Circus Ponies NoteBook for iPad - Take Great Notes. Hmm, Circus Ponies NoteBook is one of the most powerful notebooks (with built-in outliner) on the Mac - but the reviews for the iPad version are not so great. And there is no decent sync - I really wonder why productivity app manufacturers don't just initially integrate the Dropbox library, because without usable sync, the apps are not really usable.
outliner
OmniOutliner for iPad. Wow! Why didn't I notice? There's now an OmniOutliner for the iPad! OmniOutliner is my preferred outliner on the Mac, among other things because it can be configured in many ways very similar to the Frontier Outliner (especially splitting a point with a simple Enter is something that surprisingly is not supported directly by many outliners - but essential for me when I want to write texts in the outliner). Unfortunately, only cumbersome iDisk import/export instead of a usable Dropbox sync.
Tinderbox: Tinderbox 3.5 - many features sound interesting, but somehow this will be the Emacs of the outliner ...
newsRiver - Aggregator for the OPML Editor
Dave Winer released newsRiver.root - his aggregator for the OPML Editor. And what happened again - as so often with him? The character set support is complete garbage. The thing can only correctly read feeds with iso-8859-1, utf-8 feeds get broken special characters. I would really be interested to know if he will ever understand the purpose of character sets like utf-8, or if he will ever give his software a proper basis to support more than just the system character set.
Apart from that, his OPML Editor still forces me to start MSIE - sorry, but that is really ridiculous. And of course there is no easy place to change that - presumably I can change it if I change a setting somewhere in the depths of the Frontier database, which will then possibly be overwritten by the next update ...
And after some searching I found it: in opml.root you have to look for system.verbs.builtins.webBrowser and change the two scripts getDefaultBrowser and launch. In getDefaultBrowser the default is set to MSIE for Carbon, which must be changed to sfri. And in launch you have to add sfri as a valid selection. And yes, the next update in the region will flatten that again ...
Dave's new OPML editor with blog
I'm currently playing around with Dave Winer's OPML Editor, which he now uses for his blog. It looks quite fun and has a lot of features. My OPML Blog has collected some of the insights I've gained from it. I certainly won't switch over just like that - that would be Quark, which is not necessarily my target software. But it's fun to play with something completely different again.
Unfortunately, the OPML Editor has inherited some of the ailments of Radio Userland and Frontier, especially the handling of umlauts is not really smooth (I would like to have consistent UTF-8 support finally) and the runtime behavior is better than in Radio, but it still occasionally consumes too much CPU.
The concept of rendered outlines does have a certain charm. However, many parts of the rendering are not really accessible to normal users - you can edit the ancient table layout and make something else out of it, but the OPMLs are implemented with the internal OPML renderer and the HTML fragments are not so easy to change - and thus, for example, changing the language is quite cumbersome, as is the complete removal of layout tables.
More will certainly appear on the OPML blog from time to time, here I will write at most a few conclusions.
Leo's Home Page - Outliner in Python mit TCL/TK Oberfläche
Eastgate Tinderbox: the tool for notes - Zettelkasten in Kombination mit Agents zur Organisation von Daten