Outliners for OS X

Dave Winer from Userland Software has been teasing an announcement sometime later this week of a new tie-in between his popular Radio 8 content management and Web writing software and the outliner capabilties hidden deep inside Radio. And in honor of that upcoming announcement, I want to take a quick look at some of the outliners currently available for OS X.

One major caveat before digging too deep here: I am not a hard core outliner user, yet. I use outliners as a simple organization, data storage and writing tool, and many of the higher-end features used by programmers escape me. I hope to learn the benefits of those high-end features at some point, but I find outlines and outliners a great tool no matter how deep I delve into their features.

OmniOutliner 2.0, $21.12

The strength of OmniOutliner, especially in its new 2.0 beta version, is the way that the developers at The Omni Group cater to hard core programmers and outliner fans, especially fans of the Classic-compatible outliner from years and years ago, More.

OmniOutliner has some extras that make it stand out, such as multi-column outlines and preferences that offer options for how plain text and RTF exporting will display the intricacies of an outline. And the developers of OmniOutliner promise that they will take the program into areas where outliners have feared to tread before (although this tease really doesn't have any details to back it up right now).

As I understand it, OmniOutliner ships on many new Macs (or so I have been hearing), and as such it is getting more exposure as an outliner than many other outliners that have come before it. What this means for the program down the road is yet to be seen, but at this point it looks like the premier outlining tool for OS X.

For more about OmniOutliner, check out the OmniOutliner Users mailing list and its archives. Among the archives are sample AppleScripts and such, including this gem that lets you take an OmniOutliner outline and convert it to BrainForest Pro for uploading onto your Palm (this was written as a sample for OO 1.2, so it may need to be tweaked to work well with OO 2.0b1)

Radio 8, $39.95

The Omni Group folks may have a major competitor for the OS X outlining crown, though. Although Radio 8 is largely pitched as a Weblog writing tool and content management program, at its core sits what may well be the most sophisticated outliner on OS X. No, it doesn't offer mutli-column outlines, but it offers functions like Hoist and De-hoist as well as HTML markup capabilities and the option to function immediately as a story editor.

What Radio lacks right now as an OS X tool is the same on-the-fly spell checking features offered by OmniOutliner. It also doesn't have the customizable keyboard shortcuts that can make OmniOutliner a popular choice for people who want to keep their fingers on the keyboard rather than on the mouse.

There is no doubt that, if it becomes a new priority for Userland Software and Dave Winer - the creator of More - then all of the user-friendly tools like keyboard navigation and shortcuts and spell checking will be brought to Radio under OS X. This is why I am excited to see what Dave has to say later about his new focus on the outliner at the heart of Radio. I would love to use Radio's outliner as a writing tool, avoiding the problems that come with writing within a Web browser.

To dig deeper into Radio's outliner functions, check Dave Winer's document How to use the outliner. I should also note that in some recent playing around with Radio's outliner I have found it easy to save a BrainForest Pro outline as a plain text file, which can then be read and manipulated by Radio. When using this same trick with OmniOutliner outlines the result is the same - Radio can edit any of these outlines if they are first exported as text. Radio is currently the only OS X outliner that will save its files as OPML files though.

BrainForest Pro, $39.95

Aportis' BrainForest Pro has one major thing going for it - integration with Palm. Although the desktop application is pretty basic and it lacks the most sophisticated outliner functions, the selling point is that all the features available on the desktop can also be used on a Palm-compatible handheld computer. I bought BrainForest about six months ago because I thought it would be a great tool for book writing research and for storing data about specialized topics.

BrainForest does offer some basic organizer and to do features that are easy to access. Items in an outline can have alarms and dates connected to them, and although I don't find this addition enough to use BrainForest as a complete organizer program, it is a nice additional tool.

Others

The list of outliners for OS X is really quite short right now. Of course, there are outliner functions built into word processors. I have used the AppleWorks outliner from time to time, and it does offer basic functionality along with spellchecking capabilities (though not on-the-fly checking). And the OS X version of Word also has outlining functions. But for the purpose of this short article I am focusing on stand alone outliner programs.

Liner 1.1 is billed as a basic to do list program, but it also offers the ability to add pictures to outlines and it has alarm functions to make it a more rounded program. The program was last updated in February, so it is safe to bet it is still being developed.

The picture is not so clear for Outliner4X Pro 1.0, which is an even more basic to do list program with some outliner functions. It was last updated in August, 2001.

If you are willing to run Classic on your OS X machine in order to use an outliner, there are more choices available. The best bet to investigate those is to go to a software site like VersionTracker or MacUpdate and search for "outliner" to see what else will come up as a Classic application.

Rob McNair-Huff is a longtime Mac user and writer from the Pacific Northwest. In addition to writing about the Mac, and running this Web site, Mac Net Journal, he is the author of two books - Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula and Mountain Bike America: Washington - and he is working with his wife Natalie to write a third book this year called Birding Washington. If you have a need for Mac consulting, writing, Web design or photography help, check out Rob's business site: White Rabbit Publishing.