I've been wondering lately why there has been so little useful stuff written about Fargo. It's an interesting product from a lot of angles.

So I've been asking questions, and this is what I've figured out.

1. There are great places to go for reviews of Mac products.

2. If you want to know about software that's sold on Amazon, you'll find lots of reviews from users. I understand that well because I depend on reviews for almost everything I buy on Amazon.

3. For IOS and Android apps there are the stores, which have reviews.

But there is no place, that I know for Dropbox users to find out what the great apps are and what users are doing with them.

Probably because Dropbox as a platform is so new?

It's like a fog here, because we're all operating with so little information.

So let's solove the problem. I started a mail list today for users of Dropbox who want to be in the loop on all kinds of new products. Obviously it's a chicken and egg thing. If enough users show up, the developers will follow, and vice versa.

https://groups.google.com/forum/dropbox-users

We'll probably need some rules of conduct at some point, or move to a blog or blogs, because mail lists always tend to flame out if there's no moderation, but for now, it's a good way for people to meet, if there's enough interest.

As a vendor of a Dropbox-based product, I can tell you I am highly motivated to see this work. Most people who use Dropbox, some of whom would love a great outliner, don't know my product exists. I want desperately to fix that. :-)

 5/18/2013; 3:12:17 PM.

Last night watching the NBA on TNT, new commercials for the YouTube comedy fest. The production was distinctly not YouTube. It was professional in every way. Nothing amateur about it. Google is now MSM. All that talk about Burning Man is sleight of hand. That guy has as much in common with you and me as Rupert Murdoch does.

It's not just Google, Twitter is also MSM. Facebook? Eh. Their presence on TV is mostly in URLs at the bottom of other peoples' ads. Their commercials are amateurish, awful imitations of other tech company commercials. Not to say they're the only ones with awful commercials, but theirs are awful in their amateurishness.

A blog post on Forbes suggests that Google is going to bring RSS back in a MSM-type way. You'll be able to follow Blogger blogs in Google Plus. Maybe they'll make a deal with Automattic and Tumblr to make it possible to follow their blogs too. Me and you? Well we can be followed, but only if we use one of the silos. We have to be locked in someone's trunk to participate.

The web is going to play the same role to all this crazy locked up stuff that it played to MSM in the 90s. We're going to be the oddballs. The ones with amateurish sites. We'll be the artisans, the local farmers of ideas. The ones that lack polish but speak from our experience. We'll do what Bulworth so famously did. I don't have access, and I don't want it. I'd much prefer to hear from other people who don't have access and don't want it.

The web keeps moving. If your attention has shifted and you can't see that, that's not the same thing as the web being lost. Maybe you got lost? :-)

 5/17/2013; 11:32:44 AM.

Over on our Community Feed for Fargo users, a conversation started about how people are loving writing code with Fargo. This really surprised me, because we haven't done much to encourage this. There's a simple feature in the app that allows you to run a single-line of JavaScript code. This means you can call any routine that's in Fargo, or in Bootstrap, jQuery or in the core JavaScript libraries.

We have it in there because it's useful for one-liners, for debugging the app. It's not meant to make it a programming environment. But some people seem to love it. I wanted to know why, so I asked. And what came back from Dave Wynn, a user who I had not met until this exchange, was a simple and eloquent explanation of why Fargo is a great product (I happen to agree with him of course, but then it's partly my creation). Here's what he said, of course in an outline (Fargo is an outliner).

It's as cross platform as it gets

It's file backed

I can inspect it much more easily than other software

Feedback is immediate

 5/16/2013; 11:55:16 AM.

One of our fetishes at Small Picture is getting cool stuff working with no servers.

You can get a lot done. For example -- Little Outliner. There's only one function it relies on a server for, the importing of OPML. And if you think about it, it's ridiculous that that function has to be done through a server. The code is running in a browser, which is perfectly suited to get a file over the Internet.

