OmniOutliner 3 Pro

Zack Stern — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:05:00 -0500

We’re constantly collecting scraps of information: recipes, website addresses, notes for a meeting next week, or a list of music to buy. OmniOutliner store these bits, but it’s especially useful in organizing them for further action. It quickly turns out to-do lists, writing outlines, and other guides. The results are valuable enough to justify adding OmniOutliner to your Applications folder even though much of its functionality is redundant with any text editor.

However, since it’s so focused on notes and outlines, OmniOutliner is much more streamlined than a full-fledged text editor. We instantly figured out the bulk of its basic functionality: You press Return, Tab, and Shift-Tab to create new items, indent child items, and un-indent. Depending on your customized settings and templates, outlines can be organized with checkboxes, a number or letter scheme, and disclosure triangles to show and hide nested items.

A floating window interface lets you scale back to a single pane, if desired, for focus and clarity.

These personal settings apply in a broader sense too. Fonts and styles can be changed manually, but we most liked dragging options from the palette area onto outlines. We used the feature to highlight important areas that need further action. Outlines can also include columns. If you make a grocery list, for example, you could use a column to identify which store carries specialty items.

You can add notes to any item, showing them in-line or as footers. We used this function to make annotations for later follow-up, but you could use the space to write text for your final project.

OmniOutliner’s other power comes from its sorting ability. You can use your custom columns to group and show information. If parts of an outline are cluttering your view, you can hide everything except the current section. A menu instantly jumps between sections of an outline—great for long lists. And it’s easy to drag items around to fine-tune outlines.

OmniOutliner’s potentially killer feature, Clippings, relies on compatibility with other software via OS X’s Services. Ideally, you can instantly send highlighted items from another app into OmniOutliner. Unfortunately, compatibility is spotty. Apple software, such as Mail, Pages, Safari, and even iTunes work, but mainstays like Firefox and Word don’t have the needed tie-ins.

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OmniOutliner 3 Pro