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Love WorkFlowy, hate web apps.. What to do?

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tranglos:
I've just found the almost-perfect outliner: WorkFlowy. You really have to start working with it to appreciate how smooth and intuitive it is, but this requires creating an account and all that, so here are some screenshots:

Basic view of an outline:
Love WorkFlowy, hate web apps.. What to do?

Search results:
Love WorkFlowy, hate web apps.. What to do?

Isn't it just awesome? Doesn't get much better than that.

But, I'm not going to entrust my data to a service that may drop off the face of the web tomorrow for all I know, and despite how smooth and nice it is to write in it, using a browser is never going to be as convenient as a dedicated desktop app. Unfortunately, there seems to be nothing nearly as good on the desktop side:

Ecco: dead, and all the other features just get in the way

InfoQube: probably too big for what I need, and unfortunately doesn't seem usable just yet. (Open the sample file, then try resizing the panes: IQ starts to "reflow" the text and never seems to finish, have to kill the process every time.)

ToDoPaper: not bad at all, but the outline is nowhere near as neat as in WorkFlowy, the app is buggy and might be dead (version 2.0 announced in February, still not released). But really - not bad at all, I just can't commit to it as it is now.

Main screen:

Love WorkFlowy, hate web apps.. What to do?

Search results:

Love WorkFlowy, hate web apps.. What to do?


TreeSheets: not really an outliner, extremely odd, can't figure it out, probably doesn't even belong in this list. Have you tried scrolling in it with the mouse wheel?

SainOutliner: Not bad at first sight, but really rudimentary, missing too many features. Can't even change the font size. Typical old Ctrl+F search dialog box, with no "repeat find" (usually F3) feature. No filtering, no highlighting. When you enter a longer paragraph of text, the item area does not resize, so you end up typing in a very long single-line edit box. The area only expands to fit multiple lines when you finish editing. Showstopper: can't select text in multiple items, only within a single item. Read: not really usable just yet, and it's hard to see if it's going to get any of the features it's missing. (Does have a good idea for automatic numbering of items though):

Love WorkFlowy, hate web apps.. What to do?

UV Outliner: Another nice idea that never quite got finished. Buggy. Crashes if you leave an item empty, then click it. Little annoyances like when you type at the bottom of the window, some bottom pixels get obscured (truncated) below the window border. Lots of missing features. Worst search ever, with no "repeat find", and sometimes when you jump to a match, pressing Enter deletes the text you've just found. Same showstopper as in Sain: can't select multiple items.  In the "attention to detail" department, this one really needs work. Rare strong point: can create custom columns (but they're just text):

Love WorkFlowy, hate web apps.. What to do?

Noteliner: Interesting! Kind of drab and certainly quirky, but has full rich text ability, search with filtering and highlighting, can even add tables inside the outline, can create additional columns... Well, it does crash when you create a new empty file and hover the mouse over the "Note" menu :) But when I said it was quirky, it's really quirky! Can't seem to set the default font, can't find out how to expand/collapse items using the keyboard, plus lots of weirdness. For example, Under a menu called "Page" click "To do". It highlights the current item and all its siblings in yellow - what does it mean? Is it configurable? Who knows... The whole app feels strange like that, like it has tons of small little features but misses major ones. Anyway, this is what it looks like:

Main window:

Love WorkFlowy, hate web apps.. What to do?

Search:

Love WorkFlowy, hate web apps.. What to do?


OK, so it looks like I'm posting another of my scathing micro-reviews. So let me add what I think a single-pane outliner should have:

Required

- Ability to hold more than 1 line of text in an item. Few desktop apps can do that, and almost none does it well. Even MLO can't, and when you're limited to one-liners, you can't really type what you're thinking. Adding notes in a separate pane is not a substitute, since you have to constantly jump between the outline and the notes pane, which kills your flow!
- Fast instant search with filtering, just like WorkFlowy! No Ctrl+F and show a dialog box, that's so 1990s!
- Virtual views, where items are filtered based on user criteria (and shown as a flat list). MLO does that.
- Keyboard shortcuts to edit/rearrange the outline structure
- Some form of appending additional, unobtrusive notes to items.