Many of the limits of the 2013 web are accidents of history. Someone at some time thought an operation was too powerful, that it could be abused, so they made it illegal. But they didn't close off the ability to call a server to do it for us, so we effectively can do anything we need to do.

A great example of that is the way Dropbox allows Fargo to save to the local file system.

This is something we're not supposed to be able to do. But we're doing it anyway. And nothing is breaking as far as I can tell. We're inside a very simple easy to understand sandbox, a sub-folder of the Dropbox folder.

And in addition to being able to write to the local file system, we get cross-device synchronization for free. That's a great deal. (Understatement.)

All this means things are shifting pretty radically. Who is the operating system vendor if my files are equally accessible on Windows, Mac, Android, Linux, IOS, etc? Dropbox is, that's who.

A couple of years ago I asked the guys at Automattic to add a feature to their API that would allow me to store a small XML file along with a blog post. Had they done this, and if we had followed where it would logically have led, today they would have the equivalent of Dropbox, along with content management. You'd be able to publish just by saving a file.

Today you have to figure Dropbox sees this opportunity. And that they will, eventually, navigate to roughly where WordPress is.

The server is moving. A fair amount of what used to be "up there" is now in JavaScript, in the browser. The network services are doing what only they can do, provide global access to published information. And unfortunately due to history, they are also acting as pointless proxies for things a browser app should be able to do for itself.

 5/15/2013; 11:14:23 AM.

My linkblogging tool, Radio2, has a connection with Twitter. You can establish a link between your feed and Twitter so that every item in your feed is also posted to Twitter.

Here's a screen shot. To create the connection you click on the blue bird. That starts an OAuth conversation where the user gives Radio2 permission to post to his or her Twitter account.

I've been hearing, peripherally, that some part of the old Twitter API is about to be turned off, or maybe has already been turned off. I can't pay full attention because it's a small feature, used by just a few people, and I have my attention elsewhere.

Late last night I tried clicking on the blue bird, and sure enough there appears to be some breakage. Twitter complains that there is "no request token for this page." Perhaps they changed something in their OAuth implementation?

I should investigate.

If you have any clues, please post a comment.

Thanks! :-)

 5/15/2013; 9:26:34 AM.

I did a house-cleaning on my river server on May 9. At that time some of the rivers stopped updating. Mostly the ones that no longer have tabs in the user interface because either I personally didn't have enough interest in the subject and not many other people were reading them. I didn't feel like paying for machine resources if only one or two people were reading the flow, or if there were only one or two new items a week.

One of the rivers that I turned off is the Apple river. I use a Mac, several in fact. And I have an iPad and an iPod. I am a long-time Apple shareholder. I am an Apple user, but I am not a dedicated member of the Apple community like some people I respect are. For example, Brent Simmons, Marco Arment, John Gruber, Daniel Jalkut or Michael Gartenberg. I see a tremendous value in the river, if only someone rooted in the community would take an interest. It's also a potential money-maker, imho.

It's really time for communities to spread out and become more inclusive. With a well-curated river, the Mac community can explore more niches, and grow in some interesting ways, perhaps.

So I offer to keep running the river...

1. If someone with a site with serious flow offers to display the river on their site, linked to from their home page.

2. It can be rendered in their template.

3. I will provide support on the technical process for getting the river to display well in another site. It involves using jQuery, something I'm not an expert in. But I got it to work here, so I presume we can get it working anywhere. If we need help I know where to ask for it. ;-)

4. The curator has to have the ability to edit an OPML subscription list, and make it available at a public HTTP address. Fargo, my outliner, does this very nicely, in conjunction with Dropbox. But you can use any tool you like.

5. The person doing the curating and the person doing the display can be different people, if you like.

6. Curating here means choosing feeds, not stories. We're looking for good sources of Mac news and opinion. But it's up to those sources to decide what goes in the river. It's just an RSS aggregator on the back-end.

7. All I want in return is a link from the page back to a page that shows people how to set up their own rivers, which I will write. It won't be hype-ish. I may ask for a little money for the software.

