LEV  A year since my last comment and still no links or clones, nor any sign of them. We've still not got back to where we were in the old OS 9 days with More. Without clones/links OO is just a list manager with cool (though clunkily-implemented) formatting tools. Slightly mystifies me; an outliner is (for me at any rate) a preliminary tool for fixing up structures, arguments etc., and formatting is fairly low down on the list of things I need at that stage of a project. Still; it has plenty of happy users so perhaps I am in a tiny minority...  
(Version 3.9.4 beta 1)

OSP  To me it is still one of the best outlining tools on the Mac - an evergreen.

It scales brilliant from the most simple outlining to very sophisticated ones. To get a feeling on how good it really is you have to try it as well as other outlining tools.

One of the things I have to mention is that the framework seams to be a bit dated. Maybe it is time to cut some old compatibility to get rid of some display problems.

All in all I can only highly recommend it to everyone who is looking for an outlining tool the first time or who is looking for an alternative.  
(Version 3.9.3b2)

SOMMOP  Just a quickie comment. For somebody like me, who has paid for OmniWeb, it is very frustrating to see how often Omni releases updates for OmniOutliner and how little forward movement there has been for OmniWeb. This suggests to me that Omni has pulled their best talent off of OmniWeb and is leaving it stranded as a kind of orphan product.   
(Version 3.9 beta 1)

LEV  Links? Hello? Links? LINKS? You know: like this that?

I can't understand why, when Tinderbox and Notebook and Notetaker and DevonThink and Scrivener and VoodooPad and TAO and Curio and all those other apps which take into account that one way of managing information is by LINKING information, Omni still haven't stuck links -- LINKS -- into Outliner. Oh, I forgot. That one other thing which has links. You know. The interweb.

Just to clarify, this comment is about LINKS.

May we have them? I mean, they *have* been invented already.  
(Version 3.7.2)

JAZZADDICT  While 3.7 is welcome I think it's long overdue. I think they should of had this release out back when 10.5 was released; and 4.0 would be nice right about now. OmniOutliner should be further along in utilizing Leopard technologies (IMHO).

Still my Favorite outliner for the mac. :-)  
(Version 3.7)

TEKSESTRO  This is a fantastic little app, and a real gem among the outliners/listers available on the Mac.

My gripes with the program seem to be the same that other reviewers have:

* too long between updates - ok, this is not their flagship app, but they should not wait so long as to make their current userbase feel neglected. I remember when OmniGraffle and this were is more-or-less equivalent version numbers, and now there is already a huge discrepancy between them. OmniGraffle has increased in its complexity and list of functions, and even has some of OmniOutliner's capabilities built into it now...

* there are several *little* nagging problems, which have been pointed out by users (including me) over the years to the developers, and which remain without solution. Example: OmniOutliner has a "Duriation"-type column, but this 'duration' means only hours, days and months. I need to keep duration in MINUTES, and have it automatically total the minutes into hours. Not only does it refuse to do that, it insists on interpreting "33m" or "33 mins" or "33' " as 33 months. If I simply type '33', it interprets this as 'hours'. While this is not a *major* flaw, it is just one of several *pesky* little limitations, which should have been addressed a long time ago, and stop the program from going from 'good' to 'fantastic'.

OmniGroup, please, do give OmniOutliner some attention, and keep up the good work. It *is* appreciated.  
(Version 3.6.5)

SIMONM  This is one of 3 programs from Omni that do variations on the same theme (the others being OmniPlan and OmniFocus). Seems to me (and from what I've heard about excessive upgrade prices) that they're really only out there to make money. I can't believe they still try to charge for a web browser! Who would pay that? Their programs are OK but way over-priced. It wouldn't take a talented Mac programmer too long to make a similar app as this. I haven't seen it do anything I really need anyway.  
(Version 3.6.4)

DONKEYOTAY  I recently upgraded from Omnioutliner to OO Pro. I use it to run my (albeit simple) home & business accounts; keep a list of all serial numbers, several To Do lists. I particularly like the 'Default Clippings' Service. All my household projects start in Omnioutliner.

If you're running an Intel Mac with Omnioutliner pre-installed, you can upgrade to Pro rather than buy the full product. Also, 43folders.com & Screencastsonline.com are running discount codes (the latter code being SCREENCASTSONLINE for a 40% discount). I got an OO Pro upgrade for about $18.00 instead of $29.99.  
(Version 3.6.2b1)

DOUGEDDY  I love OmniOutliner but until they fix the print process I’m not sure I can use it. I have found TAO offers many of the same things I need but does not suffer from the print difficulties.

