A typically erudite post on great software by James Fallows linked to my old page on GrandView, MORE and other lost software gems.
James referenced a host of interesting modern software. Of the list he gave I can personally vouch for the very affordable OmniOutliner (which most closely resembles GrandView) and the terribly expensive MindManager. I'd also add Inspiration, which he omitted. Inspiration is still around, though it's now marketed only to schools and no longer actively developed.
There are several other OS X apps in this domain; Matt Neuburg used to write on this topic and Ted Goranson wrote "About this Particular Outliner" from 2003 to 2008 starting with a must-read history column. (Yes, one day there will be historians of software, who will write doctoral theses about the role of MORE 3.1.)
Today James points us to an excellent Oct 2009 essay on GrandView.
There are so many fine designs in these old products. Perhaps we need software archeologists to resurrect them for modern reuse. If you know of old copies, don't toss them out. Get them onto a hard drive. There will always be emulators to run them.
--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)
I grew up using GrandView, and it molded the way I thought about writing and organizing information. In 1998, I started using Emacs, and sometime in 2007 (I think!), after more than 15 years without GrandView, I finally found a replacement: Org-Mode, an outliner-on-steroids written for Emacs. It is Free, included with Emacs (also Free, naturally) and works wonderfully on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I use it everyday.
ReplyDeleteI thought it may be worth mentioning, since the community that loves outliners so much misses the old days. I'm sure you'd like Org-Mode. http://orgmode.org