I think the Apple river is a great place to start. Now I'm looking for one of the leaders in the Mac blogging world to step up and work with me on this. I may not be a Mac insider these days, but I go back to the beginning. I was onstage at the Mac rollout in 1984. I had an ad in the first issue of MacWorld. My product won the top Eddy in 1986. I used to go to WWDC back when it was in San Jose. I even spoke at WWDC one year. Ask Guy Kawasaki. ;-)

Let's do this. I think it'll turn out to be an important step in the growth of the Mac blogosphere.

 5/11/2013; 7:16:00 PM.

This question came up in the Community Feed, which you can read in Fargo, by choosing the Community Feed command from the Docs menu. Or you can read it in the Small Picture Reader if you don't use Fargo. I wrote my answer there, but thought it would be interesting to also post it here. No I didn't use the fancy Blogging 2.0 protocol I described in an earlier post. Soooon!

Well of course it would be nice to have everything, if there were no cost.

It would take time to write the code and keep it running. It would be worth doing if there would be a lot of people using it. But right now the Community Feed a new feature. We're still at the point where we're introducing ourselves. If that's all it does it will have been worth it.

I'm an investor in software, and I have to make decisions as any investor would. I can't buy everything. And right now there are other projects that I think need more attention.

Also, and this is a key point, this is not something you need Kyle or me to do. The OPML feed is public. If you want to write the code to convert it to an RSS feed, you can do it.

But OPML feeds? Ahhh that's easy. Since I'm writing both ends I can make it work. And if I want to change things based on what I learn, I can do that too. That's why the early days on anything are important. And why you should go slowly enough so you can feed back what you learn into the protocol.

Anyway you see these questions sound simple, but when you actually start writing the code, they can become complex.

Bottom-line: My bet is that no one would use an RSS feed of this content. That makes it a bad investment. I've been wrong before, btw.

 5/10/2013; 11:33:03 PM.

Jay Rosen wrote me last week to say that the River of News concept had reached a tipping point. That led me to publish a brief email exchange with Brent Simmons about what a river is, from a design standpoint. But there's more to rivers than their form, there are a couple of other very important ways to look at them:

 5/10/2013; 12:07:48 PM.

I wrote a piece in August 2012 which I posted on Medium entitled We Could Make History, in which I proposed that we get together and create a new API to connect authoring tools to publishing environments.

At the time I thought it was a long shot, but worth putting it out there in case anyone was listening at Medium, or elsewhere. That's why I made it openly. And why I put the post on Medium.

Today I'm writing this post on my own blogging platform, which is more or less some scaffolding I put together to hook my outliner up to the web, so I could publish, before we had something real that others could use.

Now I can make a more concrete proposal because Fargo is visible, people can better imagine what I'm talking about.

1. I don't like the idea of writing something to have it visible in only one place.

2. Sometimes I find that a comment I wrote in one place is really a blog post, but why should it stop being a comment?

3. Copy/paste is an awful synch protocol. It's 2013. We can do better! In fact we live in a time of great progress in sychronization, thanks to Dropbox. Publishing should make the leap into the future as well.

4. Software now runs in the browser, written in JavaScript. It's indistinguishable from desktop software. So any protocol we come up with must work equally well with JS apps running in the browser.

5. Meanwhile there are a number of projects underway to bring blogging up to date. But they're doing it without APIs and without feeds. Why? That's not really progress.

6. We were able to hook up Fargo to WordPress, largely to show what's possible. But we had to set up a proxy server so that our JS app running in the browser could call their server. This is a waste of resources and does not scale.

7. We will have a for-real CMS running on a server. It will do things that are new, that none of the other publishing platforms do. But there will still be things they do that we don't. APIs are needed. But I'd prefer to work with others to come up with the API, rather than do both ends myself. If we do it that way we get there sooner, better.

8. I'm pretty sure there will be APIs here. But I'd rather there just be one. We had that worked out pretty well in Blogging 1.0. But let's do it even better in 2.0.

