There was a time when OmniOutliner used to be a nice little program for outlining ideas or lists. You could also add additional fields to each outlined item. Pretty much all you needed, or so I thought.

With the advent of general organisational and pooling tools (e.g. Flow, Circus Ponies), Omni Group have decided that what OmniOutliner needs is additional features – including styles, attachments, feeds, voice recording, folded editing, document sections, clippings. All rammed into the original look and feel.

They even say on their website: “Use OmniOutliner to draft to-do lists, create agendas, manage tasks, track expenses, take notes, plan events, write screenplays…and just about anything else you can think of.”

Isn’t this why we have different applications for different tasks, or should the above have read: “Use OmniOutliner to draft to-do lists (sort of), create agendas (sort of), manage tasks (well, that’s what Bob does)..” Manual organisation tools (such as Time/System) have different forms for each thing being managed, and each has a different method of use. Why should software be any different?

BTW, I just noticed how cool Circus Ponies’ Notebook export is. Take a look at this one.

I promise you I’m not becoming an Elles de Graaf groupie. It’s just that she’s rather vocally prolific at present. Best not to listen to closely to the lyrics on this one. They are a bit naff.

Earlier today, I wrote: “Apparently there will be more focus on the design of technologies with ease of use and good looks a key concern”.

If I’m using my SlimDevices Slimp3 and I want to turn it off, I press the On/Off button on the remote control.

If I’m using a device that runs Windows Media Center Edition 2005 and I want to exit it (a slightly different proposition I’ll admit), this is what I would need to do on the remote control:

1. Press the Green Button
2. Press the left arrow on the remote
3. Press the up arrow on the remote (only need to do this step if something (TV, Music, Video) is currently playing).
4. Press OK
5. Press OK

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) launches this week in Las Vegas. No doubt 98% of the 50,000 new products on show will end up being unwanted and unloved or indeed, just plain abandoned, in the coming years, such is the fickle ‘lets-try-this’ approach of that industry.

It’s also nice to know that the Consumer Electronics Association is on the ball when it comes to trend setting product lines. According to one of their people ”[This year] is about personalisation – taking your MP3 player and creating your own playlist, taking your digital video recorder and watch what you want to watch when – you are no longer at the whim of the broadcasters.”

Gosh, that’s so 2001 and 2003.

The BBC even reports that “flat-screen TVs will be among products on show”.

Remarkable: flat-screen TVs? Whoever would’ve thought of those?

It gets better still. Apparently there will be more focus on the design of technologies with ease of use and good looks a key concern. I’ll believe that when I see it. It’s all very well being concerned with these factors, but a different matter to execute them in a product. Besides, most people equate simplicity with lack of functionality. So don’t expect a raft of easy to use products any time soon.

I’ve been wondering why the makers of Basecamp don’t offer a version that you can install on your own servers. With the introduction of 43 Things recently, I think I’ve found one reason.

43 Things has an MVC based architecture. The developers of 43 Things have used a open-source web framework called Rails, which itself is written in a scripting language called Ruby. Ruby is an upcoming scripting language which may one day surpass PHP. Rails was developed as part of the Basecamp project.

So, to host a Basecamp installation, one of the things you need is a web server that runs Ruby. At the moment these a few and far between, making it likely that 37signals thought the effort in creating an installer and supporting client installations too great to warrant the investment.

Ruby on Rails looks interesting. Certainly there is a lot to remove the drudgery of building an MVC-based application (look at JSP in comparison), however, one drawback is that this drudgery is replaced by a lot of command line work. What would be nice is an application that manages Rails projects and interfaces with the core Rails application. Maybe a jEdit plugin, since jEdit knows about Ruby?

37signals have just launched their new freebie web application. 43 Things is a community site for people to list the things they want to do. People can collaborate in a blog fashion documenting how their doing, supporting each other along the way. It’s also easy to browse through the site, find or search for things people are doing and add them to your own list.

So I’ve started my list.