Would you like to see cloning/aliasing in OO4?
 

Hey All-

We've been going over all the wonderful OmniOutliner feedback we've been getting and we'd like to get some more information regarding cloning/aliasing (the ability to have the same data in multiple places that all update when you change any instance of it).

We'd like to hear how you would use this feature in OmniOutliner. Details on things like what kind of data are you working with (tasks/to-do lists, writing, research, etc), and what having the clones allow you to do with your data. Basically we want to make sure we're on the same page regarding this feature should we implement it.

You can also email me this info at [URL="mailto:omnioutliner@omnigroup.com"]omnioutliner@omnigroup.com[/URL] if you would prefer instead.

Please keep this thread on topic.

Thanks!

-Derek

Hello Derek,

Thanks for your post; I look forward to getting this terrific feature!

I'm a history student from Moscow. At the moment, I'm using OmniOutliner to parse a huge pdf with a medieval text (around 1200 pages). I copy and paste chunks of text from Adobe Reader to OmniOutliner and try to classify them, trying to find an exact place in a tree of categories for each one. The truth is, however, that a fragment often should be placed under several rubrics at the same time.
I usually make lots of changes to the imported text (correct OCR errors, highlight words, add a comment to whole row, input data into columns etc.), and I would like to make these changes only once for each 'duplicated' row.

I don't know if this feature is easy to implement in terms of programming. But it is really a challenging task for a designer or a ui engineer. How would you show links to other instances of a row? Will there be arrows or buttons or whatever? Shall you probably introduce an alternative flat asset-based view with an ability to label topics with a drop-down structured list of labels extracted from the outline? I know that your company is one that is able to solve such problems in an elegant way.

This feature can really advance my research. I can't wait to get it.

Michael

PS: I'm currently exploring AppleScript to automate the clipping process. If you make those 'clones' accessible through the AppleScript object model, that will be beyond my expectations! In any case, I'll follow this topic and I'm ready to beta-test etc.

i would find this kind of aliasing/cloning extremely useful. As a teacher I have to plan whole course programs, and OO Pro is a great tool for this. If cloning were possible i could - for example - have repeating features for different lessons simply cloned, so that various items could be a kind of mini template within the document - saving lots of work

Would it be possible to make clones between documents? I have documents for each area of my life (where there are projects, goals etc). I would _really_ like to be able to have one file that shows all my projects/goals from all areas, and that update in both places / files. This might be tricky?

The reason I don't want to have all of it in the same time is just the sheer size of it. An area-file contains much more than just the projects, and it would be clumsy to navigate and hoist/unhoist through all this as it is now. I've given it a considerable amount of thought, and I landed on the conclusion that seperate files was the only way to go. Still, I miss the opportunity to show all projects/goals in one place when reviewing etc.

Here's one way that I would love to implement cloning. I sometimes have a general context in which a header with a number of subheads might appear - for example a specific punch list for a type of project or subproject. When I set up instances of that (let's say things to pack for a business trip) I would simply have that headline with its subs in each trip that I'm planning. If, when I am going down it, I remember something else that should come with me at all times, I can change it in one place in the outline and have the changes appear in each trip's agenda.
Same thing if I'm using OO to run projects in my work or in my personal life. A lot of what i do is iterations of a general plan and I get learning from the feedback that ought to affect the general and all of its other iterations.

Best,

Stephen

Hey Derek,

Cloning would be a great idea. I am a medical student and use outliner to take lecture notes (1 file/lecture). I also have a master file where I link into it the PDF of the lecture presentation and also a link to the oo3 file that pertains to the lecture. I also have another file where I keep key info about diseases and treatments under sections (e.g. cardiology) - it would be great if that info updates automatically in that section from say another file or even lecture content.

Keep up the great work - OmniOutliner is an excellent tool for students to take notes on during class - no other software like it!

Cloning is, like, so 2006. We need smart folders.

I'm a law student and in documents I have to refer to the same cases over and over again, it would be very sweet to be able to make some kind of symlink to the refered text.

Regards, Berkz

I'd like to suggest "flexible aliases" and "twins." Making the terms up as I go, so let's see if I can explain them in a way that makes sense.

[b]Flexible aliases.[/b] Take berkz's situation: I'm taking notes for class, and multiple classes refer to the same thing. Sometimes you want to review that material, sometimes reference, and sometimes edit. An option to do any of the three with a given alias would be great.

Review: you forgot the gist of Big Issue, so you just want to be able to glance over that part of your outline. No need to duplicate the entire body of Big Issue, as a hyperlink would be fine, especially if there's some way to get back. Even better, click the alias to take the portion of the outline that describes Big Issue, hoist it, then display that in a quick-look. (Being able to quick-look from Finder would be great.)

Reference: you want to be able to dig through Big Issue, maybe even make a few changes, but it doesn't need to be reproduced in today's notes. The best way to handle this would be click an alias to see Big Issue hoisted but in a new window or pane. (Panes and multiple windows of the same document would be great.)

Edit: the present subject relates to Big Issue enough that you want to clone the Big Issue material right here, to be able to edit it and have those edits show up everywhere. Standard idea of what it means to clone.

[b]Twins.[/b] Twinning a row creates an exact copy, but edits to the copies are not reflected by the original; basically, just meta-data that certain rows are related to each other. Taken to an extreme, twins would allow me to create different organizational structures in the same outline. Say I have many facts that apply to multiple issues, and I want to organize those facts by issue. One outline would be:
[code]
-Issue 1
--Good Facts
---a
---b
--Bad Facts
---w
---x
-Issue 2
--Good Facts
---c
---d
--Bad Facts
---y
---z
[/code]
But what if I want to organize by good facts and bad facts? Well, if all Good Facts were twins to each other, I could somehow see all the good facts together. And I could do the same with the same with Bad Facts. In fact, if I could create a row that acts as a parent to all twins, I can create a new outline.
[code]
-All "Good Facts" Twins (my inserted meta row)
--Issue 1 (automatically takes the name of the twin's parent row)
---a (automatic clone of the twin's children)
---b
--Issue 2
---c
---d
-All "Bad Facts" Twins
--Issue 1
---w
---x
--Issue 2
---y
---z
[/code]
This is the same as creating a new structure in the same outline and cloning a, b, c, d, w, x, y & z, but obviously far easier. I'm not sure whether it would be generally useful, though, or just for my particular needs.

Just a few thoughts.

Hi, here's how I'd use a cloning feature, if I understand the concept behind it - my apologies if what I envisage below shouldn't be called "cloning":

My main activities in multi-column OO files are sorting and filtering. OO doesn't handle "filtering" of tabular data as it is commonly understood (I'm thinking of MS Excel), but it does support sorting - although in a destructive form.
I would therefore like to "clone" my data in order to just display them according to my need at that moment.
So I guess my idea of cloning would be more like a "layer" of background data - the raw data and text and information you're actually inputting, and a number of different visualizations to suit different needs, i.e. filtered views, sorted views, or a view of, say, rows 12-15 and their sub-levels hoisted in a separate window, etc. At the same time I should be able to edit my data whenever I need and no matter what visualisation or window/pane I'm in.

Arma

[QUOTE=FredH;35462]Cloning is, like, so 2006. We need smart folders.[/QUOTE]

I agree with wanting smart folders. Most (all??) of what I would accomplish with clones/aliases would work better for me as a smart folder.

My Clone Requirements
 

Here are my basic requirements for cloning:[LIST][*](I use the term 'node' to refer to a row)[*]A cloned node is a copy of a node whose content stays in sync with changes to the original node[*]Any node can be cloned[*]Once a node is cloned, the two nodes should be essentially indistinguishable except for location relative to other nodes in the outline (i.e., the original should not retain any special notion of 'original node')[*]The cloning of a node should include copies of the node's children; changes to the children should also be reflected in those of all its clones[*]Nodes that are clones should have some clear visual clue to this[*]When all but one of a set of clones has been deleted, the remaining clone should return to a normal node[*]Some properties of nodes should not be mirrored to its clones, in order to increase the power of multiple perspectives on the same data that clones provide; but these may need to be configurable to personal preference. E.g. appearance and style properties of the node's text.[/LIST]
Can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to having this feature.

Thanks,
Rand

My primary use of OO is in creating feature lists, object/entity lists, punch lists, etc. Often times these lists can be ordered in more than one way and the hierarchies can be built differently. A particular feature, for example, may belong to more than a single category or may have dependencies on other features.