9. Who wants to go first? :-)

 5/9/2013; 2:10:12 PM.

More about Fargo 0.59.

 5/8/2013; 3:20:52 PM.

Levy: "To really think big, you can't be at a big company."

I was amazed that these words came from Steven Levy, former Newsweek tech reporter, and late of Wired. He's spent a career supporting the myth not just that big ideas can come from big companies, but that they only come from big companies.

He was paraphrasing Evan Williams, founder of Twitter and Blogger. But it's still an amazing transformation.

Now, I don't expect the press to all of a sudden start reporting on where big ideas actually come from. But it's nice to be able to point to the truth, just once, from such a source.

BTW, we're thinking very big at Small Picture. :-)

 5/7/2013; 5:54:04 PM.

On April 11, Brent Simmons sent an email, included below. My words are indented beneath his in italic.

I like the river of news style of feed reading, despite having once written an RSS reader that doesn't use that style.

But I'm not actually 100% sure what the technical definition is. I'm not trying to be obtuse about this -- I want to be sure I understand.

I think it's something like this, but I'm not sure which parts are optional, and I might be missing things.

1. It presents a list of articles from multiple feeds in a scrollable list.

2. There might be multiple scrollable lists -- tabs of some kind.

3. Items in the list are sorted in reverse-chronological order by arrival date (date the feed scanner saw the item) rather than by pubDate. (True?)

4. Items are presented with title, link, and an excerpt. The excerpt should be just long enough to be meaningful (around 280 characters).

5. It handles edited items by ____? (I don't know. Does it show them again?)

6. There is no notion of read/unread whatsoever, and thus no unread counts.

7. There is no notion of starred (or flagged, or saved) items whatsoever. (Users can blog, send to a read-it-later service, etc. as they normally would for any web page.)

8. A river of news feed scanner outputs river.js data. (Is this optional? Could it be RSS?)

9. Do river-of-news readers have to be web pages? Could an iOS or Mac app qualify, if it met all the criteria?

 5/7/2013; 12:49:25 PM.

Michael Wolff comments on the job ad that Twitter is running, looking for a manager of news.

He suggests existing news execs, and that's probably the kind of person Twitter is looking for for this job.

It's a head-fake. This guy is a figure-head. He or she will be working with media companies, speaking at conferences, talking about how Twitter is helping media companies succeed in the age of realtime Internet-delivered news. He or she is a feel-good ambassador to the news industry. A person handing out complementary samples of pasta and baked goods while the real action is elsewhere.

The job is a bedtime story. News will be as it always was, with familiar faces and jobs, just with a new delivery system.

Meanwhile, the news system of the future is booting up all around Twitter, which is and always has been a coral reef. They need a new shipwreck to build around, and this time the sunken ship is the remains of the news industry.

Even at this late hour, I have a recommendation to any player in the news industry.

1. Create a river of news and put it on your home page.

2. Include all the news from your own organization, but include news from bloggers in your community.

3. Include the feeds of your competitors.

4. Deliver the best news product you can with today's technology. You can link from the river to stuff behind your paywall, if you must, but the river itself must be freely accessible. Think of it as a river of ads for full-length stories.

5. No 140-char limit. Pick a higher number. There should still be a limit to the length of a synopsis. 500 characters is plenty. Most NYT synopses are much shorter than that.

6. Make nice with Twitter. You can do a head-fake too. :-)

 5/6/2013; 11:48:59 AM.

In software, mis-managed expectation can be as damning as it is in sports and politics.

For example, coming into a political debate, each side tries to portray the other as vastly superior, in every way. If you can get the expectation low enough for your guy, he or she might "win" just by showing up.

In sport, where the outcome is measured more definitely, in points on a scoreboard, you manage expectation to play with the mind of your opponent. An over-confident adversary might relax, and create openings. The Knicks almost lost to the Celtics that way.

In software, I've seen it happen over and over. I've never had to deal with too-high expectations, but my competitors have. The first time I encountered it, with competition from a much-bigger Lotus Development, I was scared. But when we survived the competition without a scratch, I learned that just because everyone thinks you're going to lose, don't necessarily make it so.

