Hoisting, multiple trees, tree clutter - User feedback welcome...

[srdiamond]

Introducing columns cannot require great programming feats, because when ADM acquired columns, it weighed in at less than a megabyte. There's no where you could stuff all the programming people are imagining columns require into less than a megabyte. Columns cannot be all that hard to do.

But columns may be incompatible with deep outline structures. It seems just too much to manipulate, topics at deep levels, each tied to a bevy of columns. Attempting to put columns in a program that encourages taking outlining to some depth might, it seems to me, really tend to destabiliize the application. Thus when columns were added to ADM, a program that had enjoyed a short-lived reputation as super-stable became utterly flaky. It is now so unstable that even Daley won't actually use it.

Anyway, I'm guessing about the resource demands of columns. I really don't know. But what is clear to me is that the value of columns diminishes in a deep outline. The confusion increases exponentially. Columns after all represent a hybrid between an outliner/database and a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet will only take so many levels before the point of columns is lost. The only program I've seen that is really successful in combining columns with an outline is a professional product called CaseMap. The outline, however, is only intended to be two or at most three levels deep.

It's absurd to take one pet feature like columns and build a scale of technological advancedness around it. You have to at least take account of facts like Zoot being stuck in the 8-bit world; Ariadne being unable to maintain a continuous development path, ADM producing more errors than desired outcomes, and MyInfo being in many respects a minimalist program.