taylor

I purchased Breadbox Outliner recently, and I've been trying it out.
Here are my comments. Hope they help someone out there.

I do a bit of writing and I had been using the Zoomer Note Book app
(or the Palm Connect version, depending on the machine) to keep
track of notes for my various projects. I was looking to replace
that with Outliner.

I have to say that, as a note-keeper and -organizer, Outliner works
pretty well. One of the things I'm using it for is to plan a series
of Sunday School classes I'm teaching on the history of the Bible, and
it's easy (too easy!) just to dump in Luther's views on word-for-word
translation in one card, someone else's comments on Biblical inerrancy
in another card, etc., and just keep shuffling everything around
until it makes sense.

Each card can hold up to 32k of text. That's much better than Note
Book's limit, which appears to be based on the number of lines.
I had run into problems maintaining my "research notes" notebook,
because pieces like "The Articles of War" or "Muslim Fire Weapons
in The Middle Ages" were just too long to fit into one of Note
Book's pages. Outliner holds them just fine. At this point, I've
just about abandoned Note Book in favor of Outliner.

There are a few limitations. There's no import or export function.
You can't have tabs in the body of a card. Card bodies are just plain
text, with no bolding, underlining, italics or graphics. And oddly
enough, I can't seem to find a way to generate a classic numbered
outline, like so:

I. Main Topic 1
A. Subtopic 1-1
B. Subtopic 1-2
II. Main Topic 2
A. Subtopic 2-1
B. Subtopic 2-2

Most of those are not much of a problem for me. Note Book didn't
allow tabs either, so I'm used to that, and I've already developed the
habit of working in plain text anyway. GEOS's cut/paste and quick-copy
facilities mostly make up for the lack of an import facility (I'm not
sure what you'd import from, anyway) and the way-cool Print Preview
feature makes it easy to generate a Write-ready dump of what's in
the outline, so you don't really need to export.

Some more points.

- I'm not sure I agree with the way Outliner deals with topics.
Right now, you create Main topics, with various Subtopics and
Cards below them. Cards can have text bodies, Topics cannot.
Topics can have Cards and Suptopics below them, Cards cannot.

For my own use, I'd prefer that distinction be blurred a bit more.
When I start a new bullet point, I'm not always sure whether it's
going to be a single card or a larger topic with several subtopics.
It would be nice to easily change a Card into a Topic and vice versa.

- I would like to see the standard file-access buttons on the toolbar
(especially the Save button).

- On the "Move Card" panel, it would be nice to have a "Move above"
button in addition to the "Move below" button. Otherwise it becomes
***bersome to change a card to be the first card within a topic.

- It looks like you can't save changes to a card while you're making
those changes. You have to go to another card before the changes
to the first card can be saved. Not sure why it was done that way,
but as long as that's the setup, it would be nice to have a button
to have the card revert to how it was when you first started making
changes to it.

- It looks like there's no way to erase all the contents of a card.
I deleted all the text in a card in one of my outlines and went
to another card. When I came back to that card, the text was
still there.

- On my Omnigo, Outliner's installer hangs and Outliner itself crashes
the system. I understand that the OG is an orphan system, but it
would be nice if it didn't do that. :-(

Anyway, I've been looking for a GEOS app like Outliner for a couple
of years now, and overall I'm pretty happy with the product.
--
Doug Taylor | Nothing real can be threatened.
The Ohio State University | Nothing unreal exists.
doug-taylor+@osu.edu | - A Course in Miracles

bob

Sounds like a pretty crappy app.

pat

Booo! Hiss!

I'm gonna have to disagree with you Bob. The GEOS FOR DUMMIES book has a
half page Appendix devoted to all the third party apps for GEOS. It rates
Organizer a B+.

dominique vocat

Um, outliner looks trikingly familiar with one of the apps included with
the 2.0 Beta (the one with the "x" closing buttons etc) so it has been
arorund for like a decade. Nice app though.

john howard

[big snip]

Thanks for those well though out comments Doug. One that we'll look
closely at "fixing" is the ability to do tabs and text formatting in the
cards. And we'll keep the rest in mind as we refine the app.

John ;-)

john howard

Hmmmm... now that Breadbox IS Geos does that mean that our apps are no
longer 3rd party but first party.

John ;-)

jens-michael gross

Bob schrieb:

Sounds like a really good app that could be even better in some points.
Sounds like an app that is still missing in windows (except those apps
which need 1 PIII with 512MB Ram to do the same job)

Grossibaer

--
If Microsoft would invest only 5 minutes to make Windows boot 1/1000
second faster,
we would save 30 working hours worldwide every day.

jens-michael gross

Dominique Vocat schrieb:

Note Taker has had its limitations (a LOT more than Outliner I'd say)
and was relatively unstable. But a nice app too. Unfortunately never
available to the public.

Grossibaer

--
If Microsoft would invest only 5 minutes to make Windows boot 1/1000
second faster,
we would save 30 working hours worldwide every day.

john howard

You're right Dom, it is based loosely on an app that Geoworks called


John ;-)
Dominique Vocat wrote:

bob

LOL! In other words; "It is what it is, and that's all its' gonna be."