I wasn't happy to see the expectations so high for the vaporware product Diaspora. The kids behind it were too young and inexperienced to know how much work there is in creating a finished usable product. Academia, which generally doesn't have much respect for commercial development, doesn't help. The result was awful.

Coach Bill Walsh of the 49ers had this down. Before a big game he'd always pump up the skill and courage of his opponent. Why not? Maybe they'll get over-confident. Either way, if he wins, he just vanquished a superior adversary. And if they lost, he gets to shrug it off with an I-told-you-so.

In sport, politics or software, no one cares how great you think you are. What matters is what happens on the playing field. Did you win or lose? And did you do it with grace?

 5/4/2013; 7:31:13 PM.

I've had Markdown on my to-do list for a few months, and the other day, with a bit of blank space in my worklist, I decided to give it a shot.

It was amazingly easy to integrate into our JavaScript app. I just downloaded the source for Pagedown, the Markdown interpreter used by Stack Overflow. I put it into a file on our server, and included it in Fargo. Added a command to the File menu, and came up with a simple way to generate it for users. The whole thing was done in a couple of hours.

Now we need people who know Markdown and outliners to take a look at this, try it out and relatively quickly, before there's an installed base to break, figure out if there's anything special we need to do, because this is an outliner and not a straight text editor.

Here are a couple of considerations:

1. Should we generate one or two return chars at the end of every outline heading? At first we did one, then thought better and generated two, but now we're back at one. Pretty sure one is the right answer. We often think of a headline as a paragraph, but sometimes headlines are titles. Markdown views titles and paragraphs very differently.

2. Indentation. I thought at first that we should generate a tab for every level, but backed out of that idea quickly because Markdown treats tabs as very special characters. Everything deeper than level 0 would be seen as preformatted code. Not the desired outcome.

So I wonder if there have been any others who have integrated outlining and Markdown before? If so, what did they do here?

See the Fargo docs for an idea how it works from a user's standpoint.

I welcome any comments from Markdown experts (I am anything but that).

 5/4/2013; 4:43:42 PM.

A quick note about a new development with our Fargo outliner.

Fargo now has a Markdown processor baked-in. This means that a user can write a Markdown-formatted outline, and generate HTML from it, with a single command in the File menu.

Markdown and text go together, by design. Outliners are text editors, a special kind that understand structure. There is a structure to Markdown, as there is structure to HTML, but so far as we know, none of the Markdown editors have been outliners.

How the connection with outlines and Markdown will proceed is an unknown. By baking in Markdown we're asking a simple question. How does this work? We hope to hear from users and other smart people who have ideas.

This feature is available in Fargo 0.55, which is now released on the site.

Let's have fun! :-)

 5/3/2013; 4:40:18 PM.

A number of Knicks players did something extremely stupid when they dressed in black for last night's game, saying they were dressing for the Celtics' funeral. These guys may be talented athletes, but they don't understand sports. Amazingly. How could they get that far in the NBA without understanding that you don't celebrate until you win. I know they're young. I wonder if they've ever heard about Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.

Sports, if it teaches us anything, it's how to struggle against our folly. How not to tempt fate. How to manage our own presence.

Look at the incredible baskets these guys make. But they only make them when they're grounded, in the moment, feeling the energy, whatever it is. So JR Smith started celebrating after they had a solid lead in Game 3. He got ejected, and suspended, and not only wasn't there to help in Game 4, he broke the bubble around the Knicks, that had been around the team since they emerged from an awful funk in February. Now we have to wonder if they can get it back.

The Celtics, last night, walking off the court, may have helped the Knicks get back in the groove, repeating trash talk about Carmelo's wife. I'm just theorizing, lip-reading. But maybe he'll get angry and really want to win. That's probably all it takes.