My general need is the ability to create dependency or relationship links between items. Cloning/aliasing may help in this regard to the extent that an item might be included directly in the hierarchy of more than one parent. This could translate directly to my OG graphs which better represent the inter-dependencies but do not contain the descriptiveness of my OO lists.

Any chance you could give us an idea when we could expect OO4?
thanks!

Any and all of the cloning flavors described here would be helpful. I would also like to hyperlink within long outlines. It would be great if clicking the hyperlink either popped up the linked item or took you to the linked item. The difference could be controlled by left or right clicking. Navigation would also be helpful – i.e., I'd like to move back to where I was in my outline a few thoughts ago (before I followed these hyperlinks). Thanks.

From a [B]1990 [/B]release of MORE software:

[QUOTE]Sometimes you need the same information in several places in the same outline. For instance, a consultant’s name and phone number might be recorded in a phone listing, associated with a specific project team, and included on a to-do list. With MORE, you can make dynamic copies, or clones, of a headline and place them anywhere within the outline. Any changes made to the original headline or its clones is exactly duplicated in the associated headlines. So, for example, if the information for the consultant was cloned, changes to the phone number in any of the three headlines automatically updates the phone number in the rest of them.
[/QUOTE]

This sounds fabulous and modern! Bring it on!

Steve

I would very much like to see cloning. I am thinking of using OO in my research, and there I find that I often have a lot of inter-related topics. Currently I gather this information on a Wiki, but I find that I generally work hierarchically anyway, so I would like to switch.

One additional note that is related:

It would be excellent if, when a link to a local file was embedded into an omnioutliner document, the contents were displayed using Quick View. Right now, you only see the full text of the link "file://localhost/Users/...", which is fairly uninteresting.

The reason that I post this here is that I often have shared data which takes the form of an OmniGraffle diagram, or some other, external file. Using links I can easily embed this in multiple places, but then I lose the ability to view it inline, which seems unnecessary.

Internal Links / Hyperlinks
 

Hi,

I'd also be interested in a cloning/aliasing feature. In addition to this, and possibly much easier to implement and handle, would be hyperlinks to other locations inside the same document, just like it is possible in HTML.

This would not display the distant information but would make it just one click away - and a "back" button would get you back where you linked from.

Plus it would add a totally different way of navigating through a document. Not the hierachical outline-ish way, but the nonlinear internet way. Without conflicting with the hierarchical order of course.

That's my 5 cent,
Fritz

Agreed
 

I would love to see a cloning/alias feature in OO4. I also like the idea of having a smart folder or smart search functionality.

I am a grad student and use OO3 to outline papers, assignments and entire courses. Both would be very useful for my purposes.

cloning + smart folders + conditional formating
 

I like a lot OO, but I need desperately a cloning feature. For example, when a read a book I take notes that can later be used in a course or article. This kind of cross reference happens a lot in my work.

One problem that will appear with cloning is the size of the documents. I think the documents will grow, because we will try to relate many things. To face this problem we will need the ability to have different windows of the same document.

Smart folders would be nice but what I really would like to have is conditional formatting. A place where I can order a command like that: [B]If the paragraph has the text "Alfredo" the background turns red[/B]. A search and replace WITH formatting attributes can solve this problem, but conditional formatting is more elegant.

I have tried many different programs for writing and OO is the best because... it just flows. With this kind of feature it will become a writer's dream.


Best,

Roberto

I would love to see cloning ... particularly if it doesn't increase file size. In other words, if the cloned text is not a 1-to-1 copy of the original text, but a kind of link to it.

Along with cloning, I would need two things: 1) the ability to filter views based upon the content of the item or attributes established in columns ... and 2) the ability to assign multiple attributes per item.

Absolutely would love to see cloning implemented!

Duh!

Yes, please add this feature!

Very, very few outlining programs in the last 10 years endeavored to make this a part of their feature set--which amazes me, considering "pointers" are such a part of programming!

Thank you for considering it. Please add my vote!

With all the positive feedback here, it would be great if the Omni folks would let us know if this will now be a committed feature for Omnioutliner:)

For one person early on in this thread who wanted to have one doc with an overview of various projects, this particular thing can be sort of accomplished by making a doc that contains links to other OO outlines for each project. This has worked for me, I can quickly look over what I've got going and just as quickly take a look at the outline for any single project, as well as open multiple ones to view on the screen at once.

On the main topic of the thread, I agree that clones, which I presume means not just copies but copies that update when the original is updated, would be a great asset.

[QUOTE=GregO;51318]With all the positive feedback here, it would be great if the Omni folks would let us know if this will now be a committed feature for Omnioutliner:)[/QUOTE]

It's still under discussion. We appreciate the feedback though!

i don't need cloning
 

I had cloning available in some other outlining product i used, either think tank or lotus agenda or magellan, which had outlining. I found it confusing, and also it was defective. I don't really need it.

would you like to see cloning
 

Most definitely! As some of the other folks have explained, a piece of data may apply to multiple "projects" and the "sorting" mentioned by someone earlier would make that piece of data so much more valuable.

I would like to use "cloning" as exact copies that are synched so if one changes the other does also. The other is "replicating" where the original stays independent of the replicated. So that the replicated could modified/edited without changing the original.

Thank you for suggesting such an excellent feature.

Cloning/Aliasing would be great feature to add to 04 -- I just bought 03 recently and already in my first substantial outline I could really have used the feature several times.

Even a most basic cloning tool would be highly valuable for a structure which is pretty hierarchical, as some items will naturally refer to each other or make sense to be connecte in two parts of a tree structure.

The way I read many comments on this thread about cloning/alias, it looks alot like a database where information is kept in one or many different files and then accessed and viewed in different ways depending on the needs expressed.

I too would like cloning, but maybe having some kind of database feature would more flexible and powerful.

Cloning - yes pls.
 

My idea of cloning is what someone earlier posted in reference to the old outliners MORE and ThinkTank - eg. a copy of a row which can be moved anywhere else in the structure (or even (if this is possible) into another document) in which updates to the original or any of it's clones are reflected in all the clones and the orginal. Subtree's below the clone row are considered part of the clone.

The visual trigger to let the user know this is a clone is just a slightly different icon or row tag at the front of the row. Only the top row would have this indicator, despite the fact that subrows are also technically clones. There could be a command that would show all clones of any row - the outline would expand and all clones of the row that is selected would be highlighted.

Some folks reference smart folders - although I understand the desirability of that feature, smart folders can help with re-organization and visualization, but they don't help with what I need.

As an example, a cloned item may be a single task that is actually part of many projects (assume all projects are represented in the tree on an outline). The task only has to get done once for all the projects yet I want it to be displayed as a sub-task for each of the projects.

Currently, I create a new item for each project but there is no way to link them - mark one completed and the others - which are really the same task - do not show completed. If clones were implemented, that row/task would be shown as completed for any project it appeared in.

Unobtrusive
 

I still hope that cloning/smart-folders will be implemented, and I am ready to pay for this feature (unless I become jobless, you know).
Now does anybody have any idea: how could one make cloning/aliasing/smart folders unobtrusive? I guess this is the very part of the concept we are missing now.

Cloning was wonderfully (and unobtrusively) implemented in MORE 20 years ago and was requested for OO way back at version 1. [B]Just follow in every regard the old MORE model for cloning[/B] that I would hope all your engineers are familiar with. Note that "Smart Folders" are a different feature request.

Some of the things that I used MORE cloning for included:

[B][U]Individualizing Construction Specifications. [/U][/B]

On every project I wrote individualized versions of boilerplate language for hundreds of topics. One topic might be "Contractor Parking" that consisted of 2-10 paragraphs (out of 30 total paragraphs) indiviualized to the job. The paras desired for a given job would be marked for cloning to a new document. Then after all topics have been similarly reviewed (including adding new paras with every job) all the marked clones were created into a new document with a single click.

After creation the new spec was reviewed for small individual details and insertion of things like global find/replace for things like job name, address, etc. Very cool, very productive. Note that as totally new paras are written they become part of the boilerplate for future jobs as well.

[U][B]Survey Reports[/B][/U]

Again individual boilerplate paragraphs are written. For example there may be 30 different paras on "piping." The appropriate few paras for any given project are simply marked for cloning and then collected into a document with a single click.
[U][B]
Project Planning[/B][/U]

An individual project (a business plan for instance) will have different parts that get shared with different people at various points in time. However each individual gets shown different parts of the whole (with lots of overlap). The landlord, for instance, gets shown different parts than does a venture capitalist or a prospective floor manager. Cloning allows the originator to have one place with all thoughts and ideas yet still easily collect portions of the project for presentation to different individuals.

