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One of the things that happens quite often is that you don’t notice the things that are always in front of you. That’s what has happened with Omni Outliner from the Omni Group. I registered it last year and use it just about every day. I started using it because I needed to organize a bunch of information for a report that I was working on. I was able to structure and write the bulk of the report and then move it into another program for laying stuff out. I really like working in the outlining mode as it helps me structure things and flesh them out. At some point I think that I’ll be using Keynote to create support material (but I’m waiting for a teacher deal like the one that was available in the U.S. for Keynote and iLife together), and I can export my outlines to Keynote to become presentations. Now I make lesson plans with it and use it for all sorts of planning…I’m just starting to use styles with it to make the outlines look better. It’s simple, well-designed and powerful. The only downside is that I also use Omni Graffle which I registered at the same time, but the latest version of Outliner doesn’t work with Graffle…before I could drag and drop an outline onto Graffle and get a neat diagram…but I’ll have to upgrade to the latest version of Graffle to do that again. But Graffle is still great for creating all sorts of graphics, but the update adds a lot…
The most inspirational part of using Outliner is the user community… the application is filled with features that I keep learning about through what other people are doing. The column adding features have made me think of using Outliner to keep track of student marks. Some people use Outliner for project management or accounting and there is a whole page filled with samples that you can download from the extras page.