Meanwhile in Oklahoma City, the Thunder coach thought he could sneak by the Rockets with a trick. Oh how sad. Kevin Durant who I thought was a true fighter, is instead mired in self-pity. And the Rockets, a young, smart, admirable -- wonderful group of young men -- are pushing every one of their buttons, artfully. They might pull out the upset. Amazing parallels between the Celtics and the Rockets. One team old, one young. Both not going out peacefully.

All this is a metaphor for my former friend Mike Arrington, who may be the JR Smith of tech. He was celebrating the demise of RSS while the body was still breathing. He had no clue that he had won, or that anyone was keeping score.

Technology isn't all that different from basketball. There's teamwork, and bubbles of energy, and franchises. RSS is not something that dies, any more than the NBA dies. Players come and go, there are generations -- the Patrick Ewing Knicks and the Bernard King Knicks. Now we have the Carmelo Anthony Knicks. But RSS, like the NBA is bigger than me or Mike. He doesn't get to say it's dead. RSS just laughs, shrugs it off and keeps on going.

 5/2/2013; 11:43:06 AM.

My outliner is an authoring tool. I think of it as the hub of a wheel with lots of spokes. At the end of each spoke is a way to communicate.

Some of the spokes lead to private places, for example, the worknotes I share with my programming partner. No one else sees those. But then there are blog posts, like the one you're reading now. At the end of this spoke is software I wrote that renders an outline in this form. I'm one of a small number of people, today, using that method of rendering.

Yesterday we released a spoke that leads to WordPress, the popular open source blogging environment. You can now use Fargo to create and edit posts in WordPress. This works in two ways:

Here are the docs for the feature, and a list of recent new posts written in Fargo.

Here's a homemade video demo of the new Fargo-WordPress connection.

Over time you'll see us add more connection, and of course offer a general way for anyone to add new spokes to the wheel. And because we're using an open format, it'll even be possible to hook other outliners up to the same connections.

For anyone who cares, this is how you bootstrap a new standard, a coral reef for authoring and rendering.

PS: This is what the post looks like in WordPress. :-)

 5/2/2013; 10:59:09 AM.

I subscribe to Pando, along with several hundred other feeds in my personal river.

http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=dave

I click on one link in 100, and I post one or two a year to my linkblog.

If they improved the quality of their posts, I'd push more of their links. I don't have the largest reader base on the Internet, but I am part of a chain that pushes lots of info and ideas around the net. If you drew a net of the people who follow me and who follow them, it would be pretty damn large.

I use RSS because it means I can pay attention to more stuff. If for some reason Pando deleted their feed, I would almost never see a link to one of their stories. The other people I follow, and I follow a lot of people, don't seem to know they exist. It's a very small publication, relative to the size of others like The Verge, Mashable, Engadget, TechCrunch, etc.

Last night Pando ran a piece where they suggested that we "retire" RSS when Google Reader shuts down in July. This was hopefully the last gasp of a malicious thread started by Mike Arrington and repeated by his fanboys, many times over the last couple of years. Their promotion of this idea was out of nowhere, had nothing to do with anything that was actually happening. If they were right, the passing of Google Reader would have happened without any protest. I suppose it's wishful thinking on Google's part that we depended on them to sustain RSS. When the dust settles, I think we'll see that they were stifling RSS. When competiton enters the picture, when lock-in is no longer an option (and that dies with Google on July 1), we will see the market pick up where it left off before Google entered.

So to the extent that there was any thought behind Arrington's rants about RSS, it was incorrect thought. He misunderstood what was going on. And the people who echoed his mantra were equally clueless.

 4/30/2013; 4:12:17 PM.

When users ask when a feature will be available, this is what I say.

Software takes time. Good software takes even more time. We know that so we don't make promises about when software is coming. It'll be here when it's ready.

 4/30/2013; 2:32:37 PM.

It would, imho, be appropriate for users to ask Google what their plans are for Feedburner.

It seems that shutting down that service is even more problematic than the shutdown of Google Reader.

Why? Because it effects everyone who uses RSS, even people who don't use Google products.

