I could continue a thread anywhere, rather than always picking it up at the end. I could sketch out where I expected things to go, with an outline, rather than keeping all the points I wanted to hit in my head as I wrote. If I got stuck on something, I could write about how I was stuck nested underneath whatever paragraph I was currently writing, but then collapse the meta-thoughts to be invisible later -- so the overall narrative doesn’t feel interrupted.

Zettelkasten for Normies: What Normies Really Need to Know .t3_15sqiq2._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

Digital garden design can often use the gardening metaphor to focus attention on an active tending and care of one’s personal knowledge base and building toward new knowledge or creations.

It may appear that the outliner approach is narrow, but I don't think it is. I think outliners mirror what's going on in our brains, they reflect the way we organize ideas, concepts and information. I told Engelbart that our success with outliners came with people who understood the process of thinking. Everyone thinks, but only a few are aware of how they do it. This requires a higher level of awareness

Both of these products were abandoned as supported commercial products when the outlining paradigm was incorporated into other products, notably word processors, presentation applications, and personal information managers.

Outlining is bred in the blood of Mac users. The Finder has an outliner. Nearly every mail client employs an outliner, as do many word processors and Web development tools.

Folding This is the one function whose name is confusing because many products use the term for what we called “collapsing” above. For this article, collapsing is the process of making whole headers and paragraphs invisible, tucking them up under a “parent.” Folding is a different kind of tucking under; it works on paragraphs and blocks to reduce them to a single line, hiding the rest. A simple case of folding might involve a long paragraph that is reduced to just the first line—plus some indication that it is folded; this shows that a paragraph is there and something about its content without showing the whole thing. Folding is most common in single-pane outline displays, and a common use is to fold everything so that every header and paragraph is reduced to a single line. This can show the overall structure of a huge document, including paragraph leaves in a single view. You can use folding and collapsing independently. At one time, folding was one of the basics of text editors, but it has faded somewhat. Now only about half of the full-featured editors employ folding. One of the most interesting of these is jEdit. It has a very strong implementation of folding, so strong in fact it subsumes outlining. Though intended as a full editor, it can easily be used as an outliner front end to TeX-based systems. jEdit is shown in the example screenshot in both modes. The view on the right shows an outline folded like MORE and NoteBook do it, where the folds correspond to the outline structure. But see on the left we have shifted to “explicit folding” mode where blocks are marked with triple brackets. Then these entire blocks can be folded independent of the outline. Alas, folding is one area where the Mac is weak, but NoteBook has an implementation that is handy. It is like MORE’s was, and is bound to the outline structure, meaning you can only fold headers, not arbitrary blocks. But it has a nice touch: just entering a folded header temporarily expands it.

Among its many other features, Ecco Pro installed an icon (the "Shooter") into other programs so that you can add text highlighted in the other program to your Ecco Pro outline. And better yet, the information stored in Ecco Pro could be synchronized with the then nearly ubiquitous PalmPilot hardware PIMs.

The demise of Ecco Pro was blamed by many (including the publishers of Ecco Pro themselves) on Microsoft's decision to bundle Outlook with Office at no extra charge. And while that was undoubtedly part of the problem, Ecco Pro also failed by marketing itself as merely a fancy PIM to lawyers and others then lacking technological sophistication sufficient to permit them to appreciate that the value and functionality of the product went so far beyond that of supposedly "free" Outlook that the two might as well have originated on different planets.

Those were a few of the problems that could have brought down Ecco Pro. In the end, however, it was one massive problem: There was a company down the street that was developing a product that would make Ecco Pro obsolete. Microsoft would release Office ’97 on November 19th, 1996. Among the many components of the new suite of products was a personal information manager called Outlook. Eight months later, NetManage would release its last update of Ecco Pro, version 4.01. Development of the software effectively ceased after that.

One fundamental issue with Ecco Pro I gleaned from the many phone calls I answered from customers was that people didn’t really know who the product was for. Sales people wanted to use it as a contact manager. Small business owners wanted to use it as a database. Home users wanted to use it to make to-do lists and track appointments. The problem was that it tried to be all those things at once. As a consequence, it did none of them very well. The product was bloated with features and extremely difficult to use. Even seasoned users did not understand its advanced functionality very well. After a year and a half as a phone rep, I still couldn’t offer a good explanation as to who the product was for.

upcoming versions of Skwyrul and Jot+ may be my new loves.