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First let me rave about OmniOutliner Pro: it is revolutionizing my file system, due to its flexibility and its linking capability. Finally an app powerful enough to take over from my old AppleWorks outlines. Or at least I thought so until this morning.

I'm using OOP 3.8 beta 1 on a PowerPC G4 running Mac OS 10.5.5. I'm trying to reproduce a problem I had earlier this morning.

In OOP file A I make a link to OOP file B by dragging in file B's icon from Finder; the link button is labeled with only the name of file B, with no suffix. I save file A. I open file B from the link in File A; file B comes up with the suffix ".oo3". In file B I make a change, save the file and close it. Then I open file B again from file A (which was open the whole time). The change to File B is there.

BUT when I go to finder and click on file B, it comes up in a third window, without the suffix, and without the change.

This defeats the whole purpose of linking: when I go to the other file, I want to be able to modify it! Does that .oo3 suffix indicate some kind of crippled, surrogate file?

This problem reminds me strongly of a problem I had in an earlier version of OOP. I didn't document that one very well, so can't really compare. But I haven't had the problem in some time, and I make these kinds of links frequently.

The problem started today when I did something slightly different from the description above. Let's see how well I can remember it:

Last night in OOP file A I made a link to OOP file B by dragging in file B's icon from Finder. I don't remember whether the link button had the suffix or not. I don't remember whether I saved file A (but it's likely, I save very often). I opened file B; probably from the link in File A but I'm not sure. I made extensive changes File B. Then my fingers slipped and I wasn't sure what had happened, so I saved file B as "file Boop" and opened file B beside it to compare. (Long before I started using OmniOutliner I formed the habit of doing this "oops" procedure; the addition of "oop" to the file name refers to that, not to the name of the app.) The new file was fine; to preserve all the work I'd made on it, I closed file B and saved File Boop as File B, then closed the file. I also saved and closed file A, then in Finder deleted file Boop.

This morning I opened OmniOutliner without a file, then opened File A from Recent Files. Then I opened file B, but I don't remember how. Drat! it's all getting fuzzy now. What I do recall is that at some point I had two different versions of file B open: one with all the changes I'd made yesterday, and one completely without. This was the first time the problem had recurred since I'd installed the latest beta.

I sure hope you can make it possible to modify OOP files accessed via OOP links.

-- Catherine