Outlining on a Page

In one sense, these outliners are an elegant implementation of tabbed windows instead of the multiple windows that typified the original Mac interface. Each “page” in the notebook is an outline, so if we are looking at core outlining competence, we need to start here.

Both of these notebooks rashly chose a shiny jellybean widget metaphor when Apple was into lickability. NoteBook uses an inflated glossy equilateral triangle. It employs a not widely used triangle convention that has “collapsed” arrows pointed right and “uncollapsed” arrows pointing down. I think this is a big mistake because headers with nothing under them at all (even text intended to be note paragraphs) have the same indicator as those that say “look below for content.” This is the same goof that the Mac Finder makes, by the way.

Fortunately, Circus Ponies has added an option to change the widgets to the ordinary grey ones we know. We’ll show those in the NoteBook screenshots that follow. There is a separate option to eliminates any arrow for a cell with no subcell. Together, these are much nicer.

NoteTaker on the other hand has taken a wholly different tack. It uses the Aqua-fied “plus-labels” we described in a previous column that originated in the command-line world and was brought to the Mac by MORE. (Scott Love worked on MORE.) No other modern outliner in the Mac world uses these plus and minus labels, but they are common in the Windows world. NoteTaker has announced their intentions to enter the Windows market, and this choice may reflect that strategy.

On the other hand, you can quickly get used to it. It has the purity of a functional logic (plus for collapsed cells, minus for uncollapsed and no character for a cell with no subcells). Also, it looks nice and consistent, at least on the outliner pages. The “section” pages are a different story, but again you can switch to the familiar Mac arrows if you wish. When doing this, NoteTaker uses a dot for a cell with no children, like OmniOutliner does. We’ll make the switch in NoteTaker in what follows. Why use Windows conventions when these Mac ones are so much better?

Already we encounter some of the larger differences between these two outliners. NoteBook has been working hard to court MORE-type users and has implemented every applicable key command and operation from that venerable outliner. Some of these are quite esoteric but very handy for power outliners. They’ve given options so that arcane but useful MORE behavior is used. For instance, NoteBook has an option such that if a cell has children and you hit Return, you enter a child at the top of the stack. These little things are great if you are deep into using your outliner as a writing tool.

Both have a more elegant drag indicator than any other outliner. As you drag the cells to their new location, an outline appears where the drop would occur with everything below moved out of the way. NoteBook goes a little further in that their drop box reflects the indented structure of the dragged cells.

Both have an elegant hoist feature, and they both use the same hoist indicator, a dash with three dots. But look how differently they are placed.

Neither notebook allows you to place cells just anywhere on the page like Curio (whose pages are not outline pages) or OneNote for Windows (whose notebook pages can contain outlines).

Neither of these supports clones, a prerequisite of a power outliner. And neither supports columns.

Outlines of Outlines

The huge advantage that both of these have over all other outliners is the outlines of outlines feature. The notebooks are set up so that they have an overall contents page of everything in the notebook. This is an outline as well. But it has some subtle differences from page outlines.

Below is a typical NoteBook contents page. (I have put a tiled image on it and changed the outline widgets to make it look nicer.) You’ll note that there are two types of headers, pages (which have page numbers) and section headers. Subsection headers are called “dividers” but they behave just like section dividers and have tabs. Section dividers have tabs and a subset of the table of contents that applies to that section.

Taking the levels further down, in either notebook you can give any page a tab.

In NoteBook, all of the important outlining commands can be used here on these meta-outlines. Way cool. There’s more: this contents outline can hold pretty much any object the page outlines can, so you can literally have a page title that is a graphic. NoteTaker only allows text in its contents outline.

Now we will see how NoteTaker handles this same problem: its solution is radically different. It doesn’t have the coolness of NoteBook’s outlining on contents pages. Instead it goes in a different, but still cool, direction. First of all, NoteTaker does not allow much of an outline on its contents pages. Only two levels are supported: pages and sections. Bummer.

But look at the screenshot below. NoteTaker squarely faces a key problem with the notebook metaphor: you can only see one page at a time. That means you can be looking at the contents outline or a page outline, but not both. NoteTaker has a drawer that displays the contents outline so that you can navigate to any page from any page. Objects in that outline can be double-clicked, but they cannot be rearranged. Shucks.

