Mac cloud outliner problems free#

Notes: Attaching 'hidden' text to an individual bullet point or line keeps your outline from getting cluttered. Plus, there are a few bonus features that we kept an eye out for: These apps make it easy to drop text into a new place, whether it's via keyboard shortcuts or a drag-and-drop interface. indenting it, outdenting it, moving it to a new place) applies the same change to its children.Īutomatic styling: Having your ideas appear by default with bullets, Roman numerals, numbers, indentation levels, and so forth means you don’t need to waste an extra second inserting the format you need.Įasy rearrangement: Sure, you could rely on the cut-and-paste method to move your sections around, but that would be inefficient and frankly, annoying. Nesting: Along similar lines, these apps let you create 'parent' items, each of which can have an unlimited number of 'children' items. These apps-each in their own way-make it easy to visually distinguish outline sections. Visual hierarchy: If you can’t tell the difference between a big idea and a supporting one, an outline loses a lot of its value. These are the features we looked for when choosing apps for this roundup: And you don't need anything fancy to build one-a word processor or plain text writing app could do the job.īut first-rate outlining apps handle the organization of your plan, so you can concentrate on the ideas. They're lists of ideas and things you want to work on. Outlines are just bullet points with some extra structure. Here are 20 of the best outlining tools to help you scope out your next post, project, or speech. The best outlining tools make it easy to log your ideas, arrange your arguments, and pull everything together into a polished framework.

So if you want extra functionality, you need other programs to fill in the gaps.And although you can certainly compose them with good ol’ pen and paper, a specialized app will give you more flexibility to change and reorganize points on the fly. I don't know of anything that corresponds to the 'corkboard' functionality. If you want version control, you need another tool for that. If you want something to keep track of your sources or research, you'd need another program (like Mendeley, for instance, which does a pretty good job of acting as a database for PDFs and media).

Emacs is written to be a highly flexible text editor, and org-mode is a plug-in it's not designed to be something like Scrivener, which, as far as I can tell, bundles together all of the tools that they think writers need (and in a cool-looking way). There's not much of a GUI to speak of, beyond the toolbar at the top of the screen (and each window). The disadvantages are that the workflow tends to be designed for people who are programmers, and work in emacs. The outlines are exportable to a number of different formats. The advantages are that it's free, and highly customizable (up to a point). What I like about text-based formats is that it's easy to determine exactly what changes have been made between revisions (hell, if you want to track versions, use a version control system like Mercurial, Git, Subversion, etc.). Aquamacs comes with org-mode, which is a nice text-based format for outlining and text-folding (so you can hide various parts of your outline).

Mac cloud outliner problems free#

Aquamacs is an emacs port for OS X that's free and has a nice Mac interface you can use instead of many of the Unix-based keyboard shortcuts. I tend to write outlines using emacs and org-mode, because I do technical research that involves a lot of programming, and as a result, I live in emacs. There a posting in my blog comparing the outlining feature in both programs: Outliner in Scrivener vs Outliner in Circus Ponies Notebook - Structure (Scrivener) vs Content (CPN) Outlinesįrankly I couldn't have written my diploma, nor my PhD thesis, without it. While Scrivener is very useful for structural outlines, Circus Ponies Notebook excels at Content Outlines. This posting on my blog gives a nice overview of its functions, there's also an example linked at the end of the posting. The files in Scrivener contain more than one idea when I write which makes it difficult to shift information. While I love Scrivener, I need an outline that is more detailed, one information per cell. You can also use keywords to make sure you remember your sources, and of course, non-relevant parts can be folded in. I use it for fictional and non-fictional writing, then put my outliner next to Scrivener to write it down (CPN has the advantage of optional checkboxes for each cell, so you always know what you have already used). You can easily integrate media files as well. It uses the notebook metaphor and it has a page type that gives you an outliner. I can highly recommend Circus Ponies Notebook.