When OmniOutliner came out they said it would be the MORE replacement. So far I don’t see that. I want an outliner (forget the other stuff MORE had) that works and PRINTS as simply as MORE. I am a clergyperson and used to use MORE for my sermons (what a dream app — could easily move stuff around and print with no problem. Could change font size, spacing, etc. with such ease - and PRINT). OmniOutliner fails that print test.

Please understand - I LOVE Omni products. It is just the outliner has not reached the printing capabilities I need. I don’t have time to play the “90% scale” junk to get it to fit a page, print as laid out, and have it all fit ease I had with MORE.

PLEASE Omni - all I want is to have you at least meet OS9 print standards. Other than that, your program is A++++.

Doug Eddy  
(Version 3.6.1b2)

DANA SUTTON  Just a quickie comment. For somebody like me, who has paid for OmniWeb, it is very frustrating to see how often Omni releases updates for OmniOutliner and how little forward movement there has been for OmniWeb. This suggests to me that Omni has pulled their best talent off of OmniWeb and is leaving it stranded as a kind of orphan product.  
(Version 3.6)

GERBER  Great outliner, extremely extendable into a variety of tasks.

For pure text "brainstorming" outlining, I think there's better products. This isn't MORE. However, for more general purpose outlining: task lists, project management worksheets, etc..., there are none which come close.

I use this program instead of text files to store all the random stuff in my life. It's quicker, prettier, and more functional than plain text!

This latest update adds some extremely helpful Applescript and Spotlight hooks which make it even easier to wedge OO into your daily workflow.  
(Version 3.6 beta 1)

TC  Slight problem with date entry - if I enter 3/10, it tends to interpret it as March 10, rather than October 3 - this is despite my machine having UK settings, where we use d/m/y rather than m/d/y.

The current beta of version 4 does it, too. Any chance of a fix, please?  
(Version 3.0.4b2)

ANONYMOUS  Compare this with Devonthin Pro for example, it's the same category - OO can "style", but it can't to something essential. Even an thingy like "Circus Ponies Notebook" offers links between cells - OO can't.

OO is highly overpriced, it's not "professional", it's useless for serious work.  
(Version 3.0.4b2)

ANONYMOUS  Software from Omni is just great. Their website is also fun :-)

I have both Outliner Pro and Graffle Pro, and they helped me a lot.  
(Version 3.0.2 beta 3)

ANONYMOUS  OmniGroup kicks ass! This might quite possibly be the single most useful program on my computer! Truly great!  
(Version 3.0.1)

ANONYMOUS  I had to figure out the download URL for myself as the one here is totally wrong. Somebody please fix.

Otherwise, fantastic app...could be seen as a little expensive for the pro version, but depends how much you use it. I use it a lot... :)  
(Version 3.0.1b1)

T  I just want to add that working with the style-sheets is really wonderful. It is really useful and really easy to change the style of the first level, second level, or notes. And working with the sections is amazing. It's also useful that you can switch sections via a toolbar drop-menu instead of the drawer. I think this will become my primary idea/outlining/writing app. Good solid Mac OS X experience  
(Version 3.0)

T  Better than I thought, but Pro price is a bit too high. Wasn't planning on paying to go Pro but the extra sections feature is too useful. I am looking how it compares to Hog Bay Notebook 3. I want to use less apps and I always use OmniOutliner for outlines and lists, so we'll see. Would be better if there was only one version of OmniOutliner because I hate the differentiation with minimal difference. Oh well.  
(Version 3.0)

GREETS FROM AMSTERDAM!  This really is a nice and very usefull app!

but Omni.... it's way overpriced!  
(Version 3.0)

P13  My Inspector windows are acting funny. Sometimes when I open them I get an error message saying "Can't Cache Image" and the Inspector windows are all screwed up. Anybody know why? I restarted and they went back to normal but after I quit Omnioutliner the problem came back.

I'm using OS X 10.3.6 and Omnioutliner Pro 3  
(Version 3.0)

COCOANUT  $70????? You've got to be kidding!! Omni, your time is better spent elsewhere, as is my money. While I'm sure this may appeal to some people, this application is a poor value compared to other more capable outliners and freeform databases. I love your work but this application took for too long and offers so little. Sorry to be negative but that's how I feel. Omniweb, on the other hand, is a must-have application.  
(Version 3.0)

ANONYMOUS  This is a very solid app. As can be clearly seen from some of the more negative reviews below, it obviously doesn't suit everyone. But it meets my needs very nicely--and I'm sure I'm not alone--though it would be nice if there were more obvious and powerful "join" options (hence the only 4 stars for features). Some of the new style stuff does feel a bit over the top, but I guess there are indeed times when I don't want to reformat/start over in a word processor so I can appreciate the utility of such things even if I won't use them that much.

