OmniOutliner 3 Public Beta

[Timothy J.Wood]

On Dec 3, 2004, at 7:07 PM, Philip Butler wrote:

> Congratulations on a fine new product - looks nice.

   Thanks!

> However, from my opinion, it has little new functionality.  I was 
> really hoping that some of my suggestions from the summer would have 
> been put into OO3.  Now if OO3 Pro has this, I'll buy it in a 
> heartbeat.

   I can assure you there are 5 or 6 metric tons of new features, but as 
you can imagine, the list of new features will always be smaller than 
the list of cool stuff that we couldn't get in (and we *really* wanted 
to; it's just that we had to draw the line and ship at some point).  We 
have a huge database of requests, internal ideas and future goals that 
we considered for OO3.  Looking back at the most popular customer 
requests in that database, we've covered > 90% of those.  In the 
future, you can expect us to try to cover the next 90%.

> 1)  be able to "unwrap" the hierarchical list during sort.  I want to 
> be able to do this:

   We have had lots of talks about this internally.  Many lunches, 
dinners and coffee room chats covered this topic and while we came up 
with some answers, there were even more open questions that we weren't 
able to solve satisfactorily for our OO3 deadline.  We really don't 
want to ship half baked features, so instead we concentrated on 
solidifying and polishing the other features.

> 2) We need the ability to hide "done" items and re-show them.

   Likewise we agree that this is an extremely useful feature, but it 
didn't make it into OO3 for the same reasons as above.

   Every time we add a feature, there is a combinatorial explosion of 
possibilities that we need to nail down.  You'd be surprised at some of 
the issues that come up when you consider the intersection of undo, 
sorting, summaries, AppleScript, styling, localization, etc., etc., 
etc. :)   We try to construct nefarious scenarios where the various 
features work against each other and make sure we're covering as many 
of those cases as possible.  We know our customers will do things with 
OO3 we've never expected, but at the end of the day the most important 
thing is that we ship features that are as solid, simple and fun to use 
as we can possibly make them.

   But, yeah, we want those features too :)

-tim