Outline: Knowledge Organizer 4+

This Application is the Best, it works fast, the search feature also works fast. I like the Interface too. I am waiting for the Updates, so that we can write or edit the content. I am sure Outline Team will come up with new updates soon. This App is worth Buying.

With the advent of the Microsoft OneNote app on the OSX platform I think the future of Outline is to move away from the OneNote support and embark on its own. It can function as a full fledged standalone app especially useful for those of us who wouldn’t don't to have a Microsoft account.

Needed features :

1. A web clipper like Evernote’s webclipper which has many ways to customize the web clippings including highlighter and simplified article view.

2. Ability to collapse subpages

3. Better formatting tools. The current ones are limited.

4. Internal inking of paragraphs, sentences etc to any other word, paragraph or sentence anywhere else in the app. Instant personal Wiki.

5. Publish to Ibooks, Epubs ?

6. Needs better performance. It is OK for a few dozen notes but from what I see it might stutter when they runs into hundreds and thousands.

7. Tags. Really.

I left Outline a year back for Evernote because they had vague little bugs everywhere, creating tables worked in a different way and the search didn’t function properly.

Evernote was a refreshing change, it was fast and robust. However I sorely missed the hierarchical tree organization Outline provides. I came back to Outline and was pleasantly surprised to see that everything seem to work well. And now they have iCloud sync too, not to mention several iOS 9 features on their companion app. The search works flawlessly too. I’m so happy the Outline team have upped their game and truly done themselves proud.

Some more advantages that Outline has over Evernote are: it’s a pay once and forget it deal, you own the app forever and all your notes are available offline, with Evernote you either pay them on a monthly basis or you use their free service but you have to be online to view notes and are bugged with occasional nag screens and they put their branding on your notes (at the bottom).

Both are excellent products (well, Evernote is a product and a service) - if you want absolute reliability and robustness go with Evernote, the free service is pretty decent and upgrading doesn’t cost too much, though it IS a recurring expense. If you can do with a few minor quirks then go with Outline, it works better everyday and it looks absolutely gorgeous, Outline is a pleasure to work in.

A few suggestions: the default “Normal” font size should be user defined, I find the current size too small.
It uses over 1 GB on my MacMini even when it’s idling, I appreciate an app jumping to action when I click on it in the dock but a full GB while idling is a bit much, in my opinion.
Lastly, the search feature could be improved: when I search for a term I’d first like to see the sections the contain the term listed, and when I click a section it should give me the number of occurences in that section with arrows to navigate to the previous or next occurence, all occurences should be highlighted and the occurence I am currently on should be highlighted in a different color from the rest. This is standard search functionality in all decent editor apps and it needs to be in Outline too.

My hats off to the Outline team for the improvements they have made in the last year, they’ve restored my faith in their team and the product. I hope it keeps improving as I suspect it will. Cheers!