It\u2019s been a while since I did any kind of tech review, but this one needs to get out there. I\u2019ve been meaning to do it for ages and just haven\u2019t had the time. Well, I still don\u2019t, but here I go anyway.<\/p>\n
First, for anyone reading this who doesn\u2019t know, The Omni Group<\/a> is an Apple-only software shop that makes what I consider to be some of the best applications out there. OmniOutliner Pro<\/a> and OmniGraffle Pro<\/a> for the Mac are absolutely top-notch. In fact, OmniOutliner Pro for the Mac is one of may all-time favorite applications anywhere ever on any computer, right up there with MacWrite Pro back in the day. My hard drive is littered with probably a thousand OmniOutliner documents.<\/p>\n Now, I also love my iPad, and I put off getting one for a long time because Omni hadn\u2019t released OmniOutliner for it. I did finally cave before the release, but I really missed having a top-notch outliner for the iPad.<\/p>\n So, with all that praise floating around, how is OmniOutliner for iPad (hereafter just \u201cOO\u201d)?<\/p>\n Unfortunately, my reaction to is is mixed. While it\u2019s certainly the best dedicated outliner I\u2019ve seen for the iPad, that\u2019s not saying to terribly much, though CarbonFin Outliner<\/a> is pretty decent. The fundamental problem is that OO doesn\u2019t live up to the Mac version. This is slightly odd for Omni, since the iPad version of OmniFocus is actually far superior to the Mac version, and OmniGraffle is quite comparable on both platforms.<\/p>\n Omni certainly got a lot of things right on the iPad version of Outliner. It generally looks good, it\u2019s responsive, it\u2019s packed with features like full multi-column support, has a good set of starter templates, etc. Omni obviously put a lot of work into it.<\/p>\n But, unfortunately, they didn\u2019t get it all right, and this is where I get into the mixed feelings part. Let me describe what I think are the most major flaws:<\/p>\n The Document Manager<\/strong> Mac Synchronization<\/strong> Now, I would guess that in the future Omni will support iCloud and this will get somewhat better\u2014if you can use iCloud. Unfortunately, for work I still need some old applications that only run under Rosetta, so I can\u2019t upgrade to Lion yet, so I can\u2019t use iCloud. (Also, some of my favorite Mac software isn\u2019t Lion-ready yet, which is a separate rant for another time.) <\/p>\n Mac Incompatibilities<\/strong> Missing Functionality\/Feature Requests<\/strong> The other thing I desperately want is the ability to print. Amazingly, there are times when I want to be able to have hardcopy, and as far as I can tell, there\u2019s no easy way to do this from OO. It can be done, badly, by exporting the outline to some other app that does know how to print, but again, this is a pain and the results often aren\u2019t quite what I want.<\/p>\n My Other UI Gripe<\/strong> Now, despite all those things, I still use OO for iPad fairly regularly. In fact, I even generated the outline for this review on it! It\u2019s still a good iPad app, and it\u2019s still a fairly early release, so I\u2019m optimistic that some of these will be addressed in future updates, though I have concerns about how soon such things will be available given that OO for Mac has been at version 3 since early 2005(!). OmniOutliner for iPad does fall short in some key areas that prevent me from using in the way I would like to use it. Most of those issues are ironically enough that OO for iPad is difficult to use with the Mac version of OmniOutliner. If your planned use of OO for iPad is as a standalone, then I\u2019d rate it higher. But using it with the Mac version is frustrating and klunky, not things I generally associate with Omni Group products.