Buyer Beware
The program is supposed to be the Mac equivalent of Microsoft’s OneNote which is absolutely fantastic for students because they can keep their notes in the same place. One thing someone sidestepping platforms (from Windows to Mac) will notice is that there is no spell checker and the find command will not automatically take the user to the page a specific word/phrase is on (among other shortcomings). At first I accepted these as growing pains before the program’s bugs made it painfully clear that I was not growing but shrinking. The first major glitch came when I tried to import my OneNote files into Outline and the progam crashed continually. When I was able to bring them up I couldn’t modify their content or work from them (and crashes were epidemic), so the notion that this program will accept all the content of your OneNote book is entirely false (which is a shame because I had 3 years of notes that I occasionally found extremely helpful). Another major concern is that on 2 occasions I seem to have had notes go missing, which is a major concern because I can’t afford to pour myself into note-taking (which is earning me As at university) if they are suddenly going to disappear.
Other glitches simply make the program unpleasant to use, such as the way bulleting an existing sentence that is at the side of the page places your cursor 2 letters into the sentence, meaning that if you want to indent once more you have to scoll back 2 letter spaces to do so. Another glitch is that when cutting and pasting existing notes, often the content will not paste (especially if you are cutting and pasting bullet points). I find that I am constantly pasting notes into Pages in order to transfer them from one place in Outline to another. Moreover, when you cut a note out of the program and then want to undo your mistake the program sometimes loses the information (so no cutting - use copy and then go back and delete because once it’s gone the thing saves automatically and you’ll have to redo the notes). Bolding text is also problematic because once you have bolded a line the cursor will automatically return to bold even once you’ve set it to regular font, meaning that if I want to unbold a line and then add to it, the font I type in will become bolded after the first letter typed and force you to bold/unbold the desired text after you’ve finished typing (same with italics I’m pretty sure).
The switch from PC to Mac hasn’t been as difficult for me because I was raised by a Jobs look-alike (no really they even look similar), but given that school was my main focus I now regret the shift. You think that Mac, whose student demographic has exploded (you shoud see the number of MacBooks in my lectures), would take on a program like this itself (and make sure that people sidestepping platforms are accomodated), but having left it to Gorillized Corporation has proven a mistake. Jobs said it himself: it’s “about software,” and Mac should ensure that the core programs developed by Microsoft are available and working well (I mean, Microsoft developed both an OS and OneNote- Mac should do the same).
Str8 A about Outline: Knowledge Organizer, v2.2
