Happy Holidays!

Needless to say, I've been quite busy working on bringing you Ume Outliner 1.2 for the new year. But alas, it is the holidays and I will be taking a break for a week.

I wanted to wish everyone a wonderful and safe holiday and I look forward to the new year!

I have some pretty cool stuff in store for Ume Outliner so please, join me on Twitter for the latest updates!

What's new for 1.2?

Here's a quick rundown on what is to come in January 2010 for Ume Outliner.

Ume Outliner 1.2 Preview Edition

• Bulleted lists
• Numbered lists
• Settings
• Some fixes to editing
• Find/Replace (work in progress)

Ume Outliner 1.2 Release Edition

• Bulleted lists
• Numbered lists
• Spellcheck
• Settings
• Some fixes to editing
• Find/Replace (work in progress)
• Documentation
• Wikipedia, Freebase, Google, and Twitter searching
• HTML/Text export

Some other things I'm investigating for 1.3:

• Removal of font popup (instead I'm going to have a drop-down in the toolbar for fonts)
• Tree styles - customizable styling per item level. For example, all level 2 items can have a blue font.
• Code cleanup
• Ribbon toolbar would be nice but I don't see this happening until the next major release of .NET.

And additional stretch goals for 1.3-2.0:

• Plugin support: this will allow users to extend Ume Outliner
• Template support: quickly load an outline template (for essays, stories, etc)

And a video to cause some excitement!

Of course, there's some other tools I have on my mind but currently keeping secret until the next release.

Launching the new developer blog

To kick things off with the new Ume Outliner developer blog, I would like to talk about why Ume Outliner exists, especially when the market is already saturated with several outlining options.

I had always been a fan of outlining, especially after a friend had shown me some snazzy outliner for the Mac. Granted you could do a lot of things in a word processor I began to wonder if there were any outliners for Windows. Sure enough, a Google search resulted in hundreds of outlining applications for Windows.

Unfortunately, I had a few issues with the current state of outliners for Windows:

1. Most outliners for Windows were dual pane, there were very little single pane outliners that could support rich text formatting
2. Several projects were defunct or had very little activity
3. They all did the same things
4. Not enough features tailored towards researching

I decided to build an outliner exclusively for Windows to solve these issues but also to build an outliner with meaningful and updated features.

What should you expect from Ume Outliner?

Firstly, I come from a Linux/BSD background and with that, I have a fondness with Emacs, and Vi which are severely efficient. I want Ume to have the same keyboard shortcut power (maybe not as masochist as Vi, but you can expect every tree ordering option will have a shortcut)

Secondly, I want to include meaningful features in Ume. Version 1.2 already has shortcuts to search Wikipedia, Freebase, Google, and Twitter based on your selected text. There is no need for excessive features that users will rarely use; I would rather focus attention to the smaller things that have the largest impact. If the user wants a customized feature, the future plugin system will cover this niche.

Finally, I'm a true believer in extensibility. My goal for version 1.3 or 1.4 will be to add some sort of plugin system so that other developers can create tools to help you improve your experience with Ume. I think this is where you'll find a lot of features come alive like syncing with other applications and devices.

So there you have it, a developer vision of Ume Outliner. Thank you for reading!

Please remember that Ume Outliner is built solely by me on my free time and money. If you feel that Ume Outliner has potential, please make a donation, even if it's a dollar. Every bit will go towards making Ume a better outliner for everyone!