Back-to-Basic feature suggestions

[J. Davis]

First of all, I applaud your effort to resurrect what was arguably the best
tool for outlining, organizing and writing ever developed.

I started out with ThinkTank, used Acta in both the desk accessory and
application, and finally MORE. I have used MORE virtually every day since I
bought it and thank my lucky stars that it still works under the 'Classic
(system9) mode in OSX.

Whenever I plan a product, everything-EVERYTHING goes into a MORE outline.
In one central repository, I have copies of letters sent and pending,
drawings, specs, timetables, etc. MORE's ability to easily and quickly hide,
hoist and especially 'fold' text make organization a simple task. Labeling
capabilities (especially Harvard) keep everything in order and make it easy
to reference sections when discussing the outline with others. Another
critical feature are the document windows. Indeed, MORE's feature set
parallels how people think and work.

With all that being said, and seemingly universal acknowledgement that MORE
is THE standard, why waste time soliciting suggestions on features to
implement in OmniOutliner?

All of the work in specing this product has been done and neatly bound in
three documents:
The MORE II Reference Manual (406 pages)
Learning MORE II tutorial (154 pages) and
The laminated MORE II Quick Reference.
All three of these documents came with the program.

Within these documents MORE's features are exquisitely detailed by both word
and illustration. 

Here's a quick example that speaks to the discussion threads on expected
behavior when pressing the return key:


Page 153, MORE Reference Manual
Adding Headlines

When a headline is selected, pressing the return key creates a new headline,
and the headline appears below the currently selected headline.  However,
MORE follows two rules when creating a new headline.

 1.  If the selected headline has no expanded  subheadlines, then MORE
creates a new headline at the same level as the selected headline.

 2.  If the selected headline has expanded subheadlines, or is the Home
headline, then MORE creates the new headline indented and below the selected
headline.

This same type of straightforward explanation exists for such categories
such as creating and applying rules (Œstyles¹ in contemporary jargon),
joining and splitting headlines, displaying structure symbols,  creating
headers and footers, inserting page breaks, print preview, marking and
gathering, cloning, colorizing, expanding/ collapsing/ folding text, notes
windows, embedded document windows, etc.

And of course, we haven¹t even begun to discuss MORE¹S presentation
capabilities, such as tree charts, bullet charts and slide shows.

As far as I see it, there are only four issues to consider regarding further
development of OmniOutliner.  1.) Inventory MORE's features  2.) create your
own outline interface that mimics MORE's that of MORE, and 3.) do so by
liberating yourself from Apple¹s Application Kit framework. You simply can't
expect to provide MORE¹S rich user interface using standard-issue
Application Kit interface widgets.

As food for thought, I leave you with the System Requirements of MORE II:
A Mac Plus, SE or II;   1 MB of  RAM;  one 800K floppy drive and a hard
disk; and System 4.1 or higher...amazing. And FOURTEEN YEARS LATER on my
670MHZ Titanium sporting 1GB of RAM and 40GB hard drive I¹m still running
MORE in Classic mode. Because nothing comes even close.

Why try to get creative on the basics when what already exists works
perfectly? Use MORE's excellent, proven interface as a start, THEN look to
adding new features such as columns. We don¹t need another ³ToDo² app. We
don¹t need Word¹s oblique approach to outlining. WE NEED MORE!!!!

I will be very curious to see what other discussion group members think of
this approach.

Sincerely,
J. Davis

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