I had to chuckle at myself a few days ago …
I was listening to the Mac Attack podcast with host Steve Stanger and his guest David Sparks. Stanger was interviewing Sparks concerning his new book “Mac at Work.” He was talking about his work flow and mentioned that he used OmniOutliner and exported his outlines via OPML files to Scrivener the very excellent writing program that I use.
I sometimes drool over new software and new ways to approach my work. And I thought, “Who gets excited hearing people discuss exporting OPML files in their work flow?” Must be more geek inside me than I realized. 🙂
Furthering the geek line, here are some good, new discoveries if you use a Mac. An additional note: Scrivener is coming out with a Windows version very soon; don’t think it’s out yet but very soon.
- OmniOutliner
Welcome to OmniOutliner 3, an amazingly flexible program for creating, collecting, and organizing information. Use OmniOutliner’s document structure to brainstorm new ideas, drill out specifics, and line up the steps needed to get everything done. It’s more than just an outlining tool—you’ve got multiple columns, smart checkboxes, customizable popup lists, and an über-innovative styles system at your disposal. 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.
- NeO
NeO is a powerful outliner built for MacOS X. Using NeO, you can efficiently manage and organize pieces of information. NeO supports basic outliner facilities, such as creating, moving, sorting, grouping, combining and gathering items. And the following useful facilities help you manage and organize information:
- MindNode Pro
MindNode Pro and MindNode are elegant and simple-to-use mindmapping applications for the Macintosh that help to visually:
* collect, classify and structure ideas.
* organize, study and solve problems.
Mind maps can be used for many different tasks – including to-do lists, brainstorming, holiday planning, research, writing, project management – and in many different environments – school, meetings, workspace.
- Scrivener
Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.