[B][U]Resumés[/U][/B]

One can build a huge multipart resumé and then use cloning to quickly individualize for each individual submission.

MORE facilitated other uses of cloning in addition to the few I listed above. Please, please after all these years give us the cloning we have been asking for.

Thanks!

My Post #34 examples all described a simple gathering functionality and using clones to do so. However in many instances often after the mark/gather has been performed small updates are continually made to the gathered text that do need to be reflected in the original as well.

Aliases would be really useful to me if the aliases were allowed to work across different files (i.e. not only within the same file).

I have 7 different legal contracts that I have typed up in OmniOutliner for my consulting business. Each contract is a different OO file. These 7 contracts all share about 90% of the same legal paragraphs as one another. Only about 10% of the legal paragraphs in each contract is actually different.

So whenever we need to make a change to the 90% of "shared legal paragraphs", we have to open all 7 contracts and make the change in all 7 places.

It would be so incredibly awesome if we could make the change to one legal paragraph in one file, and then the other 6 files would reflect that change immediately.

Thanks,
Scott

When OO is a LinkBack server this should be possible. Cast your vote!

Cloning allows creation of powerful Smart Task Lists
 

Cloning would allow creation of powerful [b]Smart Task Lists.[/b]

Right now I am working on a business plan. I have a dozen main headings with many subtopics listing all kinds of issues and things to do. Everything is being revised on a daily basis as new ideas and feedback from discussions come into play.

Tasks are variously defined throughout the document and are constantly changing. What is needed is a task list that compiles all the tasks referenced throughout the (long) document into a separate new location.

What MORE allowed 20 years ago was to create a major heading called [I]"Tasks"[/I] and [B]clone[/B] task subheadings from throughout the outline into the [I]Task[/I] heading as appropriate. Then as changes to tasks anywhere in the outline were made they were immediately reflected in the cloned language.

Frankly the lack of ability to create a cloned task list makes my OO outline far less useful to me than it would be if cloning was still available.

Like some others in this thread, I used More 3.1 decades ago. I wasn't a heavy user of cloning, but it is very, very handy. I would like to see it in OO.

For those not familiar with More, cloning was simply a dynamic copy of a row (and it's children). The clone could be moved anywhere in the outline, and an edit to either the original or the clone would update all instances.

Clones are most useful when you need the same info to appear in several places within your outline. As a simple example, let's say you are outlining the steps in a complex woodworking project. You may be cutting mortise and tenon joints in a number of sub-assemblies, so you would clone your "make mortise" step, along with the specifications for the mortises.

After cutting the first mortise, you decide the method you used didn't work well, so you change the method. With a clone system, you could change all your "make mortise" rows at once, by editing only one clone.

If you decide one mortise needs special treatment, you can un-clone that outline row only, so changes to it don't affect the other clones.


I think clones are essential to an outline program, and OmniOutliner is less useful because it doesn't have them. However, it may be a Pro feature.

--Liz

I don't think there's any dispute that they'd be useful; the main thing I think we struggle with are how they'd interact with the other features we have.

A couple of the questions I've seen folks discuss:
How would cloned rows interact with the level-based styles?
How would cloned rows affect summary cells they descend from?
What happens if a cloned row [I]contains[/I] a summary cell? Or can you only clone leaf rows, and not branches?

This is one of those cases where a feature appears to be simple - arguably, you'd want the app to react to a row you cloned in the same way it does to a row you pasted into several places. (With edits propagating, of course.)

The code that goes into presenting a simple appearance is often not simple to write, though...

Note: I'm not arguing against this feature. I've just been thinking about how to respond to the argument I sometimes see in other feature request posts/emails, which is along the lines of "this is simple; you haven't done this because you're crazy/lazy/stupid!" This is not one of those threads; just a good opportunity to practice. :-)

[QUOTE=Brian;61006]I don't think there's any dispute that they'd be useful... [/QUOTE]

No disrespect intended, but a problem for years now has been that the OO team apparently has always just seen cloning as a perhaps [i]"useful"[/i] feature. There must be a reason that after having been repeatedly requested since version 1 cloning still has not been implemented. All kinds of far-lesser-value tweaks have been added in 3.9 versions - and the "Pro" version exists to monetize such a feature - so I can only assume that the team fails to appreciate the real value of cloning.

Cloning is much more than simply [i]useful,[/i] it [b]is an essential component of truly professional outline processing[/b]. I do not say that to dis OO or the team, but the fact is that [u]with cloning[/u] I would literally be living in the OO app, much like I did with MORE; today [u]without cloning[/u] I often just use (and refer users of the 9 Macs I manage) to free apps like TextEdit.

[QUOTE]...the main thing I think we struggle with are how they'd interact with the other features we have. [/QUOTE]

The short answer to that is that I would hope that Omni engineers would have a copy of MORE up and running on an old box to review cloning. Obviously the apps and code are not identical, but a good start would be to integrate cloning similar to the way MORE did 20 years ago. (If you do not have a working copy of MORE I can probably find a retired but operational old Powerbook running MORE that you could have.)

[QUOTE]A couple of the questions I've seen folks discuss:[/QUOTE]

I will try to respond, but it has been decades since I used the feature so my comments will likely have some inaccuracies.

[QUOTE]How would cloned rows interact with the level-based styles?[/QUOTE]

That answer is fairly easy. Cloned text takes the style defined by its new location.

[QUOTE]How would cloned rows affect summary cells they descend from?
What happens if a cloned row contains a summary cell? Or can you only clone leaf rows, and not branches?

This is one of those cases where a feature appears to be simple - arguably, you'd want the app to react to a row you cloned in the same way it does to a row you pasted into several places. (With edits propagating, of course.)[/QUOTE]

Yes, it is like live Cut-and-Paste but with styles defined by the new location.

[QUOTE]The code that goes into presenting a simple appearance is often not simple to write, though...[/QUOTE]

Perhaps. But [b]cloning is an [u]essential[/u] feature[/b] and after 5 years of OO development the cloning feature is much too important to continue to ignore.

Again, no disrespect is intended.

-Allen Wicks

No disrespect taken, Allen, but I also can't help but notice that you declined to offer an opinion on the summary cell questions I asked. :-)

Again, we're not ignoring this; we just aren't sure how to integrate this into some of our existing features which we had and which MORE lacks.

I'm not on the Outliner team, and it's been a few years since I looked at MORE. If I remember correctly, it was a fine text-based outliner, but didn't have the sense of multiple columns that Outliner has, and didn't support the various forms of non-text data that Outliner can put in those columns.

Adding this feature would undoubtedly be valuable, but we don't think that we should sacrifice features that other customers find valuable to do so. The folks that use OmniOutliner in more of a Spreadsheet-y fashion (the folks that came up with the predecessor to OmniFocus, for example) probably wouldn't be very happy.

cloning mode
 

I can understand the caution about cloning. but you take for granted that the way styles propagate in omnioutliner is transparent to the user. I must say that after years using it, I still can't understand why some styles appear in my text... (by the way, I would like to have a way to clear ALL styles in a document with a stroke!)

why note a "cloning mode"? when activated some functionalitys would be lost. it isn't the most elegant implementation, but many of us would use it.

best,

roberto

Yes to cloning, or some other way to link "items" across projects, folders, groups, etc. Very little in life is an island.

Frankly though I'd rather see OF merge with OP, fields for estimating and tracking time, chart where time is spent vs preferred vs planned, add some way of planning that helps to prevent overloading schedules.

For what its worth, I think aliasing/linking from a row to another row is a must.

No matter what you use OO for, it comes a time when you want to somehow relate a row to another row. No matter how pragmatic you are, information is relational one way or another, and it is going to come up no matter what you do (non-trivial stuff of course).

A simple highlighted text (similar to URL highlighting) that when clicked takes you to the linked row would do wonders! Another option would be if you hover it, or click on a dispatch triangle or something similar, you get to see the linked row right below/on-top the row with the link.

What is funny is that right now I needed this feature, so I came to the forums to see whether it was possible to do, and lo and behold I came across this thread.

My vote for this feature.

Just as an example, I was trying to use OO for handling features/bugs tracking for a software project. I have features and bugs rows in the same level, and in their sublevels you have the actual features and bugs. I would like to link a feature to a bug, etc...

