Outliner structure editors
I was totally delighted to read in Steve Gillmor’s Software Blades rant of his enamor of Adam Curry’s on-line OPML display.
Now imagine if that display was an actual working Web-based outliner?
It is!
It’s called the WebOutliner - and it’s been inches of being done - for - oh gee how long is it now - 18 months?
It’s based upon the same ‘activeRenderer’ code written by Marc Barrot. We got Doug Barron (of Frontier fame….) and Danny Goodman (of lots of fame) together to create an open-source on-line outliner that used OPML as it’s native format and did lots of fancy things like:
- drag and drop nodes
- attach image, link or .swf to any node
- transclude entire OPML files onto any node
- built-in RSS feeds
- full file management
But most of all - WebOutliner is an on-line outliner, which saves off files, renders them as HTML and sends them out as email and blog posts. I just really wish we finished it.
It needs to get it’s backend OUT of Frontier and into php.
Anyway Adam’s PodSquad outliner is also based upon activeRenderer and simply renders OPML files. Which is coolio in it’s own right. And Adam definitely groks the metaphor of outlines - for everything.
So thanks Steve for the plug - just keep going - don’t stop there.
And his name is Marc Barrot, the code is activeRenderer and his new baby (congrats Claire) is named Lucille.