.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT SHOOTOUT
.TITLE Outliners for the PalmPilot
.OTHER
.SUMMARY There are some things you just love, or you don’t. Outliners fall into that category. There are some people who couldn’t be forced to use an outliner and there are those of us who literally couldn’t make it through the day without an outliner’s help. In this ruthless product shootout, Contributing Editor Bob Freud sifts through the latest versions of four outliners. You’ll have to read the article to see which product was left standing at the end of the day.
.AUTHOR Bob Freud
In junior high school, I thought outlines were a special form of torture invented by English and Social Studies teachers to inflict on their students. "Before you write your report on ancient Rome," I would be told, "make an outline." [Fate has an interesting way of evening the score. Bob is now an English professor.–DG] Of course, I always wrote the report first and did the outline when it was all finished. How could people possibly know what they were going to say until they had said it? At least that was my reasoning. Fast forward a number of years. I frequently read technical material that I want to remember and write papers and articles using my computer’s word processor. Now that I can drag items around with my mouse as I outline, and put them back again if I don’t like the result, my word processor’s outlining function seems indispensable.
Enter the PalmPilot (actually enter the Pilot, add potential litigation from the Pilot Pen folks, then change the name to PalmPilot, and further confuse everyone by calling the newest version the Palm III). Now that I ‘m a confirmed outliner, I certainly want to be able to feed my habit while using my handheld computer. The PalmPilot and outlining software seem like a perfect fit. When it works well, the outline experience is about playing with information, about trying this arrangement and then that arrangement to see which one has the most zing. Almost as soon as I started using my PalmPilot, I dreamed of sitting somewhere with my double latte, listening to cool jazz and reorganizing something important. While I do not like write long pieces on my PalmPilot using Graffiti, I do like to take the PalmPilot somewhere other than my office and play around with information I have already entered.
At present four outlining programs are available for the PalmPilot. This article will discuss the pros and cons of the outlining programs available for everybody’s favorite handheld device. Table A compares these products.
.BEGIN_TAB_TABLE A Outliner Product Comparison
.TAB_TABLE_HEADER Product Brain Forest ThoughtMill Hi-Note Arranger
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Company Aportis Hands High Software Cyclos Olive Branch Software
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Memory 67KB 52KB 68KB 40KB
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Produces Numbered Outlines Yes No No Yes
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Fonts Small only Small only Large & Small Large & Small
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Include Graphics No No Yes No
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Export to HTML No No No Yes
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Import MemoPad Text or ToDo MemoPad MemoPad Links to Address, Date Book, Expense, MemoPad, ToDo
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Cost $30.00 $17.95 $20.00 $19.00
.END_TAB_TABLE
.H1 Arranger: simple is good
Arranger is the simplest and least full-featured of the outlining programs being compared here. Yet, it may still find a place on the PalmPilots of some readers. Arranger produces an outline much like the one your teacher instructed you in. Items can be numbered 1, 2, 3, or 1, 1.1 1.111, 2, 2.1, 2.11 and so on or not show a number at all. When you start up Arranger, you begin a new outline. Each outline consists of a series of notes, only the first line of which is visible while in outline mode. You have the ability to use large or small fonts. Following the Windows ’95 Explorer metaphor, the box to the left of each item shows a plus if the item can be expanded, a minus if the item can be collapsed or an empty box if there are no sub-notes. If desired a ToDo check box can which sections of a document are already complete.
At present Arranger is the only program of those being reviewed which exports to the Memo Pad in HTML if desired. (NOTE: BrainForest Professional, due out shortly, will also have this ability). One thing I liked was the ease with which I could promote and demote items in Arranger. By dragging the box to the left of each note, I was able to make it a sub-note of a preceding item or to promote it to a higher level. There appeared to be no limit to the number of sub-levels I was able to arrange in Arranger. I stopped when I got eleven levels deep.
Despite its seeming simplicity, a real strength of Arranger is its ability to directly link items from built-in PalmPilot applications. Arranger 1.11 allows linking to ToDo, Memo, Address, Date Book, and Expense You can quickly build an outline by selecting Memos, ToDos and as well as creating your own new text items. Figure A shows an Arranger outline built of links to different PalmPilot Applications. Because these items are actual links to PalmPilot applications, SwitchHack is almost a necessity for anyone planning to seriously use Arranger.
.FIG A In this Arranger outline, the icons on the right are indicating items from the Address Book, Expense and ToDo applications.
.H1 Hi-Note: text and pictures
Hi-Note is the only outliner available which allows the user to nest both text and pictures in an outline. Included in the Hi-Note product is a full-featured drawing program. This allows you to create pictures up to 800 x 500 pixels in size. Unfortunately, Hi-Note drawings cannot be exported to other PalmPilot graphic formats, nor can Hi-Note import other formats.
Drag and Drop capability is provided in Hi-Note. Notes and pictures can be rearranged by dragging them above or below other items at the same level. To promote or demote a note you move it to an item at a higher or lower level. To make a note or a picture a subnote of another item
In Hi-Note if you want to import a memo into your outline, you must import an entire category from Memo Pad. Once I discovered this, I quickly created a Memo Pad category called "Import", into which I placed Memos I wanted to use in Hi-Note. If you want to export from Hi-Note, it will export top-level outlines with all the sub categories. Each top-level outline is exported as an individual Memo Pad document. With larger documents, I found this confusing.
