Outlining — It’s in the Name!

Right there in the name: outliner. Obvious usage, right? OmniOutliner has plenty of horsepower for this task. During my college and grad school days, I used OmniOutliner for that very task almost exclusively.

When it comes to note-taking, there is only one (hyphenated) word to describe me:

anal-retentive.

Before I was fortunate enough to have a laptop, I scrawled notes in a notebook, like most other people, and was always disappointed with how disjointed and disorganized they were. Though professors may not always speak in a perfect outline format, I felt that my notes should more or less be an outline of that day’s lecture. Structure was totally foreign to these notebooks. Drove me nuts. It doesn’t help that I am also very meticulous about notebook care. Example: the pages of an sbh* notebook should be either written in pen or pencil, but never both. I couldn’t stand flipping through a notebook and seeing pen on some pages and pencil on others. Argh! OCD? Perhaps.

Summary of the above: Notebooks don’t work for me.

In January of 2004, heading into my final semester at the University of Texas before heading off to Boston for Harvard, I purchased a 12″ iBook G4 (which the wife still uses!), and my world changed. I now took the laptop to every class, and OmniOutliner became my constant companion.

In-Class Notes

OmniOutliner excels for in-class notes. I can type a lot faster than I can write, so I could take down more and more information than I ever could before. In addition to this, OmniOutliner provided a structure to my notes that wasn’t before possible. Here’s how it broke down:

• Top Level: Lecture Date/Topic
  • Second Level: Major Divisions
    • Third Level and Beyond: All the nitty gritty, hierarchically, painstakingly arranged.

In addition, I could add columns. So, I always had a column on the right-hand side for references. For example, if a professor made reference to a particular work, I’d jot that work and a section or page number if provided. This way, my notes were also cross-referenced to other works.

Further, each line had its own “notes” field associated with. I used this area to make my own comments about what I was hearing. Perhaps I didn’t quite buy what the professor was saying, I’d take note of that here. Or, maybe I had a question about this particular item that I wanted to ask the professor. I could take it down right here so that I wouldn’t forget it when the opportunity came for questions.

Looking back, my notes for various classes during my time at Harvard are often 70 pages or more. This is a lot of information, but really it’s only 4-6 pages of outline per lecture. When finals rolled around, these were invaluable resources. You never know, meticulous, well-structured notes might make you popular amongst the crowd when group studying for finals!

One final item to mention: the ability to embed files. Extremely handy. If you were to look at the beginning of all of my class notes, you would find the course syllabus in PDF or .doc embedded. This makes these files easy to reference anytime. In addition to this, you can also record sounds and have those embedded into the outline. I used to record whole lectures, but found I wasn’t using the audio, so I stopped.

All-in-all, OmniOutliner revolutionized how I organized information from class lectures and sessions, and, consequently, made me a much better student.

Paper Outlines

In addition to class notes, outlines are also handy for the writing processor. Before I write anything of more than a paragraph or two, I start with the most basic of outlines. This blog post, for example, began with me laying out each section. It’s how I work.

OmniOutliner is fantastic for creating outlines for papers. Outlining keeps me organized, and OmniOutliner allows me to keep all kinds of information handy with my notes. I can link web pages or documents to it, take notes on my outline, etc., all from the same window.

When it came time to translate my outline into a word processor, this was easily done. I prefer to use Mellel for my paper writing needs. I could simply create my big headings in Mellel and work from there. OmniOutliner was always open and readily available.

Information Repository

Beyond the nuts-and-bolts writing and note-taking processes, OmniOutliner can serve as an information repository.

Not only can you create outlines and notes, not only can you supplement those notes with hyperlinks and documents, but you can also add audio to them.

If you wanted to, you could turn OmniOutliner into your own little information repository. Sure, there are better programs for this. DevonThink for the academic, and Yojimbo for the creative-types. But, OmniOutliner can serve these functions if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution.

How I Am Using It Now

Now that I am out in the real world, and no longer bound to the classroom, I am using OmniOutliner in a much different way. My need for in-depth notes and outlines for class is long gone, but it has been replaced by other, similar needs.

For the most part, I use OmniOutliner for my writing projects. I use Scrivener (see my thoughts on Scrivener) for most of my writing. While Scrivener helps me organize all of my projects into smaller units, OmniOutliner helps me organize all of my big ideas into categories.

I always have a OmniOutliner document open. This document is called “brainstorm.oo3.” This is where the magic happens. Within this OmniOutliner document I’ve got ideas for plots, characters, etc. When I finish a piece and want to start something new, the first thing I do is look at this document. When I’m reading or writing and get an idea about something else, into brainstorm.oo3 it goes!

