That John Martin

I listened to Dave’s latest Morning Coffee Notes yesterday and in it he asked for feedback about the new outliner that he’s building, particularly as it relates to productivity applications and ideation. So here goes…

I’ve been using ActionOutline for a few months now, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with it. It’s the first time I’ve used an outliner, so I don’t have a lot to compare against, but it certainly does as advertised and mostly satisfies my current needs. Having said that though, the longer I use it the more things I find it useful for. Initially it was just for managing todo lists, but since then I’ve started doing a whole lot more, like outlining documents that I have to write, planning out software development, even creating presentations. In fact, I outlined this post on the subway this morning:

So all of a sudden, outliners are an interesting tool for me. Definitely worth of some discussion.

Before I start though, a bit of a disclaimer: I really don’t know the world of outliners. I played with a few for several days before I settled on ActionOutline, and that’s really the extent of my experience. Chances are good that what I am saying has already been implemented or thought about in one form or another or is just a crappy idea to begin with. This is really just a bunch of loosely connected thoughts on outliners.

Basic Requirements

Like I mentioned before, when I bought Action, I bought it to manage todo items which I had previously managed using tasks within Outlook. Despite the excellent integration to the rest of the application, Outlook tasks just didn’t work for me. It always felt heavy and more often than not I seemed to fall back to bullet lists in plain text files. Action works really well in this space. It’s lightweight, and it sits quietly in the tray waiting to jump out at the touch of a keystroke. Once it appears, you can do most of the things that you want to do with the keyboard alone, right up to the point where it saves your changes and creeps back into the tray. Perfect for jotting something down while maintaining flow. So, here is the initial requirement for the outliner:

Requirement 1: The outliner must be lightweight, agile and keyboard friendly.

Now, I find that it’s quite common for people to be looking over my shoulder to discuss something that I have in the outliner. This falls more on the ideation side of things. Action is a little weak here as it’s awkward to temporarily magnify the display. When the same thing happens with a web page (using Firefox) I can simply bash Ctrl-+ a few times to jack up the font size. But that leads me to a more general point about the user interface, which is that I think with an outliner there is the opportunity to be a lot more fluid, and so:

Requirement 2: The user interface of the outliner must be adaptable to a range of different use cases.

At it’s core, Action is built around the Win32 tree control (or something very close to it), which is good - I always prefer to use native controls where possible - but it ends up feeling a little finicky and gets bogged down with bullet and expander icons. The text to graphic ratio just seems a little off to me.

So I think a lot of thought needs to go into the compositing engine. It probably boils down to two different types of editing interfaces: a quick and lean jotting interface for when your attention is focused on another application, and a more cruisy and collaboration friendly interface for when your attention is focused on the outliner itself. If only we could rig some sort of 37signals and OS X Interaction Engineer mashup…

Changing gears for a bit, I always get the feeling, and it’s a little unfair in the case of Action, that stuff in the outliner lives in its own world. I almost never paste stuff into it or copy stuff out of it. Action actually does a reasonable job of this. You can select a node, hit Ctrl-C, paste it into a text document and the result is a tab-indented plain text list. Plus you can take the same format and go in the other direction. It also supports export to RDF and a basic HTML format. I think it needs to go further though. Integration with mainstream productivity apps is in an outliner’s best interest.

Requirement 3: The outliner must do it’s best to speak the language of other applications.

This basically means that it is able to parse a wide range of inputs (like HTML, Word and PowerPoint) into a sensible native outline, and also turn native outlines into the sensible equivalent for a wide range of outputs (like HTML, Word and PowerPoint). And this, more than anything else in the application, lends itself to requirement four:

Requirement 4: The outliner must be extensible.

This is a no-brainer. The OPML based core of Dave’s outliner probably means that a lot of the format translation that goes on could be XSLT based. Below that, I’d imagine, would be some sort of scripting interface. I don’t know whether this would be UserTalk powered or whether you’d throw a Python runtime in there, but either way you’d end up with extensions to the outliner that are easily created and cross-platform (assuming that one day the outliner itself will be ported). And then at an even deeper level there would likely be an API (native to the language/runtime that the outliner is built with) that exposes some interesting core pieces, like the interface and utilities for compositing engine widgets. This would allow somebody to put together, for example, a specialized node for podcasters that keeps time directly within their show notes as they are recording. So they could jot down their outline beforehand, then hit start on the root node, and hit a little button on each subsequent node to pass the timing down through the outline. A cruddy example maybe, but you get the idea.