There's a real opportunity to do this transition more carefully than the diaspora from Reader.

 4/29/2013; 12:54:53 PM.

Watching this Chris Dixon interview this morning helped me appreciate that Google Glass has real-world non-trivial applications.

Examples:

1. A teacher giving a lecture while drawing a diagram on whiteboard.

2. As a teleprompter for a person giving a speech.

3. A doctor reviewing test results while examining a patient.

4. An architect looking at designs on a site visit.

5. Watching your heart rate while riding a bike.

6. Sign-language interpreter for a real-time meeting.

7. In general, as a heads-up display for jobs that require use of your hands and access to information, at the same time.

Honestly, I had not thought of these applications until Dixon explained.

And of course there are trivial applications, like watching Green Acres while pretending to pay attention to someone talking. ;-)

 4/29/2013; 12:13:24 PM.

I was writing a comment in response to a comment from Hanan Cohen, and decided to make it a post. It was getting so long, and said stuff that I wanted to say more prominently.

Hanan said that Word had outlining in the late 80s, and they never took it out. So we should look out for users of that outliner as people who might like Fargo. But I don't look for any magic there, because their idea of outlining and ours are not the same thing.

What they called outlining was more like outline formatting. Putting Roman numerals on the top sections, capital letters on the first level. Numbers on the second and so on.

Word is a word processor. Its primary function is writing-for-printing. The choices the designers made make it a relatively strong formatter and a weak organizer.

Conversely, we can put formatting capabilities into an outliner, but it would behave like an outliner, not a word processor. We fully explored this with MORE, the users loved it, but they still needed to export to Word or Pagemaker if print formatting was important.

Word is a production tool -- good for annual reports, formal papers, stories, books. Fargo is an organizing tool, good for lists, project plans, narrating your work, presentations, team communication. You could organize a conference with an outliner. The slides would naturally be composed wiht an outliner.

An outliner is designed for editing structure more than it is for editing text. The text is sort of "along for the ride." Or you could see an outliner as text-on-rails. Outliner text is always ready to move, with a single mouse gesture or keystroke. You enter text into an outliner so you can move it around, like stick-up notes on a whiteboard.

The reason a program has to be either a word processor or an outliner is this: There's only one keyboard, and one set of mouse gestures. The identity of a product is determined by choices made by the designer. Word processors are good at selecting words, sentences and paragraphs. Outliners select headlines and all their subs. Shift-click in the two apps do vastly different things, yet in both cases they are "extending the selection." Even the data structures used by the programs are different. Yet superficially they look similar.

Some great software designers were fooled by this in the first go-around. Probably the guys who did Word thought at first that they were equalling our outliner, but I guess over time they realized what we learned too. That you need to know what your product is supposed to do before you make those choices. Otherwise it ends up as a confusing unusable mess. That's why Lotus 1-2-3 was a magical product, and Symphony, that confronted this problem head-on and didn't solve it (because it doesn't have a solution) never had 1-2-3's balance and sharp-edge feel. Symphony was mush, 1-2-3 was fine.

People who used an outliner were never satisfied with what the word processors called outlining. Ultimately that's how you tell what you got. When you sit a person down in front of the keyboard, does magic happen?

BTW, this is great. When I was selling outliners in the 80s there were no blogs, so I couldn't comment on how the various categories of software were handled by reviewers. Now the conversation can be multi-dimensional and lots of learning can happen quickly. Hope! :-)

 4/28/2013; 8:21:01 AM.

This post was written quickly.

It was an interesting week to be in Boston, as in the Chinese proverb about living in interesting times. But not for the reasons people think.

I learned this last night, in a big way, at the Berkman Thursday meetup. We had about 15 people there, some original people from the old days, and some new people who totally fit in. Having new people there makes sense, because the Thursday group was like that. Every week we'd have a fair number of returning friends, and always a healthy number of newbies.

