Quote:
Originally Posted by WrongSizeGlass
So OG will now go out on a limb and state that you were looking to add it and that hopefully you'll get back to it.
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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.
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?
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:
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.
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?)