1.2 Arriving in January

Happy new years! What better way to bring in the new year with another release of Ume Outliner.

I will be releasing a new version which fixes several editing, menu and toolbar issues. I have also decided to give everyone the "Export to text" feature. Find and replace is still work-in-progress so please use at your own discretion.

I'm currently running through all of the test cases and this sprint should be coming to a close very soon. Stay tuned!

Oh and by the way, you may have noticed that nifty Ume icon in my blog profile - this will be the new application icon. The file icon will be similar.

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!