And look below in the same drawer and see yet a third level of outline—sort of! This (called the “library”) is a subset of the Finder view of available NoteTaker notebooks. Below that is a “history” list of visited pages.

This is a fabulous feature (configured by several options in the preferences). It helps with navigation. But it is pretty clumsy in appearance because it uses completely different outline widgets and commands than the default shiny plus-labels. Oh well, switch to the Mac labels to feel more comfortable.

Both NoteBook and NoteTaker take advantage of contextual menus in a great way. If you hover over a tab (usually on the right side of the notebook) and control-click, you get a list of the pages in that section—way cool navigation. The screenshot shows NoteBook’s implementation, which allows hierarchy. NoteTaker’s is similar except it doesn’t permit subdividers so just gives a flat list of pages.

So NoteTaker has three ways of page navigation (drawer, contents pages, tab contextual menu) and NoteBook has two which exploit outlines much more fully.

Now we come to my major heartbreak with both of these outliners. Outlining is about structuring and restructuring. They both have this neat idea of double outlines, but there is no way in either to go back and forth between outline levels without going around the barn. Suppose I discovered that I had a very large page; there is no way to promote a page to a section or the other way around: “demoting” a slender section to a page.

And it gets much, much worse for the outline user. Outline restructuring is primarily a matter of keyboard operations in four directions or dragging. Suppose you want to drag a group of cells from one page to another in the same notebook: you simply cannot do it. You cannot open multiple copies of the same notebook. And you cannot drag to a tab, have that tab open the desired page and then drop on that page. OmniOutliner, one of the competitors for serious outlining, can readily drag anything among “spatial” windows. This is where the idea of stacked windows as pages kicks you in the butt. Not even NoteTaker’s neat drawer can be dragged to.

No robust drag-and-drop functionality within a notebook is heartbreak city. But both of these outliners are improving at breakneck speed so perhaps this deficiency will be addressed soon (especially if you request it). NoteBook recently delivered the capability to drag items between notebooks and both allow dragging of pages and page groups.

What we need is springloaded tabs, but we haven’t got ’em. NoteBook can drag cells with siblings (but not groups of cells) to another page in the same notebook under certain conditions. The pages have to be of the same type (“section” or outline pages), the target page must have a tab, and the dropped cell goes at the bottom of the page. A workaround.

Integration of Multimedia and Web pages

We mentioned OmniOutliner, which can only handle text. Both NoteTaker and NoteBook do well with multimedia, NoteTaker on regular pages only. They can handle pretty much anything you can throw at them: nearly any image, movie, or PDF. Files can generally be embedded or referenced (in which case the file is not copied). We’ll deal with database issues surrounding multimedia below.

If you drag a media file, the content is copied into the notebook. If you Option-drag, the file contents are copied by reference like we had in OS 9’s Publish and Subscribe. This is true in both.

NoteBook allows for “media frames,” a collection of display options for media, including scaling, rotating and other attributes.

NoteTaker can do some limited scaling through a contextual menu, but otherwise lacks the options of NoteBook. Instead, NoteTaker displays a hotlink to the file, and pressing Option while over the file displays the path, something they call “x-ray.”

Presumably you can already see what is obvious to me after a few months with these programs. NoteBook sees itself as a power outliner with database and other capabilities, while NoteTaker exists as a great freeform database with outlining and other capabilities. Those “other capabilities” are similar and in some cases identical, but the basic identities of these are fundamentally different. Every design decision we see where they differ can be explained this way.

Both notebooks allow voice annotation, something apparently important in a laboratory environment. I did not explore the relative merits of the implementations.

Both notebooks are extremely friendly to Web content. URLs display as links, and clipped or dragged Web content displays in a cell precisely as it does in a browser. NoteTaker offers a few more options in this regard, but neither seems to have done what Tinderbox has: allow automatically refreshed pages and RSS content. Neither supports wiki links, like Hog Bay Notebook.

NoteTaker has however incorporated Web services in such a way that one can make a cell a browser! Clicking a link in a Web page opens that page in the cell just as if it were Safari.