One man, whose name I didn't catch, said something that I found surprising at first. He said that the press got the story of Boston wrong. The people weren't cowering in fear in their houses as was reported on TV and on Twitter. That was a lie. I admit I found it irrational. Boston is probably about the size of Queens, in geography and in population. If someone was holed up in Astoria, people in Flushing probably wouldn't be too worried. It wouldn't make sense. It would be like worrying that you'd get hit by a bus on any given day. There are a lot of days when no one gets hit by a bus. And even so, the chances of you being that person, well, it's not a smart thing to spend a lot of time worrying about. (Though please, look first before you step out into a street!)

Everyone in the room who was from Boston immediately agreed, enthusiastically. They didn't like that they were being portrayed that way by the media. So we explored the actual story, what was really going on among the people of Boston. The answer was, they were working together to make their city safe. The city hadn't shut down on the Tuesday or Wednesday after the bombing. But on Thursday night, when the bombers were on the run, the police asked everyone to stay off the street. And the people did what they were asked to do, because that's what people do.

This goes back to one of the themes of my talk on Wednesday night at the Boston Globe. People feel a need to be part of the world they live in. Most of us feel like we're on the sidelines, spectators, consumers, eyeballs, credit card numbers, and that's not what we want. We want meaning. We want to make a contribution. We want do do good and have that good make a difference. If you look at what people actually do, not the stories you read in the paper or hear on CNN, this is obvious. The bombings not only worried people, for a short time when the scope of the danger was unknown, but people also saw the opportunity to get some of the precious stuff, meaning and relevance.

Why was this a theme of my talk at the Globe? Because the news industry has the ability to offer people exactly what they want, but they won't do it. Their view of the world is that we're out there and they're inside. They talk, we listen. They are relevant, their lives have meaning. The meaning of our lives is not important to them. As long as they view it that way, people will continue to be frustrated by them, as long as they pay any attention. And more and more they're chosing to not pay attention.

This week the people of Boston learned something about the press because they told a big lie not just about a handful of them, but all of them, collectively. This presents a unique opportunity for a whole city to wake up and take over. I suggested at dinner that the people of Boston buy the Boston Globe, and give it a new direction. You know a city the size of Boston could buy the Globe. And you know what, it's actually for sale. :-)

 4/26/2013; 8:19:44 AM.

I had a flash yesterday, after doing a series of demos of Fargo here in Boston on this trip and my last one in March. In several cases, the people were close to my own age, and were former users of MORE and ThinkTank. For these people I just needed to show how Fargo picked up on the ideas in those products and brought them into the technology world of 2013. But in a couple of cases, the people, smart and accomplished, had no idea what I was talking about, so I had to start from the beginning. Just like the old days, before outliners were a semi-major category. I don't mind doing this, I actually kind of like it -- but the engine is rusty. I haven't done this kind of selling in many years.

The conclusion I reached, in an email, trying to explain it to a friend (who is 47) is that if you're under 50 you probably came into computing after the outlining category began to fade. If you're over 50 and a techie, you probably remember at least knowing someone who was a fanatical outliner, whose arms would wave as they tried to explain what they were so excited about. As they spoke, little bits of saliva would drip from the corners of their mouths. Non-inductees of the Club of Outliner Fanatics would stare, not knowing what to make of it. But at least they knew what they were, if only by the reaction they provoked with their acolytes.

Now, there are companies, notably Omni and Eastgate, who have made a good living selling outliners, all along. I think that's because, while the category hasn't been growing as a percentage of computer use, it is growing in absolute terms, because so many more people use computers today than did in the late 80s and early 90s.

I have my work cut out for me. I have to explain Fargo to a couple of new generations who don't feel so new, being in their 20s, 30s and 40s. This is going to be fun. ;-)

BTW, my father, who would have been 84 this year, loved my outliners. So it's not just people in their 50s and 60s. Some of the people who could explain why this software is so great, are no longer with us. My dad would have absolutely flipped over Fargo. I think about that a lot. Wish I had done this work sooner so he could have seen it.

 4/26/2013; 7:43:14 AM.