As I have mentioned, my dear wife is now a full time OmniOutliner user. She started on the iPad and eventually migrated to the Mac. One major advantage of using OmniOutliner on the Mac is that you can design templates that automatically handle formatting based on context. The Omni Group provides some tutorials and some specific demos of styles but I decided to whip up a little tutorial for my wife and I am presenting it below.
As my last post revealed, I’m now thinking a bit more about a variety of use cases for outlining as a form of note-taking. One thing that I’ve discovered is that lawyer-ly folks love 'em some OmniOutliner. There’s almost a cult following around the application. Maybe that’s where everybody’s favorite Power Users got their start with Omni products.
Here are just a few links I have discovered while figuring out how a new Law student might take advantage of OmniOutliner:
My wife recently started on her 3rd degree. She has B.S. in Biochemistry and Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. She is now starting Law School. She is obviously a great student but things have changed in the, uh-hum, several years since she was in a classroom. She begrudgingly[1] asked me for advice on note-taking options for law school. It took me about three seconds to recommend OmniOutliner in both of it’s incarnations, Mac and iPad.
This will ruin me. TUAW reports that the classic Mac game Another World is coming to iOS. I loved this game when I was in college. It’s one of the few games that held my attention until the end. While the graphics don’t look that impressive, the motion capture used for the animations certainly was.
Fantastic overview from MacStories of the iCloud music service available to developers right now. There's no guarantee these features will be part of the public launch but it sounds likely.
Only Apple would leave out a little detail like music streaming from their announcement of a new music service. "One more thing…"
Ken Case schooled me about OmniOutliner for iPad so I updated my last review. At least we both agree that we can't wait for better file syncing in iOS5. Oh yeah, and he confirms that it is coming for OmniOutliner!
I tried Paprika (Mac AppStore link) awhile back on the iPad but I did not like their paid syncing solution and there was not a corresponding Mac application. Both of those issues are now gone. Syncing is free and the application is available across iPhone, iPad and Mac. It’s a lovely looking app and has some nice features like meal planning and shopping lists.
On the recent episode of the B&B Podcast, Shawn and Ben had a lengthy discussion about the optimal home computing setup. They got pretty close to what I settled on a couple of years ago. I think this post describes my ideal setup until Thunderbolt is ubiquitous. At that point a MacBook Air could instantly connect to an array of devices through one cable and replace my desktop. I would still keep the MacMini server though.
It’s been 90 days since OmniOutliner (a.k.a. OO) for iPad was released. You can find my initial impressions here. One thing about “initial impressions” posts is that they only scratch the surface of a complex app. My post was as much about my expectations as my actual usage. But I would argue that any “review” that is posted within a couple of days of the product release has the same slant.
I’m not going to weigh in on the philosophical battle going on with Android and iOS. However this is pretty surreal. A search company just bought one of the original cell phone makers for their patent portfolio. That is a future I never could have imagined.
