A giant outline to compete with the keyword approach Google is so fixated on. Oh, and while we’re at it, why not build a search engine with actual context. This is an appeal to Dave and Ken to change the web. How did we get stuck with the fixed idea of linear text? How did we miss that the constraints of paper need no longer apply? I know I’m preaching to choir on this site. I yearn for the dogs breakfast of random navigation schemes dominant on the web to be replaced by outline structure. I know Fargo can do this, but it needs to be more elegant and intuitive for the average consumer. My fondest hope is that Dave Winer will get together with Ken Case of the OmniGroup and make the ultimate outliner geared toward a simple consumer friendly and beautiful means of building a website. I’d go further and banish linear text altogether. I live in outlines and find it baffling that they haven’t taken over the world. I started using outlines in ’85 with Thinktank and More. Given the lack of a vibrant outline application market, I am clearly in the minority of humans who find value in outlining, but an outline is how I think. While I’m delighted Workflowy exists, I remain concerned. It works exactly how I’d expect an outline to work, it stays out of my way, and it occasionally reminds me that by the way, there are some cool power use features you might want to check out. I’ve yet to read a single line of documentation, but I am already well into the development of a large outline for a complex ongoing project. It’s early on, but Workflowy so far hits the sweet spot in terms of simplicity, obviousness, and unexpected power user features. The demand for outline process clearly wasn’t huge since both ThinkTank and its Mac cousin MORE died years ago and have been replaced by… what? Outline mode in Word? It’s crap. I was organizing things is list and sub-lists for years before I stumbled on ThinkTank and discovered there was actual software for what I was doing in text files. My outlining predilection might be genetic. A quick scan of my Sent folder reveals extensive uses of bulleted and numeric lists. If I’m writing in a Field Notes, I’m organizing the page with headers and details. If I’m building a Keynote presentation, I’m indenting slides. This simple organization mechanism… calms me down. You can layer all sorts of delicious visuals, features, and meta-data on top of these items, but the mental mode is the same: I have this item and if it happens to have sub-items, it means that the item and the sub-item are somehow usefully related. The only difference between an item and a sub-item is that a sub-item has a parent item. An item is defined as some amount of text that may also have one or more sub-items. Yeah, I recently gave Atwood’s three things concept a try and it did shine a clear light on the three things, but – fact – there are more than three big things to tackle each day.Īs data structures go, a text outline is simple. However, stuff has recently started falling through the cracks it’s not clear what belongs in Asana versus Field Notes versus my brain. This is an inefficient system that until recently has been creating just enough value to quiet the productivity rage. I remain in a troubling post-Things world where I’m using a bizarre combination of Asana, Field Notes, and my brain to keep track of the world. There’s tool in the domain of explanation and organization which I’m not certain is the domain of engineers, but serves the same purpose: outlines. I find this often a better means of explanation than sitting down how the code is organized and how it works. You can walk up to the white-board and clearly visually describe the part of the system that needs explanation. Sometimes… branches or decisions occur.Ī key aspect of a flow chart is that fact it is visual. When certain conditions exist, you can move to another state. This isn’t exactly correct – engineers think in code, but most of the planet does not, but, chances are, they understand the concept of a flowchart. One of the key tenets I talk about regarding understanding the engineering mindset is that software engineers think in terms of flow charts.
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