upgrade. (Which ended up being moderately problematic because the images and sound files I was now able to save into the outlines not only couldn’t easily be pulled out, but those attachment formats were not supported when David re-acquired the app and re-coded/relaunched Opal.)
Opal works the same as Acta, amazingly, after all these years, but it’s a little frustrating to use in 2022, especially given modern free alternatives like Zavala, and it hasn’t been updated or improved since forever. (And has no iOS app.) The major annoyance in usage for me is needing to double-click disclosure triangles despite the fact that such triangles have been single-click in macOS Finder and in Mac apps since the early 80s.
But I still have old 1980s Acta outlines that open in Opal, and the app respects OPML. If I had to recommend one single outliner to someone starting out it would have to be Zavala, which is free on Mac and iOS and is really quite lovely.
I own the cross-platform Cloud Outline/Pro but its formatting is substantially limited and I dislike both the day- and night-mode views.
If I didn’t already own the pricy OmniOutliner Pro, only a subset of whose features I use, I’d probably have purchased OutlineEdit 3 by now for Mac. It’s everything Opal is plus themes, templates, dark mode, tags, and image attachments - more like a slimmed-down OmniOutliner, priced between Omni’s Essentials and Pro products.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 14, 2022 at 04:03 PM
Agree about Zavala – a very elegant alternative to the Workflowy/Dynalist duo.
And I’d love to invest in OutlineEdit. I’ll have to update my CRIMPing budget, however…
Cheers!
Bill