OmniOutliner is a powerful, yet simple piece of software. If you’re a Mac, I suggest you give it a go.

Notes

¹ I believe OmniOutliner is bundled with all new macs (not the “Pro” version, though). So, if you’ve got a Mac — get your OmniOutliner on!

Thank you, New Oxford American Dictionary that came bundled with my Mac. Scrivener isn’t just some noun historical, it’s also a smashing piece of writing software from the folks at Literature and Latte (for good measure, here’s a link to the Literature and Latte Blog, if you like to read the latest).

First, some personal back story.

Several years ago, when I was a college lad, I waffled back and forth over word processors. I began with Word, using it for everything. I was so naive in those days! “Is there anything out there other than Word?” I thought. Turns out there was.

As I got more and more into my study of Classics, I discovered some deficiencies in the Mac version of Word. Specifically, Word on the Mac has terrific trouble with some unicode stuff that was important to me (e.g., unicode Hebrew is an impossibility). After writing my undergrad honors thesis completely in Word, struggling through its poor implementation of unicode (my thesis was full of Greek, and a little Hebrew), I ventured out into the world of alternative word processing.

Eventually, I settled on Mellel. Designed by folks who really understood the needs of those who worked in multiple languages, Mellel was an awesome companion throughout my graduate work. Designed for people who love unicode and work in multiple languages, Mellel allowed me to choose specific settings for how I wanted the text to look when I switched over into Greek or Hebrew.

As nice as Mellel was, I really wanted something more when it came to creating fiction. For me, the act of writing often involves the creation of new worlds. Characters have complex relationships with their setting, both where they exist and when they exist, and, of course, other characters. In the case of a current crop of short stories that I’m working on, the characters even have relationships with characters who have long since died. With so many balls in the air, I need something that helps me to organize my thoughts a little better. I needed something more than just a word processor — I needed a thought processor.

Enter Scrivener.

Scrivener has about a million features. In my 3 or 4 months of intense usage, I have barely scratched the service. So, this is by no means a review of all of those features, I’m just writing as an impassioned fellow in the middle of a love affair.

Scrivener provides all of the note-keeping and outlining features that I need, and integrates them into a single window. Conceptually, Scrivener splits my writing into “Draft” and “Research.” In the Draft section I outline (complete with note cards on cork board!) and write my work. Research is where I keep all sorts of notes, PDFs, etc. Let’s look at an example.

For a long time, I have been working on stories set in a fictional Texas town. These stories span many generations (literally from Native American villagers to 21st century townsfolk). Consequently, I’ve got a lot of facts to keep straight:

• Family relationships and family trees.
• What the town looked like during various eras.
• The changing economic climate of the town.
• Etc.

To keep all of this stuff straight, I have a series of notes in the Research section divided into three major folders: Characters, Town Notes, Musings.

Each character that is introduced in a story has his/her own profile where I keep important information: birth date, family relationships, interesting details, etc. No matter what story I’m working on, I have immediate access to that characters information. Very handy.

Town Notes gathers all of the information about the town. I have drawn up a street map for various periods — those JPEGs go in this Town Notes folder. Each year that I’ve written about so far has a file with information about what happened that year: deaths, births, economic disasters or triumphs, and so on.

Musings is a repository for ideas I have about future stories. For example, at one point, I thought it would be cool to write a story about the current townspeople’s Native American predecessors. So, I sketched out a quick outline of that story and threw it into the Musings folder. I also keep ideas about major themes (some themes I like to drag throughout a bunch of stories), and what I call the “mythology” (yeah, I’m an X-Files fan…deal with it!) — an overarching storyline that ties things together.

So, all of these sections are floating around within one window. Sounds difficult to navigate, huh? Not really. While it has definitely taken some getting used to, Scrivener’s split pane functionality allows me to be working on a draft in the top portion of the window, while browsing through notes in the bottom portion. Quite nice.

Other features that really float my boat:

• Full screen mode.
• A sidebar where I can scrawl quick notes about whatever file I’m working on.
• Keyword/Metadata coolness with Spotlight goodness.
• The ability to use Scrivener files with Subversion or CVS.
• Templating feature that allows me to quickly get up and running whether I’m writing a short story, novel, screenplay, treatise, or whatever.
• A variety of output and export options.

Scrivener really is a full-featured writing suite that makes a great deal of sense, especially for those who tend to take a lot of notes about what they’re writing. At only $39.95, it gets the job done admirably. Download the trial!

