Some random OO feature ideas

[Angus McIntyre]

A recent message contained a URL describing how to use OmniOutliner 
for accounting:

	http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000081.html

The idea of reducing my dependence on Excel is attractive, and it 
occurred to me that - without expecting a $30 outliner to replace a 
$300 spreadsheet - there are some features that could be added to OO 
that would make it better for this task and, perhaps, for others.

One feature I very much like in Excel is the 'auto-filter': you get a 
menu at the top of a column that has one item for each unique entry 
in the column. When you choose an item, the spreadsheet is filtered 
on the chosen item, so that only rows containing that item in that 
column are displayed (there is, of course, a 'Show-all' item to 
return to the full view). Another very good implementation of the 
same idea can be found in Palm Desktop.

This looks like a natural fit for OmniOutliner, would be useful in a 
wide range of situations, and wouldn't require any changes to the 
file format.

Another unrelated idea would be the use of OmniOutliner as a bookmark 
manager. Two things might be nice to have here. One would be a URL 
column type: anything in the column could be assumed to be a URL, and 
clicking on it would cause it to be passed to the default handler for 
the appropriate URL scheme.

A second would be the ability to import and export bookmark files. 
I've taken a quick look at the Explorer Favorites file, and it seems 
to be fairly skanky HTML. This would be difficult to parse using, 
say, the XML Tools OSAX, so I haven't seriously tried to AppleScript 
a solution. But it shouldn't be that hard to parse or generate and 
the ability to suck bookmark files into OmniOutliner, play with them, 
and then write them out again might definitely be a selling point.

One further feature request: could there be (or is there already) a 
way to get the currently selected text (and/or the contents of the 
'current' cell) from OmniOutliner? I tried to implement a 'Go to URL' 
AppleScript that would send you to a URL contained in a specific 
field, but found myself blocked because I couldn't see a way to get 
OO to tell me what the currently-active cell is.

	Angus
-- 
angus at pobox.com                             http://pobox.com/~angus