I posted this comment as a followup to my blog post, but thought it might also be of interest to people reading this thread…
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!