Users of Symmetry Software's Acta outliner - which was my favorite outliner back in 1993 (see "Inspiration 4.0: Outliners and Me," 14-Jun-93), although I never formally reviewed it - will be delighted to learn that its original developer, David Dunham, has rewritten it from the ground up as a Cocoa application and has released the result as Opal

After a long beta period (and a name change), TAO 1.0 has finally been released. In the immortal words of Calvin (from "Calvin and Hobbes"): "This is so exciting I have to go to the bathroom!" TAO is an outliner - a writing space for working with items of styled text arranged hierarchically

Please accept my sincere apologies if the title of this article has raised your pulse along with your hopes. There is no WriteRight, and, speaking as a professional writer, with thousands of articles and numerous books under my belt, I'm comfortable saying that the Macintosh world doesn't have a word processor that's designed for writers

In our perpetual journey towards better ways of storing and retrieving information, a simple text-snippet keeper like iData Pro, discussed in TidBITS-675, was merely a side trip to a simple, restful pool

Storyspace, the long-standing hypertext application from Eastgate Systems, was the first program I ever reviewed for TidBITS, and I described a new version of it last year

Over the course of my relentless lifelong search for useful ways to squirrel away information on my computer, organize it, and find it again later, I've reported in TidBITS on various outliners, databases, writing tools, and combinations thereof that have appealed to me or that I hoped might appeal to me

Ten years ago, just two applications embodied for me the prospect of all that was brave and new about the blossoming Macintosh age: Apple's HyperCard and Eastgate Systems' Storyspace

Computers are marvelous at storage and retrieval of information, so why are some things so hard to keep track of? You probably know where you put the draft of your novel, or that letter to your congressman

Where does old software go when it dies? In one respect, nowhere, because it doesn't die. Unlike a motorcycle, it has no parts to wear or rust. Unlike a book, the pages don't yellow, fade, or tear

Recently, an amazing program I'd never heard of rescued me from a quicksand of information I couldn't store and retrieve effectively, and from a quagmire of outliners, databases, contact managers, and calendars that couldn't help me

The first issue of TidBITS is dated 16-Apr-90. I sit here, four years later, working on our 222nd issue, and think about all that has changed and all that has remained the same

I'm astonished. Two hundred issues is a lot, and I had no idea we would reach this mark, not because I ever planned to stop publishing TidBITS, but because I seldom think about the future in that respect

While reviewing Inspiration 4.0 for TidBITS #180, I meant to compare it as an outliner with Acta, but the winner kept turning out to be MORE, which I had never meant to consider seriously, and of which I had only an outmoded version (2.0) to examine

Being obsessed with the flexible storage and retrieval of information, I use an outliner all the time - Symmetry Software's Acta. Being an academic, I use Acta mostly to hold my notes on books that I read, and to prepare and update notes for lectures I intend to give. You know what an outliner is: it holds text in a form that looks like - well, an outline