zim is an outliner.
OK casual blogosphere cruisers, Twitter loiterers and general ADD infected youth: The executive summary here is that Zim is an outliner, and if you're lucky enough to have fired up this blog entry in Firefox, you can try out this working demo.
And for the rest of you (all 3 of you), let's talk why Zim:
Over the past couple of years, the most important personal productivity tool I've used has been OmniOutliner on OS X. The open-ended nature of the tool means I use it for a range of things, from task lists to meeting notes to presentation plans. It works well with my brain, to the point that I rarely actually think about the software, I just find myself using it in all sorts of situations. Most excellent functional design strikes me as 'boring' to talk about (there's not much to say about something that works so naturally), and OmniOutliner is no exception. If I were to describe OmniOutliner I would say it is
Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut.
Which also happens to be the tagline on these little quadrilaterals of brilliance I eat daily.
The personal productivity tool of choice for Mac users right now is OmniOutliner Pro with a GTD plugin called Kinkless. I find the whole thing fiddly, opting to stay with an ancient version of the original OmniOutliner, which on the face of it contains nothing more glamorous than the ability to add multiple columns and export your lists in a couple of formats.
Over the last couple of weeks i've been playing with the idea of a browser-based Outliner not unlike DECAFBAD's XoXoOutliner. So here's a working demo of Zim (Firefox only), and here's the javascript source. Right now it's all pretty basic, so bear with me. I'm building it for a few reasons:
- To come up with javascript design patterns that don't suck.
- Because OmniOutliner is proprietary.
- Because I live in my browser.
- Because I use multiple computers daily.
On the short-term todo list for Zim you'll find such nuggets as:
- Proper undo feature
- OPML import/export
- Drag'n'drop node functionality
- web/email publishing (good for sharing meeting notes)
And longer term daydreams include:
- Hyperlinks and rich-media support
- Actual user accounts
- Multiple columns & column types (e.g. 'date')
- Multiple projects
- Overview page with 'next actions'
Zim will never be an application with many features, and you can expect it to come together slowly - it's a 'weekends' project after all - but with a few social touches and some attention to detail, it could grow into my substitute to OmniOutliner in the long run. No public trac/svn for now but I will shout here if it does happen.