Curiouser and Curiouser! on outlining

Outlines are the answer

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 15:17:00 +0100

One thing about Radio that I lament is that I cannot 'hold items' for future publication. You can mark them as not being in a category but somehow that is unsatisfactory.

I've been looking to use the Instant Outliner for collaborating on a project and it suddently occurred to me that the answer is staring me in the face. I can write these items in a private outline (i.e. one that I don't put in the www/ folder where it will get upstreamed) and then transfer them to a blog posting when I am ready.

I like Radio more and more...

Right on the money

Wed, 19 Jun 2002 20:55:46 +0100

John Robb. How to boost employee productivity by using a news aggregator. [klogs]

A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday. That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand. Applied across a company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year. The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department.

Accurate K-Logging of current activities: status, thinking, plans, projects, etc.
Online presentations, to-do lists, project plans via outlines.
K-Log personal portals that integrate all connection info (e-mail, IM, phone, address, bio, resume, picture).

Very simple stuff can yield big results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

» John Robb's right on the money again. I'm really starting to love reading John's blogging (via my aggregator of course)

I'm looking at everything I do now in terms of whether it can be output as OPML for instant outlining, or as RSS for aggregation, or both.

Radio vs. Email

Sat, 22 Jun 2002 01:32:39 +0100

Steve Yost on ubiquitous collaboration tools. Steve Yost, inventor and proprietor of QuickTopic, disagrees with David Weinberger's assertion that collaborative software fails to thrive because companies are afraid to "hyperlink the hierarchy." The real problem is more mundane, Steve says: ... [Jon's Radio]

An intriguing hypothesis on the challenges of getting new technology ideas to take root in organizations

[McGee's Musings]

» Interesting. From a quick scan I'm not sure how QuickTopic differs from, say, using a Yahoo group where participants can either use it as a list (with single & digest options) or a web forum. I have switched from reading radio-dev as a list to using it as a web forum. But that's because I use Outlook for most of my email and it just sucks, sucks, sucks!

But beyond that I would be looking for radio-dev to arrive as an RSS feed. In fact much of the stuff I currently receive as email would be better arriving in my Radio news aggregator. Of course, at that point my aggregator is going to have to become a lot smarter and work much harder for me.

The other technology that could do for email is Instant Outlining (IO). Radio is getting interesting in this regard. It's going to take a lot of work to make it a killer app, but it's certainly on that track.

As someone else has said, Radio: the best $40 I ever spent on software!

Why Radio?

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 22:47:25 +0100

Why have I choosen Radio over MovableType? It's a question I've asked myself recently.

I think MT looks like an excellent blogging system. In a few years time I think that MT (or son-of-MT) is likely to be the choice for bloggers who need a little more than Blogger (or son-of-Blogger) will provide. I don't believe, as much as I love it, that Radio will be that choice.

However I do believe that Radio could be the klogger tool of choice. Why?

Because Radio has such potential in both a networked (social) and standalone (personal) context. Because Radio is a general computing platform that has been specialized to handle blogging but could also be specialized for a thousand other applications.

I, along with others, are looking to take it to the next stage with k-log ready tools. Userland are doing their part with things like Instant Outlining and RCS.

So, that's why Radio.

Radio news handling

Sun, 11 Aug 2002 16:30:07 +0100

More Flexible News Scanning Needed. This really hits the mark -- I've been traveling for two weeks with very limited connectivity. [Blunt Force Trauma]

» I too wish that Radio would handle news more flexibly. The idea of a "poll now" button would be genuinely useful as would a way to adjust the frequency with which different RSS feeds are polled.

However when you get to the point where you want to poll every 3 minutes I think you may be reaching the breaking point for the medium. I would be thinking about moving to Groove, Instant Messenger, Shared/Instant outlining or something like that to handle a real-time interaction. The results of that interaction could then be published klog style for everyone to share.

You know when...

Wed, 21 Aug 2002 08:51:06 +0100

Okay I'm a convert to Radio's outliner now. I just caught myself, in a Word outline, pressing F2 to navigate the outline nodes!!

