Forum Posts Feed
Zavala - An open source outliner for Macs, iPads, and iPhones
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Pages: ‹ First < 23 24 25 26 27 28 >
Posted by Amontillado
Feb 3, 2026 at 05:12 PM
Totally agree, although I have a little tolerance for proprietary file formats in some cases.
If I can understand enough of the format to extract my work, that’s a little bit of a safety net.
The worst, for me, is not being able to share specific documents with a second machine. I try to avoid the cloud, so individual documents I can carry around on an usb drive are my preference.
I stopped using TheBrain long ago. At one point I was tempted to reinstall but it puts everything you do in one database. No more individual Brain files.
Dave M wrote:
It looks very nice, but I’m very wary of software where I can’t see
>where my files are, or *touch* them.
>
>The OPML import is neat, but I’d love to see a first-class citizen of
>OPML, where it doesn’t get imported and exported, but can just be opened
>and saved as a normal file.
>
>But the ‘magic storage’ of the files is a killer for me: MindNode has
>gone this way in Next, and it means I can’t use it reliably as the file
>doesn’t exist on my machine and can’t be copied, rendered by other
>application - it can only be queried through scriping in other tools,
>which turns it into a dead-end silo.
>
>/justmythoughtsonopening
Posted by Maurice Parker
Feb 17, 2026 at 01:27 AM
Zavala 4.0 is now up in the App Store.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zavala/id1546457750
This release is a moderate one in features even though it took a fair amount of work. I did get Satis’ issue with how rows with children get created. For more on that and the other features in this release, I wrote a blog post called Building Zavala 4.0.
https://vincode.io/2026/02/16/building-zavala.html
Posted by satis
Feb 17, 2026 at 05:56 AM
Looks great, Maurice.
Posted by Maurice Parker
Feb 28, 2026 at 10:57 PM
In the “Need a memory jog” thread there was some discussion of AI and using it in a mind mapping application. I’ve always considered mind mappers and outliners to be cousins. Anyway it got me thinking about how AI relates to Zavala. I wrote a blog post about it.
https://vincode.io/2026/02/28/zavala-ai.html
If you don’t want to read the whole post, I basically say that I’m not including an AI features in Zavala anytime soon. I also show you how to work around that using Shortcuts. If you are a Bike or other outliner user, you might want to check it out too. The demo Shortcut I created should work with Bike or any other outline that can import OPML files using Shortcuts.
Posted by Amontillado
Mar 1, 2026 at 02:08 PM
AI paralyzes me. I know in my gut we’re going to see a stock market hit at least as big as the housing bubble. That took out half the market’s value.
I’m paralyzed because I can’t bring myself to close my retirement investments. They are tiny and I can’t afford to lose a penny. Worse, if I close them I have to time it to avoid losses bigger than the IRS penalty for sidestepping disaster.
Sounds quite alarmist, but look at Oracle. It hit a peak in September. By January it lost half of that from an AI contract that fell through.
There’s a data center being built adjacent to Hubbard, Texas. The town is 1200 acres. The datacenter will cover 2000.
The new DC will have 600 MW of generating capacity with on site natural gas turbines. By my calculations, that will burn about 2% of the total gas production in Texas in 2025. Add the much larger Fermi data center in Amarillo and Chevron’s huge project in Pecos County and that comes to nearly half the state’s gas production - from just those three data centers.
Hubbard’s population is about 1200. 600 MW will run about 288,000 homes.
If you support AI, you have to have hope AI will be here for the long run. It probably will, but not in its present form.
OpenAI will lose billions this year while committing to the better part of a trillion in construction. I think new chips will emerge using a fraction of the power of Nvidia’s current offering. Great, we can turn back the throttle on power generation but we can’t throttle back the debt obligations funding future overcapacity. New competitors will sideline the current generation, whose bankruptcies will avalanche into the economy at large.
Good luck to us all.