3.9, and still waiting for clones . . .
 

RSS advised that 3.9 was released. I immediately checked for cloning, as I do whenever an update is released. Seeing that cloning was not added, I read about the new version no further. I've never tried OO, for want of cloning, an indispensable outlining feature for me. Repeat: indispensable.

I would love to see cloning/aliasing in OO4, this is probably the feature I'm missing the most

I don't know if it is a help but Google Sketchup has a graphic version of cloning. When you work on a clone (called a component in Sketchup) you are changing all other clones but you are able to right-click and choose "Make Unique" after which that clone gets a different name and is no longer connected to the others.
A clone can be changed as a whole (e.g. painted a different colour) and this does not change the colour of the other clones, but if you go into the clone and change individual parts of it this will have an effect on all other examples of that clone.
Regarding your question about level-based styles - I think they should take the style of the level they get moved to.
Clones should include a definition of how many levels they encompass. Any change within those levels should change all connected clones.
Regarding cloned summary rows - they should continue to calculate their children if the children are part of the clone and they will be the same for all examples of that clone. If the summary row is the only level within that clone then it should calculate children rows based on what they are in the particular circumstance and this could then be different from other examples of that cloned row.

OO4 and Wishful Thinking
 

I do have a wishlist for OO4 features in my head, but it'd take a bit too much time to expose it here. Part of it is something I posted a number of years ago to the OOuser mailing-list.
But that was then. I think OO3 wasn't even out, yet.

Mainly, I want OO4 to work with my iPod touch. In fact, I've been thinking about buying OmniFocus for this very reason. But it doesn't seem to be as convenient as an outliner as I'd want it to be. I'm getting a bit closer to the whole GTD way of thinking, but I'd like something more akin to OO in terms of processing.
I can just see it. It's unlikely to be released, but I daydream about it.

See, I think and work through outlines. Much of what I do ends up being outlinable. Reading notes, presentation slides, random ideas, tasks, lists...
OO is my favourite outliner. I spent three years using a Windows machine as my main computer and the lack of an OO-like outliner was a big issue, for me. NetManage Ecco Pro was a fascinating concept, but it was hard to integrate in my workflow because it didn't play well with "modern technology." I eventually settled on OneNote but it didn't fit so well in my workflow because it "doesn't play well with others," even with Microsoft products such as Word, Windows Live Writer, or Powerpoint.

Which is a basic point: a tool like OO needs to fit in a workflow. OO3 hasn't changed that much in the three years during which I was unable to use it. But it's still quite useful. I can "get by" with OO3. Because it fits in my workflow. Especially now that I can use CarbonFin Outliner online and on my iPod touch. Not ideal, but much better than what I was able to get during my PalmOS days.

OO3's import and export options are quite good. In fact, the .docx export almost "saved my life" as I was trying to get lecture notes into PowerPoint. If this export option were available as an add-on to OO Standard, I'd buy it. (I ended up using a trial version of OOPro to get the .docx for further processing.)
I'm getting a kind of déjà-vu and I'm guessing these are things I've discussed in the past (apart from the .docx export, which only came recently).

But there's a broader context to all of this. Evernote is almost a killer app, on several platforms. If it supported outlines in the way OO does, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat.
Then, there's the whole "task-management" side. There's a wide-array of products out there which do GTD or other forms of task management. OF addresses this very directly and is compared with Cultured Code Things, Toodledo, Remember the Milk, Midnight Inbox, and TaskPaper. I've been looking at all of these quite carefully. As is often the case, all these products have advantages and disadvantages. None of them fits as my ideal tool. Where OF has a significant advantage, for me personally, is that it does support outlines. It's no OO4, but it could enable me to aggregate several of my more task-oriented outlines. The GTD features looked very compelling but they're also the ones which make me torn between different tools. Contrary to OO, OF seems to be a way to "take over" part of your workflow instead of helping at different points of the process. For me, as an outline-lover, OF is too constraining. I want to be able to do the braindump as an outline, transform some parts as projects and goals, and keep the rest in outlines. Sure, those remaining outlines could be related to the "Information" part of the GTD model. But OF didn't seem to make this easy to manage, when I tried it.

As others have been saying in many contexts, some of us don't necessarily need a full-fledged GTD. We could probably a form of Kinkless-GTD if it were well-integrated in our outliners, but that's not necessarily the main goal.
Similarly, those of us who are obsessed with outlines could probably use mindmaps. They go well with outlines, for several reasons. And mindmapping tools out there aren't yet ideal, for the kind of processing we do. But that shouldn't be the focus either.

A strength of outliners like OO is that they're really efficient for the kind of realtime processing required as you're thinking through diverse ideas. There are many outlining tools which lack these basic things. The fact that you can create siblings and parents with the return key, the fact that you see the whole outline as you're editing, the fact that there are keystrokes to move items around... All of these distinguish outliners like OO from many tools which aren't nearly as convenient. The lack of any of these is pretty much a deal-breaker, for me.

TaskPaper is an interesting case. It's probably the simplest tool to use. It does support some limited outlining features. And its file-format is simple enough to make it fit in my workflow. I really wish TaskPaper could have OO-like features. If it did, I'd probably use it as my main "thought-processing" app.

So, the "pie in the sky" concept for my ideal outliner (which is unlikely to become a reality within the OO4 framework) would integrate features from a variety of other tools. OO3, Evernote, OneNote, OF, TaskPaper, CarbonFin Outliner, and MindMeister. I don't know that it'd necessarily include things like attachments, elaborate style management, handles in text exports, multiple columns, and so on. These are literally distractions for me as I use OO3. I end up spending quite a bit of time getting rid of these than taking advantage of them. Makes for a frustrating experience through which I keep going because I love OO for other reasons. But that's probably just me.
My ideal outliner certainly has other OO3 features such as a variety of import and export formats or convenient outline navigation and editing.

Yes, it's all a dream. But what recent events have taught us is that dreaming is a very efficient way to think.

Great post Enkerli. I also am having a hard time finding which programs to use that match my way of thinking. I'd love a powerful note taking & outline app like OO combined with the powerful task/schedule app of OF-- for me these things need to either work seamlessly together or be the same program.

Why do our ideas/notes/outlines need to be separate from our to-do-lists/calendar, etc? Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm obviously not the only one.

Derek - first off, YES, this would be a wicked cool feature and very useful. Next, any chance you guys can implement survey\voting functions on this forum so we can vote for FRs and other stuff?

You already can vote for and make feature requests, with the Help->Send Feedback command in the program...

[QUOTE=JayEpoch;67479]... I'd love a powerful note taking & outline app like OO combined with the powerful task/schedule app of OF-- for me these things need to either work seamlessly together or be the same program.

Why do our ideas/notes/outlines need to be separate from our to-do-lists/calendar, etc? Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm obviously not the only one.[/QUOTE]

I agree. I even asked this question in the OF forum but didn't get much response:

[url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=13374&highlight=irfoton[/url]

Notes and Tasks
 

[QUOTE=irfoton;69734]I agree. I even asked this question in the OF forum but didn't get much response:

[url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=13374&highlight=irfoton[/url][/QUOTE]
Thanks for this!
Didn't really use kGTD when it was available (anyone has a copy? Can't find it, anymore). But now that I'm GTDing, it'd be useful.
(I listened to the GTD audiobook, recently. These ideas are so widespread, now, that I didn't really learn much. But I've been implementing my own approach to managing different parts of my life, inspired by Merlin Mann and David Allen.)

In David Allen's approach, notes are reference material which should be filed appropriately and shouldn't clutter your task-based system. There's a certain logic to this. Especially the one about having all "notebooks" in the same "interface." Allen's talks a lot about a paper-based method, but with the tools we now have, an online interface makes sense.
Before I really started implementing a GTD-based approach, I was managing notes in a bunch of OO files. These files weren't that well organized. Usually, the filenames were the main way to distinguish them. I was hand-versioning these outlines through filenames (soci203mtg4b for the second version of notes for the fourth class meeting in my SOCI 203). I didn't really have a master outline for everything.
On my iPod touch, CarbonFin Outliner became quite useful. I would take notes in those outlines, and then sync with the cloud, to then work in OO. Or I would export OO to OPML, sync through CarbonFin, and work "on the go," as I got more ideas.
And I did put tasks in outlines. It did work. Kind of. Wasn't very sophisticated, but it was useful to go back to.
Now, my method is reversed. Instead of putting tasks in outlined notes, I put notes in my task-based management.
More specifically, I'm putting notes in a "Notes" folder in Toodledo. Everything in the same interface, but clearly identified.
Of course, it's not as powerful as true outlining. You can only have three levels (folder, task, subtask), and they're not so easy to reorganize. But it serves my purpose more than I thought it would.
And there's a certain logic to this. Notes and tasks are different but connected. In a way, there are actions embedded in notes ("write about," "think about," "discuss"...) and there's information associated with tasks. More practically, it sometimes make sense to have a checkbox next to a note and it can be ok to have a subtask be a significant piece of text.