The Amazing Transcluding Browser

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 09:15:38 +0100

Transclusion Breakthrough: The Endless Web Page. The links you can see on the Endless Web Page demo, with [img] icons, are the result of a long research. Clicking the [img] icon, or the link's text, will cause the linked outline to be inserted directly in the current page, as a child of the node that carried the link. [img] While the linked outline is rendered, the [img] icon is replaced by a small rotating globe. Once the linked content is inserted, the [img] reverses to a 'regular' outline wedge [img] , with the standard collapse/expand functions attached. This is the in-browser version of what Dave Winer and UserLand created for Radio's outliner. This is instant rendering, happening on the fly as you browse through the current page. It is totally recursive: try clicking on the 'endless web page' node that appears under my name in the demo page. [read more] [s l a m]

» Congratulations to Marc.

He's done some pretty amazing stuff to get this working. It's an amazing demo -- check it out.

DTD for OPML

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 19:37:38 +0000

I'm about to edit some OPML files, I want to use my XML editor XML-SPY but it works best with either a schema or DTD. Fortunately I was able to find an OPML DTD thanks to Wayne Steel.

OML: Improving outlines

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 16:40:32 +0100

Just came across a link to:

OML: Outline Markup Language

which is an attempt to create a validatable XML language for describing outlines. It's simple and, as you would expect, very similar to OPML. Key differences are:

The use of a tag in the section to allow generalized meta data to be used there.
The provision of an optional tag to contain an nodes contents (rather than packing it into a text attribute)
The provision of an optional tag for use in an node.

It is this last that is key to OML since the use of multiple tags can replace the use of custom attributes within the node. It is these custom attributes which can prevent OPML from being validated. They also make it inconvenient to use tools based upon DTD or schema when editing OPML documents (to which I can attest).

The parlour state of outlining on Windows

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:10:19 +0100

At the moment I am knee-deep (expecting to be waist-deep by tea time) in writing my product management plan for 2006/7. Of course I am writing it in the excellent OmniOutliner Professional where I am making use of the notes, to-do's, styling, and attachments.

Now I want to let Graham (CEO), Peter (CTO), and Chris (Business Development Director) see them and make changes. Okay so Omni doesn't handle change tracking like Word but I could live with that.

What I can't live with is the fact that I have no way of sharing this document with them without, it seems, converting it into some dreadful legacy format like RTF! I guess I can use HTML if I sacrifice their ability to change anything (if I only I were that good!)

I tried installing Dave Winer's OPML.exe editor on Grahams machine and sharing my outline as OPML. I have no question that Dave understands outlining but OPML.exe is a dreadfully sober experience coming from Omni. Opening my outline (saved as an OPML document) I can see the outline, sure, but I lose the notes, styling, attached documents. In short I lose everything but the structure.

Apparently it's time to ramp up my campaign of switching Graham to Mac.

Tools

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 21:57:09 +0100

Yesterday I upgraded to the newly released VoodooPad 3.0 personal wiki. I bought VP about 2 weeks ago to use as my primary note-taking application and I'm really impressed with it. The improvements in 3.0 (such as tabbed pages, swapping the drawer for OmniGraffle style inspectors, and the print to PDF inside a VoodooPad page) are just icing on the cake.

I now mainly use a trio of tools when working on a project. I use VoodooPad as my note taking tool to track ideas, links (I never really got on with del.icio.us or ma.gnolia), and so on.

Then I use MindJet MindManager for brainstorming and thinking things out. As an aside I think MindJet are to be commended on having done a fabulous job with MindManager for Mac. It's a beautful Cocoa application not some crappy conversion of a Windows app.

Lastly I use OmniOutliner Professional to flesh things out, drill into the detail, and organize. From there I tend to either go straight to implementation, or create a Word document or a PDF.

In the last few days the division of labour between MM and OO has shifted though. MindManager has a great, free, viewer for Mac & Windows. This means I can share maps with the rest of the company. I haven't found anything like a good solution for sharing outlines with my windows using colleagues and it's a real problem.

This means I am tending to use maps more than outlines, even when the outliner really is the better tool for the job. I wish the folks at OmniGroup would do a decent outliner viewer for Windows and solve my problems.

Other tools I have kicking around in the information tools category are Microsoft Office (although I only tend to use Word), KeyNote, OmniGraffle Pro for when I need to diagram, EasyCrop for screen captures and general image futzing, CMapTools when I want to draw concept diagrams, and of course the veritable TextMate for general text wrangling.