At the end of the day, the outliner is a platform that provides hierarchy and structure plumbing, plus a nifty compositing engine, plus a bunch of file system and network services.

Random Features and Open Questions

I have a bunch of other stuff that isn’t nearly as well thought out as the four requirements above but is probably good fodder for discussion:

• Hyperlinks seem like a good idea, either for linking between nodes in the same document or separate documents altogether.
• Views of other outlineable things within an outline might be interesting. So if I could point the outliner (or just a node within an outline) at a directory on the file system, or at a del.icio.us tag, or a mailbox, then I could browse that thing inline. This would be neat for a Getting Things Done tool where you could aggregate the tasks that you have from several different locations.
• How does the hierarchy in an outline relate to del.icio.us/Flickr style tags? Can the concepts live together? Does one fall out of the other? Could the outliner become a part of the tagging ecosystem?
• While we’re at it, how does an outliner stack up against something like OneNote?
• Annotations would be nice. Which lends to…
• Sharing and Persistence. I would kill to have my outlines persisted into the cloud. And once there sharing is the obvious next step.
• Is persistence a possible business model? Could you give away the software and make a quid by selling premium services?

And that’s pretty much all I have right now. I think this could be an interesting discussion. It’s always fun to see what Dave has up his sleeve.

Tags: outliner, davewiner

I can understand why airports or large public places would have pay-per-use wifi (even though I think the good PR that they would get out of making it free would more than justify the expense); they’re not really trying to “sell” anything. Bookstores, restaurants, and cafeterias though are another thing altogether.

Up in Canada we don’t have (at least as far as I know) the Starbucks/McDonalds free wifi situation. Typically, the best that you’ll get while sipping coffee or eating is the opportunity to use a paid service. This seems to me like a perfect opportunity to make use of permission marketing. Simply create some sort of user/customer club, or use the one that probably already exists, and then authenticate against that when people try to access the wifi. So it’s free, with registration. You end up with a bunch information about customers, plus the ability to market to them, all for the price of a router and some bandwidth. Not to mention happy customers.

Tags: permissionmarketing, sethgodin

I was pleasantly surprised last week when Joshua Schachter took funding for del.icio.us. Even more so because Fred Wilson, who sits on our board of directors, was part of the investment group. I can’t wait to see what comes out of it. Even if the business model is not yet clear, as Fred points out in a really honest and interesting post, del.icio.us has great momentum and community around a solid, simple idea.

I’ve been playing with del.icio.us for several months now, and while I appreciate the emergent potential of it, there are two really important (to me) pieces that aren’t yet in place: user interface and link privacy.

The direction that the user interface has to go is fairly obvious, and I think the funding will provide for that. In general, access to bookmarks needs to be quicker and easier. On the web, this means AJAX powered A9/Google type features; auto-complete, inline filtering, etc. On the client, this means browser toolbars and extensions. I know there are lots and lots of little projects under way in this area, but I am yet to find something that is truly useful. This is doing nothing for me:

Apart from the user interface, I think link privacy is important. This might be peculiar to me, but I have two types of links:

1. Utility Links - This is stuff that I use all of the time, mostly online services (search engines, online banking, shopping, etc) and internal company links (development servers, intranet pages, bug trackers, etc).
2. General Links - This is stuff that I don’t regularly visit, but is worth saving a link to. Everything from the Sushi Eating Howto to Dipamo’s BBQ in Toronto. This is the long tail.

The first type of links, utility links, are of no use to del.icio.us, it’s the second type, general links, that del.icio.us is built on. My problem though is that there is a subset of the second type that I don’t want to share, at least not without some degree of control. Maybe I’m embarrassed and I don’t want people to know that I link to several beginner C++ pages, or maybe I’m about to release a new product and don’t want to give anything away by posting the dozen links that I have to reviews of similar offerings. Either way, I need the ability to selectively share.