Having said this, there's still a need for "pure" outlining. Especially when you're writing. You can go from quick notes to whole paragraphs and sections, with headings. Reorganizing and collapsing can be so useful in writing that it's hard to work in an editor which doesn't support them.
So, what I end up doing, these days, is export my notes from Toodledo into OO through a tabbed text file. In OO, I then reorganize my notes and transform them into an actual text. I then assess the original notes as if they were tasks and check them off ("I talked about this, that...").

One thing I've done a lot in the past which should be easy to implement in my new method but that I haven't done yet is to move pending notes ("odds and ends") as part of new "tasks." What this tells me is that my normal method was already compatible with task-based thinking. As I was writing, some notes were slipping into a kind of "to do" list. Sometimes, these notes were already assigned in a specific piece (notes for my next class meeting). But, sometimes, these notes were part of my "Someday/Maybe" or just general reference list. "I'm not writing about this, now, but I may revisit this issue later."
Of course, blogging has helped me a lot with this. And I often wished that OO would be usable as a blogging editor.

I guess the main realization I have is that outlining happens at different levels, including that of GTD-style life management.

Now, this may all seem a bit off-topic. It's not about cloning/aliasing. But I am thinking about OO4 and I wish it could be more than a paid upgrade from OO 3.9.

I have multiple outlines detailing manufacturer information of various products including specifications, known issues, and miscellaneous captured information. I have a second collection of outlines for each of my clients - would be amazing to link and cross reference this information. For example, client outlines containing the linked products specifications of those technologies that the client has acquired or is thinking about acquiring.

M.

yes, yes, yes
 

Lots of cool ideas here on how to implement it.

I'd say, start simple with what's fastest to get to the users. Then we'll improve it!

cloning will decide the fate of OO4
 

I'm part of a PhD student writing group here at UT (Austin). OmniOutliner's lack of cloning upsets us so much that we're no longer allowed to bring it up in discussions.

Cloning is essential. TAO and Tinderbox have it. And so we're forced to use these. Which is a shame, since OmniOutliner has such a nice interface, and the styling and find-drawer are fantastic.

If Omni wants to market itself as the serious maker of software for serious users, they will have to add cloning. If they do so, they will win. If they stay in the superficial-but-pretty market, they will lose to the competition. (See Steve Jobs on this very issue: [url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9dmcRbuTMY[/url].)

XMind, NovaMind, and MindManager are prettier and more advanced than OmniOutliner. But they have a vulnerability: they ALL lack cloning.

Cloning. Put it in OO4 or it's over.

re: Would you like to see cloning/aliasing in OO4?
 

[QUOTE=Plasmatic;72679]Cloning is essential.
<snip>
Cloning. Put it in OO4 or it's over.[/QUOTE]
Sorry to disappoint you, Plasmatic, but here's a quote from Ken Case in a post by DerekM[QUOTE=DerekM;73140]We realized that if we scaled back some of the esoteric features which we’d planned for the Pro edition of version 4—cloning and multiple schemas—we could shave three months off its development schedule and get started on OmniOutliner for iPad that much sooner. Now, both of those features are still pretty interesting to us, and we’ve already laid the groundwork for supporting these in the underlying outlining engine—but we think bringing OmniOutliner on iPad is more important overall, so that’s what we’re going to do.[/QUOTE]
Here's the thread with the quote [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=15286"]OmniOutliner 4 and iPad[/URL]. It looks like the major feature most were hoping for in OO4 have been "back burner'd" at best. Maybe cloning will show up in OO5 in another few years.

Ye of little faith....which Omni products have delivered all of their features in 1.0, or 2.0, or 3.0, or 4.0, or 5.0, and provided nothing more than bug fixes until the next major release? And with Ken stating that they've already laid the groundwork for supporting these features in the outlining engine, it becomes much more feasible to introduce them part way through 4.x than if all related changes had been yanked out of the 4.0 code base.

Now, how you know that "most" were hoping for these features based on the responses in a thread devoted to asking what form those who would like these features would like to see, I'm not quite sure...talk about self-selection bias!

I second whp's call for patience. A careful reading of OG's statement suggests that while cloning won't make 4.0, it's not unreasonable to believe it will be in an early upgrade. There is a tendency to see these things from our own perspectives, and while I, too, am frustrated by the delay and would dearly love to have cloning today, I understand OG's desire to get an iPad app out quickly, too.

Truth be told, if they took an extra three months to get cloning into 4.0, I'd be happy to get it, but would immediately indulge my need for grumpiness by complaining that the iPad app hadn't dropped yet. But maybe that's just me ...

For now, I'm using DevonThink Pro on those projects that need cloning. When OO has it, I'll be grateful. In the meantime ... take a breath. Life is good. Macs are great. The Saints won the Super Bowl. The remastered Beatles catalog sounds fantastic. "Hurt Locker" got nominated for an Oscar. Spring is coming. I don't mean to denigrate anyone's sincere need for cloning in OO 4.0, but may its delay be the worst thing that happens to any of us.

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;73216]Ye of little faith....which Omni products have delivered all of their features in 1.0, or 2.0, or 3.0, or 4.0, or 5.0, and provided nothing more than bug fixes until the next major release?[/QUOTE]
Of course they will add [I]some[/I] features between major releases. It's been over four years of 'what features would you like to see' and 'how you you like us to implement ...'. Faith wanes after years of promise. [QUOTE=whpalmer4;73216] And with Ken stating that they've already laid the groundwork for supporting these features in the outlining engine, it becomes much more feasible to introduce them part way through 4.x than if all related changes had been yanked out of the 4.0 code base.[/QUOTE]Just because the foundation is in place doesn't mean the features are imminent. OG has been [I]asking[/I] about what users would like to see in OO/OOP 4 for a long time, but that doesn't mean they will, or even [I]plan[/I] to, deliver them.

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;73216]Now, how you know that "most" were hoping for these features based on the responses in a thread devoted to asking what form those who would like these features would like to see, I'm not quite sure...talk about self-selection bias![/QUOTE]Read the posts in this forum for the last four - five years and you'll see that it's the most requested feature for OO/OOP. The example sited was to demonstrate how long OG has been specifically asking [I]users[/I] about it. [QUOTE=rogbar;73219]I second whp's call for patience. A careful reading of OG's statement suggests that while cloning won't make 4.0, it's not unreasonable to believe it will be in an early upgrade.[/QUOTE]Well, a [I]careful[/I] reading of Ken's comments shows that OG hasn't [I]committed[/I] to cloning at all - they find it [i]interesting[/i] but have decided that iPad development is [I]more important[/I]. With OP 2 a top priority, and other apps being ported to the iPad, I don't expect cloning will see the light of day until 2011 at the earliest.

[I]I posted this comment as a followup to [URL="http://blog.omnigroup.com/2010/02/11/ipad-or-bust-two-weeks-later/"]my blog post[/URL], but thought it might also be of interest to people reading this thread…[/I]

Thanks for all the feedback on our plans for OmniOutliner 4!

I apologize if anyone was upset by my characterization of cloning as an “esoteric feature”! I certainly didn’t mean that as an insult: I simply meant that cloning was likely to be understood by only a small number of people who have a specialized knowledge and interest in outlining. Perhaps “advanced feature” would be a better turn of phrase.

We certainly understand that some of you really need clones in your outlines: over the 8 years that OmniOutliner has been shipping, we’ve received a few hundred requests for cloning. But to put that in perspective, we have a few hundred thousand people who are using OmniOutliner every day, many of whom have no interest in advanced features—even the ones already present in OmniOutliner! My impression is that most of our customers just want to write basic outlines. Many of those people would like to see their outlines at different sizes on the screen than in print, which is why zooming is by far the most requested feature for OmniOutliner 4. And many of those people would like to take those outlines with them on the go, which is why an iPhone OS version of OmniOutliner is our next most popular request.