In order to get back on track, I’ve started doing two things. Here they are:

THE Notebook

I have a fine collection of half-used moleskins. Moleskins are awesome. They are the Bentleys of the notebook world, no doubt. That’s just the problem — I have no trouble taking my Nissan out for a spin, but the Bentley stays in the garage. When I’m looking at a moleskin, I feel like whatever I write in it must be perfect. No scribbled out words, no dumb thoughts, only smart and witty things worthy of Wilde and Byron and the like.

Bottom-line: Moleskins are for 19th century literary pretenders.

For Christmas this year, my wife bought me these other notebooks put out by the moleskin folks. They are small (probably 1/5 the number of pages), with these cheap, brown, paper covers. They are atrocious. They come in packs of three for half the price of a regular little moleskin.

They’re perfect.

From my snobby point-of-view, these things are trash. Therefore, I’m not at all afraid to write whatever I please in them. I’ve started to really use one of these over the last week. I keep it next to me at my desk by day. Here are some of the items that have filled its pages:

• Words I needed to look up from a Michael Chabon book I was reading (seriously, the man has a silly vocabulary).
• Writers I should check out.
• Words I hate.
• Character sketches.
• Things I’m good at (nothing like a little self-esteem boosting!).
• Notes from a meeting with some folks for whom I’m going to be editing a video.
• Notes for the Bible Study that I co-lead.
• General observations.
• Bits of conversations I’ve overheard (or taken part in).

Basically, anything under the sun makes it into this notebook.

Why is this useful?

Notebooks are dumb and pointless — unless you are going to periodically review them. Let me lay out for you how this new notebook kick got started in earnest.

Last week, I was in preparation for this Bible Study (mentioned above). I wanted to jot down a quick outline for what I was hoping to accomplish. I could find nothing but huge 8.5×11 sheets of notebook paper. In my search for a small notebook, I came upon a stack of old (and new) moleskins. Urged on by curiosity, I began to thumb threw them.

Here are some items I found:

• Notes for stories written in 2002.
• Accounts of a professor I had whose career was coming to an end due to Parkinson’s disease (truly sad stuff).
• Drawings of floorplans of ancient structures from sites visited in Greece and Turkey in 2005.
• General observations — behavior, conversation, etc.

In short: A little time machine to the past with some really good stuff in it.

The notes for the old stories were particularly interesting. I was able to relive some of those debates I was having way back when about character and plot. My stories have always been character driven. I’m not a plot guy. This notebook confirms it!

What notebooks are not…

You are not Leonard da Vinci. It is extremely unlikely that anyone will care to read your notebook drivel some 500 years from now. So, don’t fret what you put in there: it’s not for posterity — it’s for YOU!

That’s right. Your notebook is for you.

Around the Hebert house we have a strict rule established long ago: The notebook is personal and not to be touched.

This well-established rule goes for Nat’s notes too. We don’t go pokin’ around in there unless asked to. That’s just the way it is.

Start yourself a writer’s notebook. Do it. Here’s a recent post from Daily Writing Tips on the topic. Get after it!

I’ve been using Fluid for about three weeks now, and just thought I’d offer up my experience.

This review is based on Fluid 0.7, the most recent version that was available when this post was written.

What & Why?

As the web evolves and becomes more and more “2.0,” my reliance on web applications for tasks that used to be handled by desktop has increased. Web applications are simple, easy-to-use, and because they only require a browser, they are typically cross-platform and ultra-portable. Here is a list of the web apps that I currently use on a daily basis (and the desktop apps they replaced):

• Gmail (replaced Apple Mail)
• Remember the Milk (replaced a variety of “to-do” apps including OmniFocus)
• Google Docs (replaced Word, Mellel, and Excel — Though I still need to use these from time-to-time)
• Google Calendar (replaced iCal)
• Google Reader (replaced Vienna)
• Mint (replaced Quicken)

In short, these web apps cover my major daily activities: email, to-do’s, light word processing and spreadsheeting, scheduling, and money management.

At one point, however, I became annoyed with this phenomenon. My annoyance had a great deal to do with my own mode of working. I prefer to use the keyboard for most tasks — the mouse is the enemy! When switching between apps, I use cmd-tab to get around. Because these applications live in web browsers, cmd-tab can’t be used. Instead, I must use your browser’s shortcuts to navigate through its tabs or windows. The problem here is that, no matter how hard I try, it is inevitable: my tabs are going to get disorganized. When this happens, and things stop working consistently, I get frustrated and want to drop this Web 2.0 thing altogether!

Fluid allows me to trick myself into thinking that I’m looking at a regular application, when, in fact, it is simply a self-contained, site-specific browser (site-specific browser = SSB).

