- Kickstart for MORE newbies
Terrific introduction to MORE outlining by Geoff Heard, available as PDF, Nisus, or plain text.
- A 60-second demo/tutorial
A brief text page to import into MORE, illustrating its presentation features.
-
John Faughnan's excellent, long-standing resources page for MORE, GrandView, and other classic outliners, now freshly updated. Includes links to Windows outliners.
- Filters and converters
- XTND converter
- For use with the Claris XTND translator system (obsolescent, but still useful)
- XML converter
- Brad Pettit's converter for outputting MORE outlines as XML.
- MORE2TEXT
- Brad's drag-and-drop application for converting MORE outlines to tabbed plain text.
- Outliners discussion group
- A forum set up by MORE's creator, Dave Winer, at the time of MORE's free release. Early discussions were dominated by MORE, but these days it's a mine of information and tips on all outlining software on all platforms. Not very searchable, however, and thread titles tend to be misleading; your best best is to browse item-by-item, and clip or bookmark anything of interest.
- Will MORE work with current Macs?
- Yes. MORE 3.1 was designed for System 7.0, but works under MacOS 8-9 and in the Classic mode of MacOSX. For stability in later systems, in the Get Info box, increase the application memory to around 4500K. The menus, especially the Apple and Application menus, may behave a bit oddly, and modern Macs are too fast for many of the screen transition effects to be usable in presentations; users have also reported problems with window refresh and submenus. But MORE was an extremely well-written piece of software, and the core functions still work fine.
- Was there ever a Windows version?
- Sadly, no - though there was a DOS version of MORE's immediate ancestor ThinkTank, and this is available for download from www.outliners.com. Windows users might still find this useful for its Search/Mark/Gather/Clone suite of features, one of the power features carried over into MORE.
- Is there anything like MORE currently on the market?
- Inspiration is a wonderful cross-platform integrated outlining and mindmapping program. It lacks the presentation features, but its diagramming mode puts MORE's tree view in the shade. The latest version (6) still has excellent MORE import (though in the Mac version only), and the HTML export is a useful way of turning MORE files into structured web pages.
- If all you want is a simple outliner (ie no graphical or presentation features), there are many outliners and outliner-like products on the market; a good listing is http://www.ozemail.com.au/~caveman/Creative/Software/swindex.htm. Most major word processors include an outlining mode, of varying design and usefulness. Word's is quirkier than most, but has its strengths.
- PowerPoint has largely cornered the market in MORE-type presentation software, and is an adequate substitute for many purposes.
- What are the advantages of MORE over PowerPoint?
- PowerPoint is a "dumb" slideshow program; it has no understanding of presentation structure. All it can do is put together a flat, linear slideshow, with the option of laborious and clumsily-implemented hyperlinks that have to be added manually. In contrast, MORE has an intelligent grasp of presentations as structured outlines, and will automatically organise its slides so as to navigate this outline from broader to finer levels of detail. In particular, instead of confining all subtopic levels to a single slide, MORE can automatically generate further slides for the deeper levels of detail. These can then be navigated either linearly (as in PowerPoint, but with the hierarchical structure preserved in the order of slides) or hierarchically (up and down the outline levels).
- It has a more sensible approach to hyperlinking. In PowerPoint, when you jump to another slide you've lost your place in the slide order, because each slide has a single fixed position in the slideshow and you have to jump back to that position to revisit the slide. In MORE, a slide can be "cloned": a single slide can appear in as many different places in the slide order as you like. So, for example, you can revisit a master sales graph repeatedly in the course of the presentation without having to skip backwards and forwards. The slide is stored just once in memory, but can be summoned up at all the points where it's needed in the sequence.
- It imports and exports graphics correctly in outline documents for other programs (including Word and Inspiration). You can knock together an outline in Word with graphics included, and import it directly into MORE; or you can export a MORE outline with embedded graphics to Word or Inspiration for conversion to HTML.
- It has a far superior outliner, with some uniquely powerful hyperstructural search and link features.
- It's better at the core tasks so long as you don't need:
- Windows version
- sound
- QuickTime (though MORE can use compressed images if QT is installed)
- direct HTML export
- example documents and layouts that look at least vaguely this-millennium.
- The program is only 594K, and runs happily in 1M of RAM (and can run in only 750K). It's compatible with practically every Mac ever made, and with systems up to and including MacOSX Classic.
- Tree chart view is integrated into the program.
- Files are extremely compact.
- It's free.
- Some would wish to add: it's not Microsoft.
- Acta (MacOS)
- David Dunham's classic simple outliner, with very low memory requirements. Particularly nice to-do list features. Imports/exports to MORE via version 1.0 format.
- FullWrite (MacOS)
- Legendary word processor with excellent integrated outlining and annotation features. Some problems with some PowerMacs. The download page doesn't make this clear, but you can register your copy for free by entering the registration number FREE-33333-33333.
- Frontier (MacOS/Windows)
- Astounding, near-impossible-to-describe outline-based cross-platform scripting environment from MORE's own Dave Winer. (Frontier is a commercial program, but there's a free older version available.) Views differ on how far it qualifies as an outliner; the case for is put by Dave himself at http://www.scripting.com/98/01/stories/frontier5IsAnOutliner.html. On-line tutorial available; there's also a very good book on it by the wonderful Matt Neuburg, published by O'Reilly.
- PC Outline for Windows
- I haven't tried this myself. I think it's just a time-limited demo.
- Designer Draw (MacOS)
- Not an outliner, but an excellent free diagramming program along the lines of the diagram mode in Inspiration. No outline mode as such.
This page maintained by Nick Lowe (n.lowe@rhbnc.ac.uk)
last updated 5/1/01.
Back to top
Royal Holloway Classics Home Page
