[wbm]

Originally Posted by Ashcroft

Here's a suggestion for a strategy that may satisfy a large number of costumers for the short term and give OG more time (in terms of customer patience) to tackle the bigger problems that's been hindering them from introducing any automatic syncing (via Dropbox, iCloud, you name it...) at all - for such a painfully long time.

OG could introduce a new "slim" file format for OO with a limited feature set that's rather easy to sync. ...

So what if this new file format would only feature the most commonly used text attributes such as font-family, color, size, bold, italics, underline and strikethrough? Plus: colors for backgrounds, multiple columns, checkboxes and folding-states, of course. ...

I think this could make a *huge* number of people very happy. Whaddayasay?

Agreed. This situation — where the functionality (and market viability) of a product is held hostage to supporting legacy features — is very similar to what is happening with Microsoft, where they are trying to conform tablet functionality to support the legacy features in Microsoft Office for PC's. In this case, OG is not providing (so far) a critical performance feature found in best-in-class mobile iOS apps — simple cross device syncing — to support a legacy feature (embedding attachments into outlines). I didn't even know that Omni Outliner could embed attachments, and even after I learned that, I still don't use it. As with some Office features, I'm sure it's a nice feature, but I don't think it's so nice that it justifies omitting a feature (cross device syncing) that many long-time, loyal OG customers expect and depend on for their work flow.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

Which is more useful to you: an application which has an easy to use sync that gets your documents to all your devices with a minimum of fuss, but offers only weak beer when it comes to actually doing anything with the contents; or an application where moving files around is somewhat inconvenient, but which offers some utility in return?

I guess I have discovered the answer to that question. Earlier this week, I threw in the towel and switched to the vastly inferior CarbonFin Outliner, which has an iPhone version and supports syncing between the iPhone and iPad versions.