discussing tester's edition
 

is it appropriate to discuss bugs and oddities from the testing program for oo4 here? (after sending a feedback report of course) i have some things i've found, and i wonder if this is happening for other test users.

Yes, everyone is free to talk about anything OmniOutliner 4 related in this forum. Thanks for asking!

some very quick initial thoughts on OO4.

i like the new interface - especially the updated unified sidebar. it might be nice to have some control over the styling of items in the sidebar - emboldening, italics, perhaps, i'm not sure about this yet, so i haven't yet sent a particular request to support. i'd be interested to hear what other users think about this. in the sidebar, with OO3, i am able to reveal subsections by double-clicking any sub-section item with children, i would like to do this with OO4, but at present there is only a context-menu item 'show' or 'hide' subsections.
i think i've discovered a bug with this (which i've emailed support about) when i choose 'show sub-sections' (or children) nothing happens. however, when i close the file and re-open it, the sub-sections then appear in the sidebar, with their parent having the bullet-point changed to a working disclosure triangle. until this is fixed, i can't use OO4 for anything more serious than playing around.

the ability to zoom - at last! - is beautiful.

i have, over the years, got used to OO3's much maligned styling processes, and i find the new OO4 style section very obscure and apparently illogical after OO3. i also have the iPad outliner, and i find that similarly (although not quite so) confusing. i think i need to make myself think about it a bit more.

after two weeks
 

the new interface is more streamlined - if a little dull. but the unified style and hierarchy sidebar is neat, compared with the old pull-out drawer.

aside from the text zoom feature - which is great, something which should have been there ages ago frankly - there isn't that much to get excited about in terms of new features unless i'm overlooking something. but i was already pretty satisfied with the programme for my purposes.

as for styling, i'm less confused than i was at first, and with a lot of (not all ... ) the bugs ironed out, i'm getting it. i was quite accustomed to the styling in OO3. so there was a lot of self re-training to do, but once you understand how it's shifted, the styling system is pretty clear, if not yet fully functional.
i'm just wondering if there's likely to be anything which will make me go 'wow' before the first public release.

keep up the good work guys, overall it's definitely promising to be an improvement over OO3