If there ever comes a time when proper applications can be written for the iPhone — this is the first one I’d like to see. I don’t know the first thing about writing software; I’m just throwing this out there into the ether…
After tapping the Outliner icon on the home screen, you will be taken to the Outliner overview. Here you will see the first line of each entry; tapping on a line will cause the entry to slide into view from the right.
The entries are pure text. The first line of the text is the header of the entry — that appears in the overview, so an entry could be a large body of text with a descriptive first line — or just a few words, to be used as part of a list of bullet points to be dragged and re-arranged when in the overview screen; as in a checklist, or shopping list, or ideas list.
To make it easier to scroll through the text of a long entry one page at a time, a simple tap on the lower half of the displayed text will advance the entry one page. A single tap to the top half will take you back one page.
To edit the text of an existing entry, first tap the edit button, then tap where on the entry you want the insertion point.
Whenever you go back to the overview, or return to the home screen, Outliner will remember your position within the current entry.
Back in the overview, you can drag the headers up and down to re-arrange them. You can also nest headers within other headers; by holding, say, Get toothpaste over When shopping, a space will be made below When Shopping where you can drop the entry. Get toothpaste is now a child of When shopping, and a triangle now appears to the left of When Shopping. Tapping the triangle causes the new outline to collapse or expand.
Tapping on When shopping will reveal the When shopping entry on its own — tapping on the symbol to the right of the entry will reveal When shopping together with its child entries.
When you are typing within a entry, you can create a new entry, simply by starting the next line with a space. Press Return, then a space to start your new entry; pressing space twice will cause the new entry to be a child of the current entry.
Entries are synchronized between your iPhone and your Mac every time you charge the phone. Applications and context menus on the Mac have the option to Export as an Entry; placing a new entry in the Outliner Folder that syncs with the phone.
Opening the Outliner Folder on the Mac reveals an interface similar to that on the phone, for re-arranging and editing the entries. You could select the text from several sequential web pages and export them as entries, those entries can be found within the Outliner Folder, selected and combined into a single entry for reading.
Using Outliner:
You could simply use it as somewhere to jot down ideas and reminders, creating new one-line entries, then jumping back to the overview to re-arrange them or nest them within other entries, making those other entries into categories. It would be useful just for that.
You could use it to write a blog entry or an article. Write a header, then Return andSpace for each new paragraph; jump back to overview to re-arange or delete paragraphs before publishing.
You could take massive text files on your Mac and add spaces to the start of new paragraphs to create new sections and sub-sections — dropping the modified file into the Outliner Folder for export as a nested collection to the iPhone.
As described above, this app could be eminently useful — obvious and straight-forward, while at the same time adaptable to your imagination. For those who want more, an advanced version might enable the following features:
- A button to turn the text of an entry into an email message
- An Urgent button to color an entry header red, along with a way to filter the Overview to show only theUrgent items
- A Set Reminder button to set a due date and time when an alarm would sound and the Outliner icon in the Home screen would show the number of due entries
