IOS SOFTWARE
A superb app for organising ideas
Outline ideas easily, track your health, and play god in the newly improved Sims Mobile
Think of the app as a repository for all your stuff
£9.99 (Essentials); £38.99 (Pro) FROM The Omni Group, omnigroup.com needs iOS 11.2 or later
OmniOutliner 3 comes in two versions: Essentials, which offers the basics, and Pro, which adds
tools for power users. The free trial enables you to try both: if you choose Essentials at the end of it, you can later upgrade to Pro for £19.99.
The name OmniOutliner is a bit of a misnomer, because there’s much more to the app than outlining. Think of it more as a repository for all your stuff, ranging from your project to-do list to study notes or the literary masterpiece you’re writing. The Pro version includes file attachments, such as images and audio recordings, which makes it handy for college work and projects involving meetings.
The app works on both iPad and iPhone; using the latter means losing a lot of the space available to the bigger iPad app, but it’s useful if you’re syncing via Omni’s own OmniPresence sync or Apple’s iCloud Drive.
To start using OmniOutliner, you just start typing. If you want to indent, tap † or the indent button; if you want to go the other way, it’s ߆ and or the outdent button; and if you want a new line, just tap ® or the + button. Collapsing and expanding sections is just a matter of tapping the arrow next to them.
Straightforward stuff, but it’s what you do after you’ve written that’s interesting. For example, when you filter, you don’t get the traditional highlight in a block of text. The app hides all the rows that don’t match, making it easier to see what you’re looking for. You can select multiple rows to drag and drop, which is useful, and in the Pro version you can drag images and files as well as text from other apps.
Pro benefits
There are tons of keyboard shortcuts for formatting and highlighting if you’ve got a hardware keyboard. You also get a small but decent selection of predefined templates – although irritatingly they’re pre-populated, so you need to delete content to insert your own. You can now print and export to PDF, CSV, HTML, docx, pptx, and tabbed text. The Pro version adds Excel support and OPML links.
Pro also benefits from OmniAutomation scripting (as per OmniGraffle and OmniFocus), password encryption, custom templates and themes. It also offers more styling options, the ability to have more than one column, and the option to save filters. It’s very powerful and feels closer to a dedicated business writing app than an outliner.
If you’re a student, Pro is the one to go for; it makes managing even the most enormous outlines a breeze, and the ability to include media is a real plus. For us, though, Essentials does enough.