LeadingProject

You may recall me reporting on ConceptDraw Project in an early column. Ukrainian developer Computer Systems Odessa has a very aggressive agenda. They have been building a cross-platform (Windows/Mac) integrated suite under the ConceptDraw brand which integrates drawing, diagramming, mindmapping, presentation (like PowerPoint), and project management. The suite targets businesses, not a bad strategy, and they have a special edition for the biomedical enterprise.

Because it competes with Microsoft products, is “comfortable” on Windows (user interface-wise), and targets businesses, I find the way it works to be a bit straightjacketed compared to pure Mac products. But feature-wise what these folks have done is miraculous. What’s nice about their approach is it reaches far back into the early brainstorming phase of projects, so it covers more of the life cycle than usual business suites.

That’s more than I wanted to say. Anyway, they are apparently now changing their business strategy or developing a parallel one. ConceptDraw Project is now improved and rebranded as LeadingProject. Where ConceptDraw Project was $180, LeadingProject is $250 plus another $50 if you want the boxed version.

We’ll cover it next month.

Daylite

Most of these applications bind contacts, schedules, and project outlines in some way. Daylite emphasizes the contact end and bills itself as a contact manager. It sells for $149. I consider the approach to be one of building an integrated database of all the elements and presenting views that include integrated outlining. That is an approach worth examining and has lots of advantages. It syncs to Palm and integrates with Chartsmith.

ActionItems

ActionItems takes a completely different approach. Instead of building a consolidated database like Daylite, it leverages existing databases and applications that every modern Mac owner has: Address Book, Mail, iChat, and iCal. It is breathtakingly different, and the difference between these two approaches is one reason for the delay in the survey. Both approaches offer significant advantages depending on how your mind (and consequent projects) is structured.

I can say that ActionItems spends more time on user interface and is probably best for smaller teams. ActionItems is $99. The ATPO Tracker introduced it two months back as we did with Process.

Merlin

Merlin has just been released by a German group. It sells for 145 Euros (about $193 as I write). This group takes an approach that is yet again different from the two above. It is an open database framework for program management. In other words, rather than present a set of specific tools that it hopes you like, it gives you quite a few plus the ability to adopt whatever unique management techniques you desire.

It presents a variety of report panels on whatever you want: risk, resources, issue management, conflicts, and so on. The ability to create new ones is (I assume) reflected in the name the developers chose: ProjectWizards.

Incidentally, it links to NovaMind and iCal and exports to Palm and iPod. You can see how these radically different architectures have complicated my survey. Each employs outlining in a way that superficially looks similar, but is not at all.

I hope to be engaged with as many developers and users as possible in this project.

I’ll be looking at lighter weight task managers as well.

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In the general outlining community, here’s what’s up:

DEVONthink

Last month we reported on the update of the junior product, DEVONnote. Now we have the similar update of its big brother DEVONthink. This product is targeted at importing (directly or by reference) essentially any sort of document. It builds a text-based index in collaboration with you, and the utility of the thing is what you can do with this index. No competitor can currently touch it in two areas: the comprehensiveness of the documents it indexes and the inferencing it employs in the indexing and search functions (which extend to Web searches with DEVONagent).

It has been comparatively weak in user-directed tools to mature the content and the inter-relationships of its documents. This update helps. It adds metadata tags (which they call labels, something long overdue) and wiki links. It cooperates better with key mail clients and adds a sychronization function. Boy, I needed that!

Still no word on the long overdue DEVONthink Enterprise Edition.

VoodooPad

While DEVON started with depth and is struggling to add user-directed structure, Flying Meat took the complementary approach, starting with breezy easy creation of linked notes. Now they add some depth. Version 2 was just released, and this is a whole new animal. It adds too many things to list here. I’ll only focus on two that are ATPO hot topics.

Regular readers will know that I like metaoutlining, where notes are ordered in an outline structure and the notes themselves can have some outline structure. Its a Zen thing: atunement with graphical structure of text is as valuable in the small as in the large. Now VoodooPad joins a few others in supporting bulleted lists in notes. Hey, it’s a start.

The other deal is integration with Address Book. Names in the book now act as wiki words. Good.

FrameMaker

I’m often amazed at the surge of cleverness in the Mac outlining community. One of the main purposes of outlining is the creation of written documents. Outlining is a particularly strong paradigm when the document carries its structure into the page layout and publishing phases. Unfortunately, our strongest program for structured documents is Adobe’s FrameMaker. I say unfortunately because Adobe has dropped support on the Mac for Frame.

I’m reminded of what a loss this is, and what it means for the Mac as I sketch out an ATPO column on writer’s workflow using outliners. Perhaps FrameMaker is obsolete. Maybe Adobe has plans for FrameMaker-like features in InDesign some day. But the sad fact is the rest of the world gets to use this powerful tool and the Mac (which had it before Windows users) is now abandoned. So Mac outliner-fed workflow is stymied because the world’s top application for structured documents just isn’t there any more.

This should bother you. If it does, please visit the Frame-on-Mac OS X petition page and voice your concern.

Publicon

In my ATPO column on user interfaces, I mentioned Mathematica Notebook’s unique way of providing outline controls as nested brackets on the right. The notebook is a pretty elegant outliner in a way and scriptable to an astonishing degree. But to use it you had to buy the whole, pricey Mathematica package. Well, no more.

Now you can use Publicon, which is the notebook stripped out of the Mathematica package and goosed up in the editing, styles, templates, and publication areas. It’s a whole different approach to outlining in a word processing context and is worth tracking. Now we have three in this space: Mellel, Word, and Publicon.

iDive

I’m thinking of doing a column on multimedia outlining. It has become quite a challenge, forcing me to rethink just what outlining means in a video context. I suppose we’ll get to some of those advanced notions in due time. But in my research, I discovered iDive, a very nice piece of work. You can consider it a specialized consumer database for video clips and projects that has the outline as its basic organizing paradigm. Portfolio has an outlining view as well, but is oriented to static images.

StickyBrain

Finally, several ATPO readers have advised me that StickyBrain has been reincarnated as a Cocoa application. The un-Mac like interface is gone. As with a growing number of outliners, it now supports Palm and iPod export, and Address Book integration. It has good clipping services and supports internote links (now also links to Address Book entries).

• • •

That’s it for this month. I apologize for not having our trademarked extensive screenshots.