Before this blog post, I don’t believe we’ve ever said anywhere that we were planning to bring cloning support to any version of OmniOutliner. Yes, we’ve certainly asked on our forums whether you’d like to see cloning and how you would use it—but in that message we clearly said that we were looking for feedback to help make sure we’re on the same page regarding the feature should we implement it. We did not say that cloning was definitely coming in any future version.

By the way, one of the things we learned from that feedback was that some requests for cloning would be better served by saved smart folders—a feature which, as I’ve indicated above, is coming in OmniOutliner 4.

Now, with this blog post I’ve gone a little further, indicating that true cloning support was in fact something that we were looking to add to OmniOutliner in version 4. And that enough of the groundwork has been laid that hopefully we’ll get back to it sooner rather than later. But if you absolutely need cloning support in your outlines today, then—much as I’d love for you to be using OmniOutliner as your tool of choice—I humbly submit that it would be a good idea to look for another outlining tool that already supports cloning rather than waiting for some potential future version of OmniOutliner. I wouldn’t want to hold you back from a solution which works today based on some vague forward-looking statement from me!

Once again, thanks for all the feedback!

P.S. — I should probably point out that when I said “say goodbye to the old Aqua drawer”, I simply meant that we were moving that functionality from a drawer to a sidebar, not that we were dropping that functionality altogether!

Good news on smart folders, I just hope I live to see it

[QUOTE=Ken Case;74060]Before this blog post, I don’t believe we’ve ever said anywhere that we were planning to bring cloning support to any version of OmniOutliner.
...
Now, with this blog post I’ve gone a little further, indicating that true cloning support was in fact something that we were looking to add to OmniOutliner in version 4. And that enough of the groundwork has been laid that hopefully we’ll get back to it sooner rather than later. [/QUOTE]
So OG will now go out on a limb and state that you were [I]looking to add it[/I] and that [I]hopefully you'll get back to it[/I].
[QUOTE]We did not say that cloning was definitely coming in any future version.[/QUOTE]
And you still haven't.

Call me a skeptic, or a cynic, or even a realist. As it turns out I may have actually been an optimist when I predicted 2011.

[QUOTE=WrongSizeGlass;74112]So OG will now go out on a limb and state that you were [I]looking to add it[/I] and that [I]hopefully you'll get back to it[/I].[/QUOTE]

It sounds like you're close to understanding my message—except that I'm not trying to go out on a limb.

I'm saying outright that we've never indicated that any future version of OmniOutliner will add cloning support, and that we're still not indicating that it will come in any future release. I believe there are a lot of other capabilities that are much more important to the vast majority of our customer base. So if cloning is something you need in your outlines—again, much as I’d love for you to be using OmniOutliner as your tool of choice—I'll once again humbly submit that it would be a good idea to look for another outlining tool that already supports cloning.

Cloning in a simple outliner is a relatively simple problem. Cloning in OmniOutliner is a much harder problem.
[INDENT]I have yet to find an outliner which supports cloning and also supports multiple columns with calculated column summaries. If some of the row's values are calculated based on its position in the outline, what happens when you clone that row to a new location? Do you want a new calculated value, or were you hoping to bring across the value from the original?

Context-dependent row styles are already one of the most confusing areas of functionality to understand in OmniOutliner, and they're an area we'd like to make simpler. But what happens when you add cloning to the mix? If you make a single word red in a clone, should that word be red in all of the clones? What if the clone's position indicates that all its text should be red already? Or green? Or red when negative and green when positive?

And cloning gets even more complicated when you add multi-schema support into the mix: What happens when you clone a row from a position where it has columns A, B, and C, and put it into a context where it now has columns A, X, Y, and Z?[/INDENT]
Most requests for cloning tend to have simple examples in which none of these questions matter (e.g., one-column outlines with no formatting), but if cloning is ever going to work in OmniOutliner we feel it's important to come up with satisfactory answers to all these questions and more. And some of the answers might require the addition of other new features (e.g., letting you specify how to map columns of clones between different schemas).

In other words, cloning isn't just a simple feature which we haven't gotten around to implementing in OmniOutliner yet. It's a research project which might not have a satisfactory solution for some of the outlines which OmniOutliner supports. We've already spent a lot of time thinking about it, so we have some ideas about how to solve some of these problems, but we don't know yet whether those solutions will feel right to those of you who are actually requesting the feature.

And while clones are one way to solve some problems, there are other ways to solve some of the same problems while also introducing totally new capabilities which clones don't support:
[INDENT]For example, many people have indicated in this thread that they'd be just as happen to see hypertext links within an outline. That would be much easier for us to implement—we already support hypertext links—and would probably benefit at least as many people while being much easier for most people to understand. (Thanks to the web, everyone now understands hypertext links.)

Some people in this thread have also indicated that they'd be just as happy to see their problems solved with saved smart folders, which could filter the existing outline and present a collected set of results in that folder.

Some of the cloning use cases would also be solved if we were to implement spreadsheet-style formulas within cells, which would let you reference another cell's value and use it in another context—much like cloning, but without causing ambiguities about exactly what that means. And adding support for those sorts of formulas would enable all kinds of new outlines which currently require a spreadsheet, like an outline which tracks variances from a baseline budget.[/INDENT]
Some early outliners solved a set of outlining problems by providing a cloning feature, which has made it a familiar solution for those of you who have experience with those outliners. But is cloning really the only solution to that set of problems? (Or even the best solution?)

Ken,

Thanks for your thorough and thoughtful reply. Much as I'd love to have cloning in OO today, I do understand that it's a very tricky one and that there may well be other needs more important to more users.

That said, I would offer this thought to your statement that "I have yet to find an outliner which supports cloning and also supports multiple columns with calculated column summaries."

Ecco Pro did it almost twenty years ago. Not being a programmer, I don't know if the means by which Ecco did this are applicable to OO, but they certainly demonstrated it can be done.

Good luck with it.

/rb

Wishful Outliners
 

There might be something special about us, users of outlining apps. These apps are such an integral part of our work that we might react as strongly as if spell-checking were taken out of a mainstream word processor. At the same time, outlining remains in something of a niche. Many apps do outlining, often for a specific purpose. But the ideal outliner isn't there, yet.
And it's quite possible that the 4.0 version of OO won't be it. In some key ways, it's even possible that MORE 3.1 was closer to the ultimate outlining than OO will ever become. Part of the reason is that the market for the ultimate outliner is either dormant or simply too small.

The comment about NetManage EccoPro (now hosted at Compusol.org) does get me. When I was in exile on XP for a few years, it was described as an appropriate replacement to OO. I tried using it for quite a while and did manage to integrate it in my workflow, to an extent, but it still didn't do some of the most important things I wanted and needed to do, especially in terms of producing documents for both classroom and study use. For a while afterwards, I was using OneNote. But that still wasn't ideal. When I came back to Mac OS X, OO was among the first things I installed. And I still like it (though I've switched a significant chunk of my note-taking to Toodledo). Far from perfect and showing its age in terms of "computing paradigms." But still useful.

Over the years, I've probably spent inordinate amounts of time looking for the ideal outliner. From the description of upcoming features, OO4 isn't it (at this point, I really need seamless synchronization and an innovative approach to outline entry; I don't need cloning, but I do need seamless sync). TaskPaper would be much closer if it had import/export features (which seems so easy to do, given the format). And I can just imagine how much of a dream outlining on the iPad could become. If only we had the ideal app...

--
Hopeful in Montreal (aka Alex)

FredH,

But cloning would let you put something right where you want it, rather than having to make smart folders that just collect things all at the same level.

[QUOTE=Ken Case;74118]I'm saying outright that we've never indicated that any future version of OmniOutliner will add cloning support, and that we're still not indicating that it will come in any future release. [B]...it would be a good idea to look for another outlining tool that already supports cloning.[/B][/QUOTE]

Thank you, that is pretty clear, especially after having been led on regarding cloning "coming soon" since v1. With all due respect I too will be clear: I will not upgrade again unless cloning or something fully equivalent is added.

[QUOTE]I believe there are a lot of other capabilities that are much more important to the vast majority of our customer base. [/QUOTE]

With all due respect that just points out a serious ongoing flaw of primarily looking to existing users to evaluate the need for new features. There are many potential new users IF the feature was available. And, cloning is a hugely powerful tool that staff and users would LOVE once they learned how powerful it is by really using it.