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s been a while since I did any kind of tech review, but this one needs to get out there. I\u2019ve been meaning to do it for ages and just haven\u2019t had the time. Well, I still don\u2019t, but here I go anyway. First, for anyone reading this who doesn\u2019t know, The Omni Group is … Continue reading Review: OmniOuliner for iPad<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,3],"tags":[17,20],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nUnfortunately, OO uses the same kind of document manager as Apple\u2019s productivity apps like Pages and Keynote. Unfortunately, it\u2019s not very good. It\u2019s fine when you have only a few documents, but it doesn\u2019t scale very well. As I noted above, I use OO all the time on my desktop, and I want to do that on my iPad as well. Unfortunately it just doesn\u2019t scale. If you have even 30 documents, it becomes very cumbersome to manage. There are no folders and no search facilities, just view by modification date or file name. This is a pretty major stumbling block, and while it is one shared by numerous other iPad apps, i feel it more with OO than with any other app, since I tend to generate lots of outlines. (This is my preferred way to take notes in meetings, for example.) GoodReader is an example of an application that does this much better. No, GoodReader\u2019s document manager isn\u2019t pretty, but it scales a heck of a lot better.<\/p>\n
\nThis is also a really important thing for me, to be able to share outlines between my iPad and my Mac(s). OO is pretty bad at this as well. First, it doesn\u2019t support DropBox, which is a shame, only WebDAV and iDisk. (And iDisk is going away anyway. More on that in a bit.) iDisk support isn\u2019t very good, though some of this isn\u2019t Omni\u2019s fault\u2014iDisk has always been a dog for me. The real problem, however, is that it doesn\u2019t actually synchronize at all. It will make a copy of something on iDisk, and you can save a copy of a document to iDisk, but those are only copies. It doesn\u2019t sync. This means I constantly have to check and re-check to see whether the most recent version of any particular document is on iDisk or on the iPad. Again, GoodReader has this problem solved reasonably cleanly, storing a link to the document on the sever and supporting a \u201csync\u201d button that figures out who\u2019s newer and syncs it. <\/p>\n
\nAnother other big problem is that there are number of very annoying incompatibilities between the iPad and the Mac that OO simply does not handle well. For example, I find that to look right on the iPad, I need documents zoomed in to about 125%. Unfortunately, when you open that document back up on the Mac, it remains zoomed in at 125%, and there is no way to change the zoom level on the Mac version of OO. Argh! (Actually, I\u2019ve figured out a way to deal with the problem, which qualifies as a horrible hack: If you open the raw XML of the OO document on the Mac with a text editor like BBEdit, you can actually find the setting buried in the XML and change it back to 100%. Not fun.) There are also problems going the other way. If the document on the Mac side is in a font that doesn\u2019t exist on the iPad, it obviously can\u2019t use that font\u2014but then it throws away all<\/em> font information in the whole document. All the bold, italics, size changes, etc. are wiped out when you open it on the iPad. Look, I understand that Gil Sans (or whatever) doesn\u2019t exist on the iPad, but it\u2019s not like bold<\/strong> doesn\u2019t exist. Why is that information lost?<\/p>\n
\nThis might be getting a little nitipicky, but I really like being able to attach audio to my outlines, which is something that is available on the Mac side. As I mentioned, I like to use OO as my note-taking app in meetings, and it would be GREAT to be able to record audio snippets as annotations. I guess this is more of a feature request than missing functionality. <\/p>\n
\nThe last thing on my list is another user interface gripe (the document manager being the first one). One of the most important features of an outliner, from my point of view, is use as a hierarchical checklist. Fortunately, OO supports this, but its support for this is pretty awful from a UI standpoint. Fundamentally, where you want the checkboxes to be is on the left side with the start of each line of text, and you want those checkboxes to indent as the text indents. This is exactly what the Mac version does, and what every even half-decent outliner I\u2019ve seen anywhere else does (including CarbonFin Outliner on the iPad\/iPhone). Unfortunately, OO for iPad treats the checkboxes not as a property of each row, but as an entirely separate column, and this column is rendered on the right<\/em>, away from the leading edge of the text. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a truly awful bit of UI. Usually Omni is really good about UI stuff (one of the reasons I\u2019m normally such a fan), so this seems very out of character.<\/p>\n