Back-to-Basic feature suggestions

[Ted Goranson]

>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.

...

>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?

I also was a MORE user from way back. But I found it unflexible, and 
non-extensible. More Word-like in its philosophy than Mac-like, 
especially with the tacked-on presentation stuff. (Although Dave 
Winer takes the credit, I understand the primary design was done by 
his brother.) User interface was crude.

So I wrote my own, first in Frontier until that collapsed (sorry!), 
then in some rather hairy macros and external tools on NisusWriter. I 
recommend thinking about how you would work if you could create 
anything, rather than starting with a shrink-wrapped app and getting 
used to it. You'll be surprised at what you discover about yourself.

Now, I hold great hopes for OO, but only if it avoids trying to clone 
MORE. There is one MORE-like feature I would like: definable styles 
for each level. But I would go way beyond MORE in this regard. 
Otherwise, MORE is only of historical interest.

Other things are important to me for a future OO, like extensibility. 
Like leveraging Apple's guidelines and Aqua's strengths.

Let me suggest one key paradigm that I have found extremely useful, 
and which I would like OO designers to consider.

I use outlining to write. I have lots of "ordinary" outlining tricks 
I use to organize and rearrange my documents from notes and thoughts 
to finished product. Lets call that outlining for the management of 
the structure OF a document. But I also use a sort of outlining IN my 
documents as well. These mini-outlines are usually bullets and 
sub-bullets. I want the same management tools for each, but clear 
visual cues to show the difference. Sometimes I promote an internal 
outline to external status and more rarely the other way. Once you 
use this, you will never go back, especially if each level of both 
types can have:

--pointers to things outside the outline, as source pointers for 
future resolution

--conditional headers: These are headers that you would like to see 
in the production of the document but which are excluded at some 
point. A conditional header may be just extra organizational 
structure for the writer. In this case, just the headers are left off 
in certain uses. Or they may denote stuff for some limited audiences: 
for instance notes, annotations, or even content for some inner 
circle. Conditionals should be user definable and allow multiple 
threads.

Best, Ted
-- 
_____________
Ted Goranson
Advanced Enterprise Research Office
Virtual Enterprise Framework: http://sourceforge.net/projects/alfve/