[QUOTE]Cloning in a simple outliner is a relatively simple problem. Cloning in OmniOutliner is a much harder problem.
[INDENT]I have yet to find an outliner which supports cloning and also supports multiple columns with calculated column summaries.[/INDENT][/QUOTE]

Agreed, there are features in OO like some calculations or logic that would be difficult or impossible to integrate with cloning. The solution seems simple: rather than denying the power of cloning to all potential users, instead document certain features as incompatible with each other just like spreadsheets do with an illogical formula.

Different users can then use the same app in different ways, making for a larger potential customer base. E.g. I seldom use OO because of lack of cloning but have never felt the need to use calculated column summaries. Calculations or columns can simply be invalidated and red flagged when cloning is implemented; or conversely an attempt to clone from or into an invalid area can be invalidated and red flagged.

[QUOTE]Context-dependent row styles are already one of the most confusing areas of functionality to understand in OmniOutliner, and they're an area we'd like to make simpler. But what happens when you add cloning to the mix? If you make a single word red in a clone, should that word be red in all of the clones? [/QUOTE]

That is pretty easy. If only the [U]word[/U] is red, then the red stays with the word. If the red word became red because it is context-dependent like a style, then the color becomes whatever the style of the new location determines. Look to the way MORE did it 20+ years ago.

[QUOTE]...red when negative and green when positive?[/QUOTE]

Calculations can simply be invalidated and red flagged as previously discussed.

[QUOTE]Most requests for cloning tend to have simple examples in which none of these questions matter (e.g., one-column outlines with no formatting), but if cloning is ever going to work in OmniOutliner we feel it's important to come up with satisfactory answers to all these questions and more.[/QUOTE]

I really, really disagree - - and I have many thousands of cloned-outline pages and decades of real-world experience to support my opinion. (a) Users who want cloning will happily forgo multiple columns and calculations for outline parts cloned as a trade-off and (b) formatting was answered above; a clone simply takes the position-dependent format of the new position.

[QUOTE]...we have some ideas about how to solve some of these problems, but we don't know yet whether those solutions will feel right to those of you who are actually requesting the feature. ...And while clones are one way to solve some problems, there are other ways to solve some of the same problems while also introducing totally new capabilities which clones don't support

Some early outliners solved a set of outlining problems by providing a cloning feature, which has made it a familiar solution for those of you who have experience with those outliners. But is cloning really the only solution to that set of problems? (Or even the best solution?)[/QUOTE]

With all due respect, [B]yes cloning is the best solution to suit the need for a cloning feature.[/B] It should have been implemented with v1. Just invalidate cross usage of cloning with calculations and columns, and let clones take the styles of their respective locations. Save the [I]"other ways to solve some of the same problems while also introducing totally new capabilities"[/I] for whoopdewhoop new features down the road and implement clear succinct cloning ASAP.

Please and thank you.

-Allen

"I have yet to find an outliner which supports cloning and also supports multiple columns with calculated column summaries."

Ecco Pro did it 20 years ago .. brilliantly.

We've done pretty well in our 15 year history by listening to what our customers want and trusting that features with broad appeal make for an app with broad appeal.

This feature has deep demand among a narrow segment of the customer base. I'm really sorry, but it's not the same thing.

Solutions that involve walling off sections of the application into modes aren't going to fly; if there's one thing we've learned form OmniFocus, it's that customers hate arbitrary limitations like that.

Unless we can do it right - integrate it with the app's other features - we shouldn't do it.

Hi Brian,

I understand - and agree - that deep demand among a narrow segment of the customer isn't the same as broad demand. But, for what it's worth, ECCO's cloning did not prevent people who didn't want cloning from using the program simply and easily without it.

I'm just hoping you guys figure out how to do integrate it so it it doesn't interfere with those who don't want to use it. It's an EXTRAORDINARILY useful feature that opens the app up to almost unlimited possibilities of customization.

I'm pulling for you ...

roger

[QUOTE=Brian;82563]We've done pretty well in our 15 year history by listening to what our customers want and trusting that features with broad appeal make for an app with broad appeal.

This feature has deep demand among a narrow segment of the customer base. I'm really sorry, but it's not the same thing.[/QUOTE]

Agreed it is not the same thing. What IMO Omni is missing - by a lot, based on comments here - is how extraordinarily powerful a tool cloning can be. With cloning implemented and marketed the appeal could be broad, not just a narrow segment. The folks at MORE missed it too; they had an awesome tool they did not fully understand and hence did not market.

[QUOTE=Brian;82563]Solutions that involve walling off sections of the application into modes aren't going to fly; if there's one thing we've learned form OmniFocus, it's that customers hate arbitrary limitations like that.[/QUOTE]

An app like OmniFocus requires free-form as part of its raison d'etre. An outliner however is by definition structured. I believe OO users would accept structural limitations of a feature like cloning. After all, the folks who do not need cloning lose nothing. Only those of us who need cloning would suffer limitations, and for clone users losing a few features like some columns interaction is no big deal.

[QUOTE=Brian;82563]Unless we can do it right - integrate it with the app's other features - we shouldn't do it.[/QUOTE]

I could not agree more that unless you can do it right you shouldn't do it. However I do not at all agree that it somehow is not "right" unless it integrates fully with all other OO features present and future. Cloning is so powerful it deserves inclusion without being excused away based on conflict with some other feature.

Thank you.

-Allen

FYI, as part of the design work we did for OmniOutliner 4 we did figure out how we would like for cloning to interact with the rest of the feature set, so that's no longer an issue. (And we agree that cloning is useful, which is why we went to the trouble of designing it in the first place.)

But we still think it's more important to get OmniOutliner 4 shipping as soon as possible than to add cloning, so it's still not planned for this release.

This thread is depressing.

This is good news! At least you solved the problem. We hope to see it in OO as soon as possible.

Roberto

[QUOTE=Ken Case;82961]...we agree that cloning is useful, which is why we went to the trouble of designing it in the first place.[/QUOTE]

Thank you, that is very positive news.

[QUOTE]...we still think it's more important to get OmniOutliner 4 shipping as soon as possible than to add cloning, so it's still not planned for this release.[/QUOTE]

I for one will upgrade for sure when cloning becomes available (or even buy a separate plug-in). However until cloning is available I expect to hold off on upgrading.

Thanks for your help!

-Allen

[QUOTE=Brian;82563]
This feature has deep demand among a narrow segment of the customer base. [/QUOTE]

Perhaps there isn't a deep demand among a broad segment of the customer base because people don't fully understand the feature. I get the idea conceptually, but I have never used an outliner with a cloning feature.

Cloning plus calendar = indispensable
 

I have been using MORE since 1987 and find it so indispensable that I keep an old Mac around to run it. My life and my work as a writer is based on it. Every year I create a new calendar file which gives me a place for each day's to-do list and archive. I mark unfinished tasks from the previous day and then move them to the current day. If I wish to record that I partially finished something on the previous day I clone it and move the clone.

Notes about the task are added as they are created and appear in all cloned instances of the item. A stroke of the enter key opens up a word processor document at the heading of the task, For example, a task might be [B]Post comment on cloning on Omni blog[/B]. Hit the enter key and type the post. When done the post can be created as a separate document in the format of choice.

Suppose I wish to keep a record of all similar blog posts. I clone the entry and move the clone under the appropriate heading. Cloning allows me to keep this document under separate headings for many different purposes.

Suppose I write an email on some technical subject. I can keep a record under the date, a clone under subject heading, another clone as a note for chapter heading in a planned book.

MORE 3.1 is still the best tool for my purposes but I dream of something still better. My dream outliner combines MORE features with mind mapping capability and many powerful features from Microsoft's OneNote. I especially like OneNote's ability to print to a file within the program and wish I could do this with a program which combines the features of OmniOutliner and MORE.

While I'm dreaming, this uberoutliner could also replace PowerPoint and be able to turn outlines into sophisticated presentations.

Well there you have it. That should keep you busy for awhile.

Robert

PS I also would like to be able to move files from one operating system to another and back again.

Robert-

I wish that I had done what you did, and kept an old box working just for MORE. I falsely assumed some modern outliner would quickly provide the HUGELY beneficial cloning capabilities of MORE but it has not happened. Great loss of the report/specifications generator that I had built using MORE cloning.

-Allen

I have also used MORE for my professional work as a writer (I came to it after it had been discontinued) and its cloning capability gives me a fantastic tool for planning my novels. I still have a copy of it and while I like OmniOutliner (and also own OmniPlan), I agree with the posters who indicate that cloning is a very powerful feature that a much broader audience might embrace.

