There We Go!

[Mark Smith]

ooutline-ml.5.haelo at spamgourmet.com wrote:


>There is a lot of stuff in Pro, now that I've played with it, that
>does not seem very -- how should I put it -- well, worth the $70.
>Bookmarks? Named styles? I don't know, seems like stuff that should be
>in the standard version to me.
>
>I actually do not think I'll be getting an upgrade this time around,
>which is disappointing. I've been waiting a year for this app, but it
>has gone in a direction I really don't need. Styles just aren't that
>important to me. I am a data kind of person. Give me a ton of ways to
>manipulate my data, not just a ton of ways to make it look pretty.
>Pretty is generally distracting.

I sympathize completely with your disappointment, though not so much with your overall assessment.

I'm sure Omni did their homework and that we are in a minority.

I like a lot of things in OO3 and I like them a lot, but I don't see me being able to make particularly good use of it.

To give you an idea about how I feel about the styles, I would pay the price gladly for OO3 Pro if it *took out* the styles completely and gave me a way of *naming* a relatively small number of elements that were tagged as such in an available XML output file. Named elements and hierarchy are more than sufficient (for my needs) to be able to generate the different kinds of output I might need. Like you, I see the styles as a distraction. Unfortunately, naming the styles to suit my elements and just making them all *look* the same, is a poor substutute.

Concession: Pro's "Sections" feature is a nod in the general direction I was hoping it might go. (Some open system of "node attributes" and maybe some different ways of "viewing" an outline (standard hierarchy, "map", whatever) were the things I was hoping for.)

I sympathize if you have been waiting and just found out. I was on the beta and learned to live with this quite a while ago.

Again, no criticism of Omni Group implied. I don't doubt that my wishes are barely, if at all, on the radar.

Finally, at the risk of sounding like a broken record and possibly being asked to leave, you might want to take a look at Tinderbox. Its not "pretty". It doesn't have columns. It lacks some of the OS X bells and whistles that we lucky folks are beginning to take for granted (and which are there in spades in OO3). Its not cheap. Its AppleScript support is minimal. Its difficult to "get". But, it is tremendously powerful as a result of its "attributes" and "agents".