Notice how each of these web applications shows up in my Dock as its own item: Gmail, Remember the Milk, Google Calendar, Google Docs. I can cmd-tab to them, launch and select them from the Dock, etc. Some apps, such as Gmail and Google Reader, even have badges that get updated. Looks like I’ve got an unread email in my inbox. Quite nice!

If you’re a real geek then you’ll love the fact that Fluid now has a JavaScript Console, JavaScript API for dock badges as well as Growl notifications. I’m a Growl user, so I’m down with that.

Use

Fluid is quite easy to use.

1. Launch the application and you’ll be greeted with this window:

2. Enter the URL (e.g., https://mail.google.com/mail) for Gmail.

3. Enter a name for the application.

4. Choose where to save the application. Of course, like any other OS X app, you can drag it wherever you want later.

5. Tell Fluid which icon to use for the app. It can use the website’s favicon — which is handy but very low-res. Luckily, there is a Fluid Flickr Group where you can grab PNG icons for your favorite web apps.

Voila! You’re done. Double-click the application and get busy…

The Good

1. SSBs Fit My Workflow
No elaboration needed here — I’ve said my piece above.

2. Dock Badges
What could make an app feel more Desktop-y than live updating badges on the Dock icon?

3. Control How To Handle Outside Links
A Fluid apps preferences allow you to control how that application handles links to other domains. This is especially useful when you want some apps to open links within and others to use your regular browser. For example, I hate the idea of my mail client opening up a link. My Gmail app’s preferences allow me to tell it to use FF3 to open links. Problem solved. At the same time, you might really like the idea of being able to open Google Reader stories in tabs — no problem.

Here’s a quick screenshot of the application’s preferences:

4. Growl Support
I love Growl. Anything is enhanced by its use of Growl. OK, maybe not anything.

5. Knocks the Socks Off of Mozilla’s Prism
Prism, like Fluid, is Mozilla’s answer to the SSB need. You might be thinking, “Well, Stephen — aren’t you a Mozilla fan? Why not use Prism?” Unfortunately, as of this writing, there is no way to open more than one Prism SSB at a time (at least in OS X, maybe this works in Windows). This is beyond comprehension. It is, for lack of a better word, dumb.

6. Checks for Updates
As you can see above, there is a preference for each Fluid app to check for updates. I am hoping that when Fluid is updated, it will be able to update these apps individually so I won’t have to recreate them. If this is the case, then this rocks. If not, then we can slip this item down into “The Bad.”

The Bad

1. WebKit
I am not a huge fan of WebKit. I use Camino as my primary browser, though I’m testing Firefox 3 right now. In either case, I would prefer to use Gecko as my rendering engine.

Why does it matter?

It doesn’t matter too much. However, my Fluid apps look all WebKit-ish, which means that web widgets and forms and whatnot look slightly different than they do in Camino/FF3. Consequently, my web apps look a little “off” to my eye.

2. No Keychain Access (as far as I can tell)
One of the reasons I opted for Camino over Firefox a year or two ago was the issue of saved passwords. I like the idea of having passwords saved in the keychain (still one of my issues with FF3). Fluid does not seem to have a way to access passwords from the keychain. Further, it does not have a way to save passwords. This means that I’m typing in passwords for apps like Gmail more often than before.

3. Too Many Apps
Over the past few weeks, I have sometimes felt like I have too many apps running. I like to keep things clean. If you are paranoid about the number of apps that pop up on the screen when you hit cmd-tab, then Fluid might not be for you.

The Ugly

There is one little bug in Fluid that requires discussion. I didn’t put this in “The Bad” simply because I felt it belonged in its own category.

As of v. 0.7, Fluid apps have a really annoying habit. When I click on an external link in an app that does not use them (e.g., Gmail as I’ve discussed my setup above), the Fluid SSB opens a blank SSB window before opening the target in your other browser.

Example:

• I have Gmail setup in a Fluid SSB to disallow external links.
• I click an external link.
• Gmail app opens a blank Gmail app window.
• A new tab in FF3 is created, displaying the target.

This is quite annoying. This is my appeal to Todd Ditchendorf, the creator of Fluid, fix this please!!! FIXED

Conclusion

Fluid creates great little SSBs for my favorite web apps. It’s changed the way I work with web apps, and I’m quite grateful for it. Currently, I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

What can it do to earn 5 stars?

1. Stop the silly blank window business described above. FIXED
2. Give me a choice of rendering engines.

Otherwise, I think this is a solid app, and I can’t wait for it to mature into 1.0.

UPDATE

- The blank window opening problem now has a workaround. Check out this page at the Fluid App Google Group.