Although I probably would not use Hi-Note for creating an article or document, I would use it the way Figure B shows. H-Note works well as an organized place to keep the various lists we all maintain such as a shopping list, book and music list, list of directions with associated maps, and a list of passwords. Each outline can be marked private, public, read-only.
.FIG B In this Hi-Note list of lists, I can even include a map drawing along with my directions.
.H1 ThoughtMill: full-featured and visually oriented
ThoughtMill from Hands High Software provides serious outlining power and a couple of very engaging features. ThoughtMill features an icon bar at the bottom of the screen which enables you to perform common tasks like adding or deleting an item, turning on or off completion boxes and leaving the outline. A triangle to the right of an item, indicates an item which can be expanded; a dot indicates an item which has no daughter items. Numbered outlines are not generated by ThoughtMill. When an outline is begun, you must add new items by using the plus sign icon
Like Hi-Note, ThoughtMill will import an entire category of memos from the built-in Memo Pad application. ThoughtMill, however, will try to present you with a workable outline by treating spacing and tabs in the original memo in such a way that it produces a workable outline once imported.
Two features that will endear ThoughtMill to many users are the Can and the Folder visible at the bottom of Figure C. Let’s say that while working you decide that a certain section will be used later on, but you are not sure where. Drag it to the Folder, represented by a folder icon at the bottom of the screen. When you have decided where that particular gem should go, drag it out of the folder again and place it wherever in the outline you would like it. So far this sounds fairly sensible, but here’s the neat twist. The Folder holds up to ten items. The trash feature works much like the Macintosh trash. You can drag up to ten items there which will be available until to you empty the trash by selecting Empty Trash from the Options menu. Equally valuable is the fact that ThoughtMill features undo, available from the menu by using a Command + U keystroke combination.
.FIG C The ThoughtMill Folder and Trash will each hold up to ten items that can be placed anywhere in my document.
.H1 BrainForest: innovative and intuitive
Brainforest is by far the most ambitious and full-featured of the products reviewed here. Alone among all the outliners available for the PalmPilot, it will soon feature a companion desktop application. This will allow you to create your outline in the PC or Mac version of BrainForest, HotSync it to the PalmPilot without putting it into Memo Pad and continue working. This is really what I have been looking for. Many PalmPilot users are reluctant to edit really large documents entirely in Graffiti. The PiloKey adapter from LandWare, which enables a PalmPilot to use a Newton keyboard for input might be worth investigating for those who plan to make serious use of the other outliners mentioned in this article. The PiloKey solution is now Palm III compatible.
What makes BrainForest an ambitious project is the range of possible uses. It produces numbered outlines. In fact, there is a wide range of numbering/lettering choices available. A feature new to the latest version is the use of project planning boxes. This boxes graphically represent completion of a project from 10% to 100%.
When you create an item in BrainForest, a small text field opens up as shown in Figure D. You can enter up to 130 characters in this window. Should you need more space for your idea, you can attach a note to an entry. Once an item is created you can access a row of choices along the bottom of the BrainForest window. In addition to adding or deleting a new branch or leaving the outline, you have access to the details window. Here is where BrainForest starts to show off. A small window very similar to the To Do List details window opens. Every branch or leaf (topic or subtopic in BrainForest parlance) can indicate priority, whether or not to show a checkbox, a start date and a finish date. If you select the option of viewing the tree as a Project tree, you the action check box now graphically indicates completion from 10% to 100%.
.FIG D A small text field opens up in BrainForest.
So far this seems like pretty standard stuff. But BrainForest contains a powerful double sort feature. I can sort my entire tree (or just a single branch of it) by title, priority, due date, and completion % and at then rearrange all my branches and leaves again in a subsort using the same criteria. This produces vastly different views of my tree and information is no longer just organized. It begins to make sense and various patterns emerge. Figures E and F show two different ways of sorting the same information.
.FIG E This shows a project with information sorted first by Due Date and second by Project Completion in descending order.
.FIG F This shows the same information sorted by Project Completion in ascending order.
Those used to other outlining programs may miss the ability to promote or demote an item by dragging it to the left or right. Instead, you select a branch or leaf and make the graffiti symbol for space to promote an item and the backspace symbol to demote an item. Since there are already several formatting choices performed at the left end of each item (completion percent, check box, and numbering style) this is probably necessary to avoid accidentally selecting one of these
This full-featured program comes with a 95 page Adobe Acrobat users guide to enable you to get the most out of it.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability
Arranger is available at http://www.olivebr.com
Hi-Note is available at http://www.cyclos.com/pilotsoft.html
ThoughtMill is available at http://www.HandsHigh.com
BrainForest is available at http://www.aportis.com
PiloKey is available at http://www.landware.com
SwitchHack is available at http://www.deskfree.com
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Bob Freud is an active PalmPilot enthusiast and a Computer Communications Consultant specializing in Web Design and Multilingual Computing. He can be reached via email at quick@intac.com. Learn more about Freud Consulting at http://www.intac.com/~quick.
.DISCUSS http://www.component-net.com/webx?13@@.ee6bedf
