Think Different about Your New Outliner

[Ted Goranson]

Max--

>I'm partial to your suggestion. Let us think different, but at the 
>same time I want most of the insanely great functionality of More 
>before the other features.

Sure. MORE, but also Xemacs, Palimpsest and InfoDepot, each of which 
are best in their own way. Even Acta had neat capabilities missing in 
MORE. I eschew a fundamentalist focus on MORE alone. It shows a lack 
of imagination and experience with parallel paradigms. Since the mix 
of Omni and Cocoa gives us a new platform, why not revisit old 
assumptions?

>...
>I agree. It should look pretty, do PDF flawlessly, and be easy to use.

I don't think it will be possible to have a discussion at all if you 
think what we are talking about is prettiness and mere ease of use. 
The Mac way is behind much of what you like with MORE, or was a dozen 
years back. But life is more friendly now. You like the changing 
cursor but don't want dynamic contextual menus for instance? You 
don't want XML database links? You don't want smart drag and drop? 
You don't want in-line palettes? Macros? Docklet fragments? Popup 
annotations (and popup views of collapsed or folded material)? 
Hyperlinks? Multiple views? Progress tags? Draggable formatting? 
Agent-based templates? Style-based background transparency?

MORE didn't even remember my partly collapsed state when re-expanded. 
Frustrating as all getout.

>Does putting these mini-outlines in the second column of OO count? 
>More had a feature called "comments" that did this as well, but it 
>didn't allow outlines inside. Perhaps OO should do this.

MORE's "comments" were so limited, they drove me from the product. 
And no, the second column approach wouldn't work for me. But it does 
bring up a clever notion. Can we have the "column" dynamically adjust 
at different levels, sort of a cross between columns and tabs?

>>--pointers to things outside the outline, as source pointers for 
>>future resolution
>
>  This should be an OSX service right? Link to file, link to net?

That would be the crudest implementation. Richer would be the ability 
for me to control-drag a fragment from one outline (say a notes 
database) to another to create an "alias" that could be resolvable 
from a placeholder icon to a publish and subscribe-like live image

>>--conditional headers:...
>
>More accomplished this with "speaker's notes" no?

No. Not even close -- not even in the same country. Do you know 
Framemaker's conditional text feature? Any conditional type. 
Multiple, parallel types, all fully styled.

(I removed your dreadful html markup and introduced the more 
outline-like quote bars.)

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