So the two types of links can be extended to three; two private, and one public:

1. Private Utility Links
2. Private General Links
3. Public General Links

Right now, del.icio.us is pretty good at the third. With a bit of user interface pixie dust it will be really good. The second simply requires a public/private flag. Extra points for group based sharing. The first also requires the public/private flag, but more importantly, it requires either a way of distinguishing those links from other links for purposes of making them easier to access, or a user interface for accessing links that is so slick that it’s not required. Most likely a combination of the two.

Anyway, I’m switching over to del.icio.us lock, stock. We’ll see how it goes. I think these guys are going to do good things.

Tags: delicious, folksonomy, tagging

What a brilliant idea, rendering the XML source comments inline within the editor. JetBrains has done so much good for the lives of developers over the past few years.

I went out and bought a copy of TopDesk, an Expose clone for Windows, right after Scott Hanselman pointed to it last week. It’s very cool, and very useful for impressing coworkers looking over your shoulder. It seems to have a bug that’s causing it to crash on a resume from standby, but there might be a fix on the way by the looks of things. For $9.95, definitely recommended.

Looks like everybody is talking about eBay after the MarketWatch piece citing the nine month traffic decline reported by comScore.

I’ve always wondered about the thinking behind the eBay user interface. Obviously (I hope), it’s built around a rummage sale metaphor, and I can certainly understand the value in that, given their core audience. I get the feeling, though, that the inconsistencies of the interface, coupled with the burden of the enormous number of features that eBay provides/requires, alienates casual and new users (like myself).

On the flip side is Amazon with their new product page design. Amazon has always had a lot of vertical on their page, and so instead of trying to avoid it, it seems that they have embraced it and improved the usability with better section delineation, more consistent typography, and full use of page width. I like it.

And I’m pretty excited about it. I can’t wait to see Dave’s keynote. Btw, I don’t think anybody has summed up Dave better than Don Park in his Dear Mr. Picky post.

Now, to book some flights and accommodation…

Last week I sold my old laptop on eBay. It was an 18 month old Inspiron 8500 with one of those big 1920×1200 resolution screens. I loved the thing, but it was just too big and heavy for me to drag around everywhere, so I have downsized to the company sponsored D600, which I’m really happy with so far.

Anyway, this was my first eBay experience, and I have to say I was really surprised at how difficult and intimidating it was. Between PayPal and return policies and off-eBay propositions its an intense seven days this is not your fathers online marketplace. The low point was definitely PayPal, which in general I like, but as a first time seller you are forced into “enhancing” your account to either Premier or a Business status in order to accept the payment made to you. And this is done after PayPal has received payment, so your cash is practically held in ransom. It’s not like it costs anything to do it, it just smells bad, like you’ve been tricked into it. Those fees seem pretty high too (it’s extra for non US transactions).

Having said that though, I got more money than I expected and the transaction went through more or less without a hitch. I just wonder whether there isn’t a model for a happy medium between craigslist and eBay. Something that is not quite as geeky and minimalistic as craigslist but not as gamey and involved as eBay.

I am a big A9 fan. Huge. Before A9, search for me was all about the Google toolbar, but when I realized that A9 had persistent bookmarks and browsing history that are accessible not only from the toolbar but also through a web interface, I was sold. Since then, with the introduction of OpenSearch and UI updates, things have only improved.

One thing that bugs me though is that there is no way to choose the type of search that you want to do (or in A9-speak, the columns you want to use) before getting to the results page. So, if I am after a dictionary definition, unless I keep the relevant column permanently open on my results page, I have to do the search, and then toggle the column. Instead, it would be great if I could either select my search type from a drop-down menu that was dynamically populated with my active columns, or, even better, if I could use a text command prefix within the search box itself e.g. “ref pedantic” for an Answers.com reference search, or “amazon purple cow” for an Amazon search.

Just a thought…

Ok, I’m going to try this blogging thing again. A little bit about myself…

I’m a Software Architect for comScore Networks up here in (the currently soggy) Toronto. We provide a bunch of services around measuring and understanding consumer behaviour and attitudes, particularly as it pertains to the online world. We’re probably most famous for our Media Metrix service, which gets quoted in the press every other day and then some. My team is focused on survey and reporting technology and the toolset that falls around that, so I spend most of my days either inside of Visual Studio or in front of a whiteboard.

Outside of comScore there are a bunch of little projects that I bang away at when I get the chance, some of which I’ll probably write about at some point.

For now, we’ll just shake the keyboard from time to time and see what comes out.