The original question was how do we use cloning, and even with OO4 not including it, I thought I would still offer my answer.
When I outline a novel, scene by scene, cloning lets me have both a linear outline of how the scenes are presented in the book but also lets me clone those scenes that belong to certain story threads or subplots and keep those scenes in their own order. That lets me be sure that the character and plot developments are moving at an appropriate pace. Scrivener has started offering collections, which are like smart folders for this, but it's not quite the same to me. A set of search results and a set of notes that I have placed right where I need them are not the same thing.

And before MORE, I never knew about cloning. It was other, older authors who told me about it. It felt slightly odd to embrace a dead software product to help me make my living but it worked exactly as I needed it to, and I didn't know about the power of cloning in organizing my work because it wasn't an option with any other product.

Thanks for listening!

I can only agree that cloning/aliasing is a much-needed feature.

Here's an example: you're in the legal profession, and are outlining some deposition questions for a common case amongst several witnesses. Some of the questions will be asked of each witness. Others will be unique to the various witnesses. A perfect use of aliasing/cloning.

I understand the difficulty in getting it to work with custom column types. My suggestion would be to handle that later. Get it working without it first.

Still waiting...
 

Hopefully all the examples here of how powerful a tool cloning is means we will see it in v4. After all cloning has been requested since v1 beta. Will there even be a v4? Or is all engineering now aimed at mobile?

Note that I understand resources being shifted to mobile development - but including for mobile cloning is hella more value add than elaborate formatting like columns.

Note also that (as previously stated) cloning does not need to comply with all OO column formatting choices. Just to take the format of the closest non-columnar outine level above would be fine for most usages like writing specifications, task lists, deposition questions, report generation, etc.

I for one could totally do without all kinds of features to just get cloning because without cloning OO's utility to me is very limited.

-Allen

Yes cloning
 

Very much yes on cloning

You did not ask but tabs would be very very useful. Tabs like Safari, at the top

I've come to rely on clones so extensively using Leo (outliner) that I find Omni Outliner of limited utility until it's implemented

Another vote for cloning
 

Potential OO customer who is looking for this feature in an Outliner. Hoping to see it in OO in the not too distant future!

[QUOTE=Ken Case;74060][I]I posted this comment as a followup to [URL="http://blog.omnigroup.com/2010/02/11/ipad-or-bust-two-weeks-later/"]my blog post[/URL], but thought it might also be of interest to people reading this thread…[/I]
[/QUOTE]

And here we are, over 2 years later, with still no shipping OmniOutliner 4... :-(

YEEES Cloning is ver very needed feature
 

as may other said.. cloning is a key feature to structure (non linear) complex data in an outliner... this and a proper spread-sheet like filtering of columns would make like much easier..
peter

Without having read the entire thread of 4 years, I would like to vote as well for "cloning" in some format to come to OO. I'm an old MORE user as well, and for standard questions, special layouts of the data that are all part of one document (then hoisted and printed or saved separately)--it's indispensable.

Although you feel that you've only had a few hundred requests out of thousands of users, it's one of those features that you didn't realize you needed until you tried it. Also, please keep in mind that the folks who frequent (or not as frequent, in my case) these fora are your hard core users who know where to go to ask, and can be seen to represent many others who don't come here to ask. I'd say 1 to 10; each one of us at least represents 10 others who haven't' posted.

I say, cloning (or some derivative of the ideas shared here) in OO4! ;->

[QUOTE=FJHeumann;110321]
Also, please keep in mind that the folks who frequent (or not as frequent, in my case) these fora are your hard core users who know where to go to ask[/QUOTE]
Actually, the users who know where to go to ask know to send email to [email]omnioutliner@omnigroup.com[/email] (or use Help->Send Feedback), not post on the forum!

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;110324]Actually, the users who know where to go to ask know to send email to [email]omnioutliner@omnigroup.com[/email] (or use Help->Send Feedback), not post on the forum![/QUOTE]

Actually, no. Feedback and emails to Omni are primarily a one-way process. If you take the time to study this thread you will realize that the cloning discussion is way more than simply "whah, I want another bell/whistle" and that the requests have been well communicated to Omni at v1 and ever since, and that Omni to its credit has at least responded.

Cloning is a core function of the best outliners that so far Omni has intentionally chosen not to provide, despite feedback ever since v1 (at v1 we were told "soon..."). Users' time is not free, so lecturing on using additional comms methods to advise Omni of something that has been discussed for years is not particularly appropriate in this particular instance.

Users loss and Omni's loss. I let my old MORE-capable hardware go away because I assumed (we all know what that means) that of course v1 OO would evolve and include such an exponentially-useful capability, so why not shift to a modern outliner? Huge mistake.

-Allen

Allen,

you miss the point. Additional email through the feedback mechanism translates into more development priority. Additional forum posts do not. The previous poster expressed a desire to "vote" for the feature, so he needs to send email, not post to the forum. Doesn't matter whether it is a new feature request, or one made by many before.

[QUOTE=kened;34790]i would find this kind of aliasing/cloning extremely useful. As a teacher I have to plan whole course programs, and OO Pro is a great tool for this. If cloning were possible i could - for example - have repeating features for different lessons simply cloned, so that various items could be a kind of mini template within the document - saving lots of work[/QUOTE]

Yes. Would be fabulously useful to being able to port a column from one document to another, complete with the dropbox data choices intact.

Once I’ve created a template feature - I don’t want to have to go through the pain of duplicating it elsewhere just because they were created from two different templates.

Another feature would be to pull in a .csv file & map correctly to the active destination column, with or without a styles match to the destination document.

No alternatives, still want enhancements
 

You prompted me to look: Leo doesn’t seem at all Mac-friendly
& its a little messy to install. It looks like Code Junkie territory.

The install instructions omit all mention of the MacOS - and just discusses Windows & Linux.

Outliner suits me better.

Isn’t this topic in the wrong sub forum?

Cloning
 

Cloning is an essential feature.
I'm very disappointed that it didn't make it into OO4.

Please add it right away.

I'm with popcornflix. Please add cloning soon to v 4.

Thanks.

I started using Tinderbox to use cloning, but I much prefer the simplicity of OmniOutliner. I would love to see cloning as it is extremely helpful in a complex outline. I'm sure the OmniGroup would add cloning if it was straightforward, but I imagine it gets more complex when trying to keep the application compatible with the iPad version.

still waiting ...
 

Cloning is sometimes called transclusion. The feature is invaluable for witness examination outlines. Certain topics apply to multiple witnesses. Copying and pasting is not only kludgy but also makes it impossible to ensure that each incidence of a duplicated section is up-to-date. Cloning. Cloning. Cloning. Please. Please. Please.

rhillcfi, this sort of example is helpful. Can you describe more exactly what you need out of this? Specifically, it sounds like at least row status would need to be distinct between related - if you check off a row in one location, you wouldn't want the row to be checked off for any clones, correct? What about other columns - would you need to edit them independently or would they always be identical? It seems like you would want to at least add distinct notes when performing the examination, maybe even new child rows - or is this just an itinerary and the resulting examination notes are captured outside of the document (or at least outside of the transcluded portion)?

Should there be a "master" section, where changes to it get pushed to all the corresponding transclusions which themselves can't be edited (and would deleting the master also delete the clones, or would they simply stop being clones), or should editing any clone cause all of the corresponding clones to change identically? Maybe a clone should get any changes to rows that haven't been modified locally, but changed rows would be left untouched? Do you need a way to "detach" a clone so that it is no longer connected to its clones? Would clones always exist at the same level in a document, or might a top-level section be cloned as a child of another section, for instance? Should there be some kind of visual indication that a section is a clone? Do unrelated clones need distinct visual identifiers? Do you need some way to directly navigate between related closes?

And styles - do you need to change any of the styling of individual clones? If so, is it a limited set of attributes, like you only need to change the background color for instance? Is transclusion really the best match for this, or would a section template actually be a better match, allowing you to start from a consistent configuration but then customize completely? Or some combination, like you want transclusion initially, but when ready to you start an examination the transcluded section(s) would be "instantiated" and exist distinct from the original from then on?

(This feature has had quite a bit of internal investigation, but even the simplest cases have some difficulties, and there have been a number of conflicting requests for what it should entail, so it has been quite a challenging topic. The more concrete examples that we can get, the better.)

Did cloning/aliasing get implemented in 4? I can't tell from this thread.