Some random OO feature ideas

[Brian C.]

On Wednesday, January 8, 2003, at 05:24  AM, Angus McIntyre wrote:

> 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.

We have an existing feature request for this, and I'm attachin your 
mail to that item in the F.R. Database. No specific plans to implement 
it at this point, but it's something we want to do eventually.

> 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.

URL support is our number one feature request, and we're planning on 
implementing it sooner rather than later.

> 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.

This should be doable fairly soon if someone wanted to write an XSLT 
stylesheet to do the conversion from our XML format to the various 
browser bookmark files. Once we support URL's, I'll probably take a 
look at this if it still needs to be done at that 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.

Not possible with current releases, but this should change fairly soon.

Sincerely,

Brian C.
Support Manager
Omni Group