How is the outliner? The site descibes it as “simple”. How does it compare to Omnioutliner?

Tim

Tim: It’s not really a replacement for OO (great app, that), but it does one thing pretty well. Like Curio, it allows you to make any object into an outliner object. I haven’t played with it much, but it seems like a pretty mature set of documents and photos (or their “replicants”) could be arranged in interesting ways using the outline functionality.

In other news, that OO3 is looking sort of cool, eh?

For me, the show-stopping misfeature of DEVONThink, which I experimented with at some length a few months ago, is it’s gratuitously opaque database. This is stored in the user’s Library in a series of uselessly named folders and files. People who like iTunes’ transparent library and are disappointed with iPhoto’s use of the filesystem will be all to familiar with this lazy, shortsighted development. This is not normally a problem, but when the application’s specific aim is to sort and ease access to information which will inevitably used elsewhere (you couldn’t possibly spend all your time in DEVONThink), and the application is closed source and could disappear at any time, it renders it useless.

As Merlin says, it doesn’t claim to be an outliner, although the ability to add tickboxes is welcome.

By the way, readers of this blog may find Ted Goranson’s ongoing About This Particular Outliner series of interest. The new column (released today) is entitled Task Management and Outlining, which is right up our street.

Does the new version allow for a Mail.app email to be dragged and dropped into it? Because so much of the info I’d want to keep track of is in emails, DEVONThink’s inability to do this made it impractical for me. I wrote to Devon and they said it was Apple’s fault, so it’d be interesting if they’d fixed it.

Drag and drop from Mail.app doesn’t work AFAIK, but I think there are AppleScripts to import selected emails from Mail.app, Entourage, and Eudora.

This does get to one point I’m still wrestling with, which is whether DT can seamlessly sync information between the database and Finder files/folders without an explicit import/export. For example, I’m still considering which import/synchronization method lets me pull in all the files of my “txt” folder while keeping the originals editable (and Quicksilver-appendable) and while transparently staying synced and editable within the DT database. Still working on that one.

I registered DT ages ago because it is a great product. However, I’ve found that it’s ultimately overkill for what I needed—even though it is über-cool.

The main reason you throw stuff into DT is so you can index it, organize it, and find relatedness—the main feature of the app is the little drawer that shows you similar files. Most of the time, you just don’t need this unless you have THOUSANDS of files, as you would if you were, say, researching a dissertation. But even then, DT gets better the more you subdivide and organize those files into subfolders, so there’s always a large amount of effort involved in organization in order to reap the benefits of the semantic classification. I had to ask myself whether it was worth all that effort (syncing, importing, exporting, capturing, organizing) to get at those connections, most of which I knew about or could have figured out anyway. It wasn’t. There’s also the fact that learning to make connections, see similarities, etc., is a skill unto itself that’s worth cultivating.

So to my mind, from a GTD perspective, tools like DT are actually -not- what you want to be using b/c they a) require constant tinkering b) encourage an over-stuffed filing system and c) replace decision-making (what do I need this for? is it actionable? etc.) with deferral (I’ll just let DT index it…)

I’ve come to the same opinion about wikis, which I used to spend lots of time maintaining and adjusting. Ultimately I spent more time fiddling with the wiki, throwing stuff into it, and paging through it than I did doing my main job, which is reading and writing. YMMV, but in the end I’ve settled on plain old index cards, just like in high school. This isn’t a knock on DT, which is a great app and for which I’ve put down my $40; it’s more a response to the endless search for the ‘all-in-one’ app that does it all, etc. etc., especially in the context of GTD, which is all about actually looking at your data rather than relying on search to look at it for you.

Here’s an article I wrote of how I use DT:

http://matt.makalumedia.com/archives/000223.html

(Lately, however, I’m using a combination of DT and Hog Bay Notebook.)

A little OT, but from reading your post, I wonder: where is the fine line drawn that GTD goes from saving time, to wasting time?

I don’t mean that to sound harsh, but at what point do we start accumulating more lists and spend more time maintaining our processes for keeping track of things, than actually getting those things done?

I tend to give new ideas/apps/systems 2-3 days max. If I can’t get my brain around it in that time, I deem it not worth my time (or my brain’s just not flexible enough…which is entirely likely). I’d rather be getting at those things, than creating more spaces for me to look through and maintain.

perhaps I’m not embracing the spirit of GTD - i’ve not read the book, only 43folders.com :) - but it seems to work well enough for me. balancing the maintenance with the actual work is the ultimate goal, no?

I much prefer the mail-like interface and lucene search engine in Hog Bay Notebook 3.5.

But I wonder if such applications will still be necessary with the new spotlight search features of Tiger (OS X 10.4)?