Links

We’ve talked about URL links a little. What about links within the notebook and to other notebooks? NoteTaker has this well in hand. It is not as robust as Tinderbox’s many types of links—NoteTaker links are just like HTML links. But they can be two-way (very nice), and they can be from text or cell to text, cell, or page. They are designated by a badge to the left of a cell and—as with referenced Web and image content—Option-hovering reveals the source. NoteTaker links can be to other notebooks as well.

NoteBook’s links can presently be only from text to a page within the current notebook.

See the pattern of NoteBook drifting to power outliner and NoteTaker to power freeform database?

Outline Formatting

I’ve discovered that one hot button among outliner people is their appreciation for sophisticated outline formats. They want control. They want visible structure. They want options.

Both notebooks allow you to change font styles individually. How could they not? Additionally, NoteTaker has a “Favorite Styles” submenu where you can name styles and apply them to selected text, but otherwise, NoteTaker considers all cells to be the same style regardless of placement in the outline.

NoteBook goes much further, at least as far as MORE and OmniOutliner in level-specific styles. You can specify styles for outline levels so that you can—for instance—specify that Level 2 is a little smaller or less bold (or red) than Level 1. NoteBook also has quite a few more options with label style. Labels are the numbers in parentheses or letters that many outliners use.

Both allow all sorts of honking around with margins, images on background, removing the “binding,” three-punch holes and paper lines. You can color, remove, or relocate the tabs that are normally on the right. NoteBook considers its contents/section pages to be different animals so you can format those differently. I find that a great help in reminding me that the outline level has shifted.

Folding

Folding, in normal outlining usage, is the ability to collapse cells to only their first lines, independent of collapsing subcells up underneath. It is very handy when you want to get a big picture of the outline because no cell takes more than one line.

Both NoteBook and NoteTaker support the same method of folding, which is the sweetest I have ever seen. You can fold any text cell or collection or selected text cells by using a key command (Command-Esc for NoteTaker, Esc for NoteBook). They then fold to one line followed by an ellipsis.

The cool part is that once you enter a folded cell, it automatically expands it for editing. That’s an attention to detail that takes the breath away.

NoteTaker’s folding goes one better and is the only case where it beats NoteBook in the outlining area. That same key command when no cell is selected toggles what they call “multiline” mode so that all new cells are presumed to be folded.

Other Miscellaneous Outlining Stuff

NoteTaker lets you assign and change keystrokes for menu items, even the “favorite styles” you will certainly add. NoteTaker has all the outlining menu commands NoteBook does, I think, so you could emulate the MORE command set if you wish. NoteBook does not allow custom key assignments, and as I will remark later, many of its important controls are not in menus anyway, but in “inspectors.”

NoteBook has superior typographic controls, allowing for shifted baselines, ligatures, and kerning. Great, but these settings are not included in the custom styles for outline levels. Ouch!

I consider “finding” to be a basic outlining capability. NoteTaker has a minimal find/replace (find a text string, but you can search over many notebooks) while NoteBook’s “superfind” also considers assignable cell attributes (keywords, “stickers,” highlights, dates, and priorities) that will be mentioned below. The results of a “superfind” are presented as a page on the index. Results are displayed with surrounding context so you can actually understand them. Each result is hotlinked to its occurrence. Nice.

Incidentally, this “superfind” is close in effect to MORE’s much-celebrated “search, mark, and gather” feature.

NoteTaker Categories, Templates and “Summarize”

Now let’s dig into NoteTaker categories. These are not the “passive” descriptors of NoteBook. They can be; you can make up any group and category and use it just like NoteBook’s attributes, as tags. But NoteTaker also rolls its internal attributes into this list, stuff such as whether a cell is an image, link, movie or such. You cannot edit this group.

So far, NoteTaker “categories” are just like NoteBook’s collection of attributes (keywords and stickers and such) but less visually exploited on outline pages. So why am I excited? Because NoteTaker users can build “templates” with these categories.

A template is a group of cells with assigned categories and styles. Suppose you wanted to make a movie notebook and had a section where each movie had a page. You’d want some cells to be like fields in a database, with titles like: “Movie Name,” “Director,” and other text entries. But you would likely want a date cell as well, and some for images and video clips and URLs. Easy as pie to make such a template for a page.

