OmniOutliner beta 7 is out

[Daniel Flatin]

James Moore wrote:

>We hope this will be the last beta before release.
>
>http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/beta/

There is such a high level of elegance in this release of OmniOutliner. The interface to the
application is full of tastefully understated touches, from the small outline control handles (a big
improvement) to the row and column highlighting, to the simple but powerful inspectors. Consequently,
I was surprised when I reviewed the manual that came with b7 (yes, I'm one of those who reads
manuals).  In contrast, the manual has a raw, blocky appearance which doesn't really reflect the
structural and aesthetic sensibilities of OmniOutliner itself. In fact, it looks like a flow chart
that was whipped up in OmniGraffle (a fine program in its own right, but perhaps misapplied here).
For specifics:

(1) Gratuitous use of arrows linking information elements is not appropriate, providing excessive
visual clutter where a simple outline structure would work well (we are talking about an outliner
after all).
(2) The thumbnail images of OmniOutliner in action are too small to discern for normal levels of
magnification, but when expanded sufficiently the manual text is too large to be useful.
(3) The heading text blocks are way out of proportion to the rest of the content.
(4) Why have a next page indicator which does not, in fact, send you to the next page? It is a bit
like putting the instructions, "turn page", at the bottom of each page of a printed manual.

One obvious approach might be to just go back to the "mini manual" approach and use a native document
format, but if a pdf manual is more useful, then I would suggest using OmniOutliner to generate it.

Dan