LooseStitch - Free Online Outliner

by absconditus • 17 years ago

9 6 17 years ago

markbao• 17 years ago

Hmm. It's a very beautiful app, but its user experience is iffy. Case in point: http://screenshots.markbao.com/43208b3dcc19bd9cf1a8e8864459e...

Perhaps it's just my tendency as a developer, but I hate having this "view" part and an "edit" part in different places. Why should I have this part where I can see my outline, but then I have to click, move my mouse over to the side, edit, and then click save on the box? Most of the time during outlining, I want to use zero mouse. I don't want to use it to add new rows, to delete rows, etc. It would be awesome if it acted like a text editor with outlining helpers.

Much of the time that I use outlining is during notetaking, where speed is a pretty big factor. Maybe this is a different use of outlining that I'm not familiar with?

An example of an app (that, I should add, I love) that this app should emulate with view+edit on the same place is OmniOutliner: http://screenshots.markbao.com/7e2b04d5fb6f2721287848166a108...

So here's one way you can refactor it: http://screenshots.markbao.com/ebef2709d6f0ddde877da8339bac7...

(Side note: why the hell are they using Dreamhost to host their app? I use them for personal sites. Outages every week.)

jerf• 17 years ago

My personal project is an outliner. My personal project has been an outliner for about eight years now, on and off, and the primary reason that it has been so long is not that I've failed to carry through; it is that my entire goal is to make a "no compromises" outliner, and the open source text widgets just haven't been good enough to support it. (I could come close in some ways, but never close enough that it would ever be a joy to use; always terribly and unfixable quirks that people would have found in the first hour or even the first minute.)

I think QT is good enough now, but I haven't gotten far enough in my current iteration to be sure. But certainly the web is very likely not good enough to give a really good experience. It might be, but I doubt it. Outliners really, really, really push the text widgets, way more than you might think just looking at them. (Especially if you want to take full advantage of them.)

Numerous open source outliners exist with the "click to edit this node" model, but it's just uselessly klunky, in my opinion.

If you don't find this uselessly klunky, pop "open source outliner" into Google and you can find several others that will be quite a bit better and run locally. (I haven't got any recommendations, as I don't like any of them or I'd simply use them.)

jaxn• 17 years ago

I really like Omni Outliner for the Mac (wish there was an iPhone version).

I like having my outliner local since I often use it for meeting notes and tend to jump around quite a bit at a fast pace. Maybe a web version can be fast enough with lots of client side scripting.

bayareaguy• 17 years ago

I love outlining but I hate outliners. They all make some mistake that limits their usefulness to me. This one makes the mistake of wanting me to register before trying it out. Haven't we learned from applications like http://jottit.com that this is the wrong way to do things? Let me build my outline and then make me register if I want to keep it

misuba• 17 years ago

Outliner users seem even more finicky than other users. (I say this as one of them.)

sidsavara• 17 years ago

Tried it out, biggest complaint is that I can't do "in place" editing -

Example: As Mark Bao mentioned, have to edit to the side, rather than in place. Pressing enter to head to the box, and then hitting enter (or escape) to go back isn't bad, but it is not as ideal as if I could double click and edit in place.

Second (more irritating for me) I can't grab something and drag and drop it.

I know these are challenging technical problems (with solutions) but they do make the experience a little difficult for me.

Also, in Chrome Alt+up and alt+down shortcuts are not working for me. No idea if this is something I've changed as a setting or not. Other shortcuts appear to work fine - but why is it one button (?) to open the help and another (space) to close? I don't see space used elsewhere, perhaps just use space for both?

For exporting, I was not too pleased with how it exported to HTML. I was actually expecting a bunch of nested lists, but it gave me lots of divs and styled it as an outline via CSS. I don't know how other people feel about it, I was looking to use it to outline blog posts: so for me being able to export and then import a list of lists would have been dynamite.

LooseStitch - Free Online Outliner

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