ATPO readers may remember us enthusing about an identical capability with the long lost Arrange in our survey of legacy outliners. NoteTaker’s template cells allow you to attach style, formatting, and outline hierarchy information to template cells (as in Arrange). You can see that NoteTaker’s attention to styles is over on this database side rather than outlining.

Now remember that all categories are automatically indexed. Sweet, if you’ve set things up right.

NoteTaker has a cool feature called “highlight and summarize.” Basically it is a progressive find feature that searches for text, categories, priorities, date, and flag. You can page through found results, highlight them and/or create a “summary” which appears as an index. The result looks much like NoteBook’s “superfind,” but the underlying approach is quite different.

(Highlight in the NoteTaker context is not like NoteBook’s where you highlight a text block with different colors. Instead, you have one color that highlights the whole cell. “Highlight” and “flag” are ways of marking a cell.)

Neither NoteTaker’s nor NoteBook’s supersearch dialogs allow for patterns, Boolean searches (except in the text field), or relatives (find cells that have the priority “high” and modified one day ago or less or with the priority “medium” and modified three days ago or less).

User Interface

Both of these notebooks have user interface quirks. Part of the problem is that they have had to reinvent stuff that other applications can take for granted. Background images don’t cover the whole background; until recently you could move NoteTaker’s title bar under the menu bar with disastrous consequence; NoteTaker’s setting for a new cell on “Return” was erratic over several months till now; there’s lots of similar stuff not worth listing.

But most of the quirks are because they have added a huge number of features without re-engineering their interface strategy. NoteTaker has a sparse preferences panel and has shoved all sorts of functionality into menus. Options, toggles, commands, and selections are mixed helter-skelter.

NoteBook has a completely different strategy. It is based on an “inspector” paradigm, the inspector pane openable from a logo in the lower right corner of pages. NoteBook offers many more options than NoteTaker and as a result has a rather confusing inspector layout. One goof is especially notable in an otherwise elegant application.

Remember that both companies are innovators in tabbed windows. Now look at one pane in NoteBook’s inspector, shown in the screenshot below. That row of icons at the top are essentially tabs, but rendered as rectangular buttons. The second row is another kind of tab, and rendered as another kind of button. And the third row of those two radio buttons? Yep, another tab using yet a third type of button. Think about this coming from one of the geniuses of the UI field and an expert in tabbed design. This is as ugly and jarring as NoteTaker’s odd outline widgets in their drawer. Both can do better and doubtless will.

But as ugly as it is, you can muddle your way through. I think I’d rather have that than the toolbar of NoteTaker. It breaks the notebook metaphor so boldly it discomfits. Fortunately, you can easily hide it and retrieve it only when needed. Things don’t look so bad in NoteTaker if you go with the brushed metal. Their Aqua look has no soul.

NoteBook makes its own design mistake in this department. It has a huge ruler that comes and goes where NoteTaker has its toolbar. When you hide the ruler, that huge space simply becomes blank. It doesn’t shrink to allow the user as much room as possible.

Well, growing pains I suppose.

Scriptability and Encryption

NoteTaker is moving toward AppleScriptability, which puts it in a class with only OmniOutliner and now Hog Bay Notebook. Many serious outliners are also serious scripters, and usually share what they write. NoteTaker has come a long way in this regard and deserves a special acknowledgement, though it still has a way yet to go. In fairness, it has way more stuff to access than the other two.

Also, it is still not recordable, but that’s Apple’s fault. For some reason, Cocoa’s AppleScript framework doesn’t support recording, and Apple hasn’t seen fit to fix it. Please complain to Apple, as recordability is what makes scripting available to the novice.

NoteBook allows you to encrypt pages, which is to say you can protect an outline. NoteTaker allows you to password protect (much weaker protection) a notebook, in other words, protecting that database.

To Do List Capabilities

Both notebooks have capabilities to handle to do lists. Whereas they are among the best in class in outlining and databasing, their to do management—except for their strong sorting routines—is nothing to get excited about. And since they don’t exploit the outlining paradigm in this regard, I’ll just pass on making this column needlessly longer.

I do expect them to cover this base in due time. But it’s a tough nut with heavy competition.