OmniOutliner: The ultimate notepad for lectures

I [heart] OmniOutliner OmniOutliner is more and more becoming one of my favorite tools on the Mac besides TextMate. Yesterday I used it more or less for the first time to take some notes in a course. Normally I would simply fire up TextMate and do all the notes in Markdown using headings and item lists. But since the presentation was very fast adding the “*“s and “###“s etc. proved to be way to slow for this. So I gave OnmiOutliner a try and was finally able to keep up with the lecturer :)


But the killing feature for me is, that all the fields can actually be rich-text fields and esp. that you can simply attach things like images, movies etc. to each outline item. This comes especially handy for another task I’m planning to use OmniOutliner more or less exclusively in the future: Summarizing papers. From time to time there comes a paper down the road with some nice diagrams in it which completely essential to understand the topic. So you can simply select the image in Preview.app and copy’n paste it right into an item. If you do this with actual files, you can also choose between completely embedding the content of that media file or just linking to it. Really great :D

I’m sure that OmniOutliner will also come in handy for other tasks I might need to accomplish in the future. The only thing I’m currently not sure about is … do I want to get the PRO version? ;)

If you’re still not sure, what to use OmniOutliner for, you might want to check out Ben’s post where he links two articles (1, 2) on ScreenCastsOnline giving a review of OmniOutliner.