Radio Still the Best Outliner
For the last few weeks I have been trying out different outliners, since I wanted one that I could use on both the PC and the Pocket PC. I use an outliner for many reasons, including many of the scenarios for outliners listed here. Considering how long outliners have been around, it’s surprising how bad the choices available are. Screen glitches, lack of functionality, awkward and laborious text entry. The only one I found that was halfway usable (for my scenarios) was S’More. S’More has it’s quirks, but I spent my whole vacation working in S’More’s outliner and was getting warm to it. Then it happened. S’More crashed, and reset my file size to zero, wiping out many hours of hard work. Corrupting user data is the worst sin an application can commit. Say what you will about Radio, but in years of use I’ve never had Radio lose data in an outline file. And the UI for editing outlines provided by Radio is much cleaner and usable. I copied the Radio UI to some extent in my DHTML OPML editor, and this web outliner does an even better job. But I really want a rich UI. The drag-drop cues in Radio are really nice, and would be very difficult to duplicate in the browser; and the browser gets untolerably slow with my very large outline files. I’m tempted to write my own outliner, but judging by the results of some other open-source alternatives, I’m not convinced I could do much better.