Schmier means to smear and zettel is just a piece of (worthless) paper. Schmier also has a secondary meaning of to grease so becomes like bribe. The combination may have some colloquial meaning which escapes me. Sounds very Yiddish to me.

It seems to be like Fresszettel a southern German expression for a scrap of notepaper.

As a tradename I think it leaves a lot to be desired in both English and German.

I found this... it seems to mean time consumed by evaluating or considering items that weren't initially considered, but wound up having to (or something like that). Perhaps someone from Germany can weigh in.

"The biggest challenge was definitely the validation unit, as there appeared so many (special) cases I did not think of in the first place, but which had to be considered. This parttook most of the time of my project and consumed a considerable amount of what in German is called a Schmierzettel.

"scrap of paper for jotting notes".

With Gruber's thoughts on "frictionless" interfaces (http://daringfireball.net/2009/02/untitled_document_syndrome) still fresh in mind, I could easily appreciate the appeal of a simplified outliner (especially if lightweight, responsive and standards-compliant).

But I second a previous poster: there's too much disconnect between the app's apparent slickness vs. its name's perceived clunkiness (at least, in English). Maybe unused synonyms for "outline" (i.e. précis, gist, or synopsis) could be explored -- "Synopsis 1.0" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

You know, there are other languages than English out there, approximately 6800 as a matter of fact, and English words can sound "clunky" to a lot of people.

It's not about dissing other languages! I'm glad this comment arrived now, as just the other day I happened to be reviewing "lightweight to-do list" software and recently remembered seeing an app that could've worked for that ... except its oddly unmemorable name made it impossible to search for. (Ah yes: "Schmierzettel"! Too late now...)

Don't change the name for ideology -- consider changing it for practicality. I could've written this in German, Spanish, or even (for practice) the Russian I'm currently studying, but chose English in order to get my message across, since both the MacUpdate boards, and the software itself, are mainly in this language.

Maybe if there's enough demand, MU could add a localizing feature to their comments section!