Second, it’s nice to have my outlines in a separate window layer from my BBEdit and Safari windows. I can see more in less space, especially when I use the Hoist feature. First, it makes much better use of screen space. However, I’ve also noticed two somewhat unexpected benefits compared with Trac. Anything that isn’t fluid is is more than an annoyance it’s an impediment to thought. This makes all the difference because OmniOutliner is now (along with BBEdit and Mailsmith) one of the applications that I think in. But, more than that, OmniOutliner has achieved a level of polish such that it no longer gets in my way. And I prefer a flexible hierarchy, combined with columns and styles, to Trac’s Component-Milestone-Priority-Severity filing system. Obviously, the biggest improvement is that it’s much easier to make small changes and to re-arrange items compared with using a Web-based interface. In addition to the stuff from Trac, I’ve moved some lists and notes that used to be in BBEdit into my Issues outline. I also appreciate that it’s much less buggy than 2.x was. The most important new features for me are sections (for navigation and scoped searches), styles (very useful, even just for on-screen editing), and attachments (to associate troublesome input files, code, and documentation with a row). OmniOutliner 3.5 Pro seems to be the release that crosses that threshold. I’ve always liked outliners,īut I didn’t use them as much as I would have liked to because there weren’t any that did enough of what I needed. Now I see that 3.5 Pro is a huge improvement, to the point where I can use it for all kinds of things that 2.x wouldn’t have been able to handle. My use of versions 1.x and 2.x was very basic, and so I kind of ignored the later releases because I didn’t think I’d be using their extra features, anyway. The tool I chose for issue tracking is OmniOutliner 3.5 Pro. When I need to browse Subversion, I can use BBEdit, or fall back on Trac. Since I’m a solo developer, I don’t need a Web-based solution I can use a real Mac application that saves regular files to disk. Subversion has built-in support for revision numbers, so I can use a separate tool for issue tracking and simply enter the revision numbers in the appropriate places. At this point, I realized that I don’t need Trac for issue-tracking. None of this would have been difficult, but it was enough work that it got me to think about whether there might be an easier way. Actually, to run in Rosetta isn’t quite trivial, either it would probably involve making a stripped python binary and changing some shebang lines.) (I want to be able to sync it between my iMac and PowerBook and run it at full speed on both machines-Web applications are slow enough without Rosetta. When I got my iMac Core Duo I started thinking about building a universal binary version of Trac and realized that would be even more of a pain. I like Trac even better than CVSTrac, except that it’s kind of a pain to install. Naturally, when I switched from CVS to Subversion, I switched from CVSTrac to Trac. CVSTrac isn’t good for storing rapidly changing notes (which I create and edit while coding a particular feature or fix), so I used BBEdit for that. It has a nice timeline that interleaves check-ins and ticket changes. CVS assigns revision numbers per-file, but CVSTrac is able to group the revisions (and display the changes) by check-in. But I also used it to track issues, because I wanted to be able to see which tickets corresponded to which check-ins. CVSTrac includes a great CVS browser, which I could have used by itself. Most importantly, it integrated with CVS. Being Web-based, this was more cumbersome to use, but it provided better search options, and the Web interface made it very flexible at displaying different windows and views of the information. I soon switched to a Mac build of CVSTrac. It was great for organizing little bits of information, but it wasn’t quite powerful enough. When I first started developing Mac software, I used OmniOutliner to keep track of feature requests, bugs, and notes about what I was working on at the moment.
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