Nice-to-have

- Desktop app!
- Ability to add some formatting to items (make bold, make larger, change color)
- Same as above, but automated: define styles and have them automatically applied depending on the nesting level
- Checkboxes!
- Metadata: timestamps for items (date created, date modified), importance level, etc.
- Ideally, user-defined columns for items (but with the possibility of hiding the columns and only showing the outline).
- Rich text inside items
- Since tree hierarchy is very rigid, it'd be nice to be able to "associate" items with each other somehow. Especially if you need to refer to one item in another. If the list is bulleted, you cannot do that at all. If the list were numbered, and I typed here: "see item 17.3.b", the number could easily become invalid as you add/delete items in the list. So instead, some clickable method of saying "See item Foo" is necessary.
- Easy switching between bulleted and numbered list, with various numbering styles (1, 2, 3; I, II, III, i, ii, iii, a, b, c etc.)

WorkFLowy on the desktop, can anyone do that? I'd pay all kinds of money.

wraith808:
I love workflowy, and use it all the time.  I suppose I could be cynical about the cloud aspect, but even that has its advantages.

tranglos:
WorkFlowy really is great, though I'd love to see some styling options - sometimes I want a part of the outline to stare me in the face.

If my coding skills were up to par, I'd do the same on the desktop, but this is way out of my league. There are no Delphi components that even come close, and tree-based controls are not cutting it for various reasons, I've tried. On the other hand, a text editor (with or without rich formatting) is no good either, because it doesn't have  the concept of "items" as integral elements. You can select and drag a piece of text, for example, but not a whole item, and certainly not including its child nodes. And I just don't know enough to do it all myself from scratch.

The funny thing is, I had never felt a particular need for a single-pane outliner until just recently. As part of a group I volunteer for, I organize and moderate public debate panels. I prepare for these meetings extensively, and there's nothing better than a single-pane outliner to sketch the general concepts and drill down to specific facts I want to include and establish the order in which to present them. I guess I could do it in Word too, but that'd be so boring ;)

rgdot:
Have no idea if it is authentic, etc. but a comment left on
http://www.tanner-smith.com/2010/11/08/workflowy-reinventing-the-outline/

by Jesse Patel of workflowy says

Yeah, we’re planning on offer offline access and eventually a desktop app.
--- End quote ---

dated last November

Armando:

InfoQube: probably too big for what I need, and unfortunately doesn't seem usable just yet. (Open the sample file, then try resizing the panes: IQ starts to "reflow" the text and never seems to finish, have to kill the process every time.)

-tranglos (November 04, 2011, 05:09 PM)
--- End quote ---

Hi tranglos,

What IQ version are you using ? There was a compatibility problem with IE 9 and some of the components IQ uses. The last build solves that problem AFAIK.
Otherwise, I really don't see what could be the problem as I've never seen anyone complain about that in the forums -- apart from the IE9 compatibility problem.

IQ might not be what you're looking for anyway, but I'm curious about what caused that problem.


For your information:

Required

- Ability to hold more than 1 line of text in an item : YES
- Fast instant search with filtering, just like WorkFlowy : KINDA. There are many ways of searching in IQ, filtering the grids, etc. But the prefered way is... Ctrl-F.
- Virtual views, where items are filtered based on user criteria (and shown as a flat list): YES. This is what IQ is based on.
- Keyboard shortcuts to edit/rearrange the outline structure: YES
- Some form of appending additional, unobtrusive notes to items : YES

Nice-to-have

- Desktop app : YES
- Ability to add some formatting to items (make bold, make larger, change color) : YES
- Same as above, but automated: YES, for the most part (you can automate all kinds of formatting), but there are still features to be implemented (outline styles)
- Checkboxes : YES
- Metadata: timestamps for items (date created, date modified), importance level, etc : YES
- Ideally, user-defined columns for items (but with the possibility of hiding the columns and only showing the outline) : YES
- Rich text inside items : YES
- Since tree hierarchy is very rigid, it'd be nice to be able to "associate" items with each other somehow: YES
- Easy switching between bulleted and numbered list, with various numbering styles (1, 2, 3; I, II, III, i, ii, iii, a, b, c etc.) : NO. Not at this point. Maybe later. There are numbers and bullets but it's rudimentary.

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