It's of course a good thing when you can pick up an app and immediately do useful work on it. That's probably the definition of the difference between Macs and PCs, but it comes with a price. Sometimes that's a literal thing, as Apple devices cost more, however we mean in the sense that you never stop to look further, and you should. You should, we should: we've been using OmniOutliner for three years, and there have been huge areas of it we've never gone into. Now we have.
Consider this Pointers tutorial an example of both the forgotten corners of an excellent app, and of the smaller little features that we've come to rely on through extensive use of this software. This Pointers was tested on the standard editions of OmniOutliner 4.5.1 for OS X, and OmniOutliner 2.9.2 for iOS.
Search for an outline in iOS
If you told us we could only use one company's software on our Apple devices, we'd be torn between Apple and the Omni Group, we're that keen on it. Yet, please tell us why you haven't been able to search your outlines in OmniOutliner for iOS. You can't in OmniPlan for iOS either, and yet the one you'd expect to skip on search because it doesn't create any documents like these to is the search-replete OmniFocus. If you want to find a task in your To Do app, fine, it has great searching. OmniOutliner and OmniPlan, not so much.
They've lacked this feature since the dawn of time, but now they're never going to get it, because you can use Spotlight instead. The makers had to work to include this, so why they didn't also work to include a search option in the app is anyone's guess. Still, you can now come out of the app, swipe to the left, and bring up the regular iOS 9 Spotlight search bar. Enter something in that, and if it's anything in an OmniOutliner document on your device, it'll find that.
Change your theme tune
OmniOutliner comes with around 20 themes and templates to make it easy to read your outlines. One will have stripes on every other line, so that you can readily see a long list broken down. Another will be, frankly, gaudy. A third will be stylishly moody. They all work the same way, but they all display your outline in a different fashion. We still write practically every outline in the same boring, dull, basic, standard, blank, empty, normal template, and you can tell we're thrilled at it. Yet each time we start using a different template, we regret it for some reason or another.
So don't. Use the boring dull one -- and then when you've got a lot of information in there, change your theme. It's when you've got a packed outline that's full of your own data that you can really assess whether a different template will help you. Or whether it will help you present that information to someone else.
In the iOS app, go into an outline, and tap the wrench-in-a-square icon. In the Contents section that appears, tap Styles, and then the top row is Apply Template Theme. Tap on that, and you get the same choice of templates you do when starting a new document. Choose one, and your existing document reformats to fit the new look. It takes a moment longer than you'd expect, but it works, and you can change back whenever you like.
On OS X, again go into an outline, but now choose the Format menu and Apply Template Theme from there. Note that you appear to get far fewer options: OmniOutliner, for some reason, starts you off looking at only a subset of templates. Click on the Templates word above all the folders on the left, and you'll effectively select every folder and so see every template.
Roll your own templates
We ignored templates for so long because they were just different pretty ways of displaying information, and we wanted to get on with our work. Only, in all the hundreds of outlines we've done over the last couple of years, there are ones that keep coming around again. The
MacNN podcast
One More Thing, for instance, is planned out in an OmniOutliner document every week. Well, we call it planning, it's more a shopping list way of checking that we've got enough tea and coffee in before the chat.
Still,
One More Thing does always include a Thingy of the Week or two, and it might not if we didn't have that on the outline -- and pre-baked into a template. Around episode 10, we were familiar enough with the show that we could open a blank outline and just write down the news headings, the thingies of the week, and so on. Around episode 20 we said hang on, why are we writing this every week?
So for episode 21 or thereabouts, we wrote it out one last time, and saved the barebones outline as a new template. It's just a matter of choosing File/Save As Template in the OS X version. On iOS it's a bit more involved, though.
Create an outline, write whatever text you will always want, and then save it by tapping on the less-than symbol at top left. That takes you back out to the Locations, where all your outliners are saved. Tap the Select button, then tap the outline. Choose the Share icon, the upwards arrow coming out of another square, then choose Create Template from Outline. A copy of it is saved into the templates section.
Next time you choose to make a new outline, your existing one will be in the list of available templates. Note that it'll be in there in alphabetical order, though, and you can't change that to, say, chronological.
Don't push it
OmniOutliner -- and all Omni Group apps -- use a syncing service called OmniPresence, which as well as a great name does come with some effective limits that aren't documented. They're generous limits, and the Omni Group doesn't exactly police them, but there will come a time when you've stepped over the mark.
We stepped over the mark. "While we don't currently have hard limits on storage space, we do ask that each account is kept below 1 Gigabyte (GB) of storage, on an ongoing basis," said the email from the Omni Sync Server Team. "This allows us to provide optimal performance for all of our customers, while keeping the service free. We are currently contacting customers that are using more than 1GB, to request they decrease the amount of data currently stored on the Omni Sync Server."
That is more than fair enough, and we got this email when we had 2GB, so you see what we mean about it not being policed exactly ruthlessly. Still, we hadn't the faintest, faintest clue that we were taking up any space at all, and that's what this tip is really about. OmniPresence doesn't just sync your documents between your iPhone and your Mac, say, it also syncs it to Omni's own servers. If you don't want that for security reasons, or you do want a lot of outlines, you can switch from OmniPresence to your own server.
When we looked at our hundreds of outlines, we found that in a startling number of them we had added audio. You can tap a Record button in OmniOutliner, and we'd done so again and again to capture some detail or other. That's what added up, so if you never touch the Record button, you're less likely to hit the storage limit; but it's there.
Don't bother trying to move columns
It's very handy that OmniOutliner lets you add two or three or four or more columns to an outline, but if you're going to do this, think first and get it right, because your options for changing are limited. On the Mac, you can add another column just by clicking the Add Column button, and then if you click in its heading, you can drag it around. Only, drag it to the first position, before the column that by default is called Topic. It only sort-of works.
If you only ever use the Mac version, then you won't notice this, and you won't have a problem -- but the iOS edition requires that Topic column to be first. Always. You can rename it if you like, but you can't move it. Not that one. On iOS, tap on any column and you get a pop up menu with various options, but ignore them all and tap on Columns at top left. That takes you to a different menu that includes a list of columns.
As well as the straight list, you'll see an icon next to every one except Topic. It's a Photoshop-style icon of an eye with a line through it or not to indicate whether it's hidden or visible. Topic always visible, you have no choice, and Status -- a series of tick boxes --defaults to being hidden, but you can change that. The other columns are ones you've created, and each is automatically shown as visible.
Now underneath all of these there is an Edit button. Tap that, and you can drag the columns up and down the list and therefore, possibly confusingly, move them left and right across your outline. The only columns that you can move, though, are the ones you created: they are the only ones with grab handles, and they are the only ones with delete buttons.
That's because OmniOutliner for iOS must always have a Topic (though, again, you can change that name) and a Status one. If you move a column to before Topic on OS X then open it on iOS, it will have moved to second position. Short version: decide on your columns before you go into this.
More Omni tips
These five tips are taken from my new book
Getting Productive with Omni Software, which is about exploiting OmniOutliner plus the To Do app OmniFocus, and project planning software OmniPlan. It's now out on
iBooks and
Kindle.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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