The upgrade price, especially for the Pro version, is a bit steep, though, which is why I only gave it 3 for value. But 5's for ease of use and stability are well-earned, OO is very easy to just pick up and use and I don't think I've ever had OO2 crash on me; even the betas of OO3 have been highly stable.  
(Version 3.0 beta 8)

ANONYMOUS  I do like this newer version, as Omni has always worked at making graphically oriented software in its usage. I just wish the price was a bit less...that's all.  
(Version 3.0 beta 8)

BRIAN COVEY - SUPPORT MANAGER  Reposting this up top, as well in response to steve below:

If this happened, I'd like to know about it. We guarantee our registered users 48 hour turnaround on their support emails, and if you're not registered, we still make every effort to get back to you. If you sent email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com or support@omnigroup.com and didn't hear back from us at all, that's a problem that I want to correct.   
(Version 3.0b5)

BRIAN COVEY - SUPPORT MANAGER  Boy; there's a lot to respond to here.

Yeah, there are different users out there, and they want different things. When we decided to start in on OmniOutliner 3, there were at least three broad categories of users we could go for. Some folks used OmniOutliner 2 as a to-do list and organizer - they wanted one set of features. Other folks looked at the fact that we had columns and summaries and wanted us to go in a more spreadsheet-y direction.

The largest broad category of feedback we got, though, was "I really like writing in OmniOutliner, but I need to export my document to Word, or AppleWorks, or SomeOther.app before I can show it to anyone." Many of these users were the folks that ponied up far more than Outliner costs, even at the new pricing, for a tool from back in the day called MORE.

I used to do a lot of OmniOutliner support, and I cannot count for you the number of times that we got email that began "I really like OmniOutliner, but I used to use this tool called MORE..." This broad class of users was the bigger than the other broad categories, and when you're developing any application, you have to prioritize. The features you *could* implement will always be more numerous than the features you have time to actually implement.

So, yes, we focused on better presentation in our documents and on the printed page. We added tools for the folks that we know wanted those things. Those users are lawyers, students, teachers, and authors.

If you're the type of user that doesn't care one whit about what things look like, if you're the sort of user whose documents are just used to keep yourself on track and they never leave the format of your monitor, then I can understand you being a little disappointed by version three. It, quite honestly, was not designed for you as a user.

And I'm sorry for that; if we had infinite time and infinite resources, we'd have loved to develop everything at once and present you with an app that did the data-driven stuff you're after and had great presentation features. We ran the risk, however, of becoming the Mozilla of outliners, though - nifty, feature-packed code that takes so long to appear that no one really cares any more when it does arrive.

Okay. About pricing. For the standard version, we definitely had some people here who opposed increasing the price at all. However, other people felt very strongly that the product was underpriced at $29.95, and the "That's all? Are you crazy?" look we'd get at MacWorld when we demoed version 2 factored into the "what do we price 3" discussion.

We definitely do not plan to do this with every iteration of the product. Of course I can't promise we'll never increase the price again, but this was a 'fixing what we thought was wrong' decision, not an "inflate the pricing" strategy we want to adhere to every time we release a new version.

As for Pro, we had a lot to consider. We looked at the feature set, we looked at its retail competitors, NoteTaker and NoteBook ($69 and $49), we looked at our past experience selling Pro versions of our software. We offer features no other outliner does (named styles, for instance), in addition to being on par with similarly-priced apps. Of course, charging for the sum of its parts means that some folks only want one feature in Pro, and that one feature costs them the whole upgrade. Other folks, though, get a heck of a deal. And if you don't need any of the features in Pro at all, that's why we offer standard. We look at it as saving some of our customers money, rather than forcing anyone to pay for features that they don't need.

And lastly: comparison with other applications. All I'll say is that when you have multiple applications that are doing the same sorts of things, you end up with feature overlap. In some case this is out-and-out copying; in other cases, it's a simple case of parallel evolution. If you don't care a whit about styles, then OmniOutliner 3 may not be for you. We don't hate you for that fact, and all we ask is that you not hate us or our users because they do. If anybody copied anything, Tao, Outliner, and the other outliners popping up in the last three years all copied from MORE; we just picked different features and we did it in different orders. =)  
(Version 3.0b5)

STEVE COPLEY  Have to agree with everything said below...

I've been playing with OO3 for a week now. I too have been awaiting this release for SO long, and it's such a disappointment - lots of visual whizz, but little extra functionality from v2. So many other outliners are way beyond this now... Cloning, gathering, etc. TAO in particular is FAT with USEFUL features, not just visual fluff.

Also, many other developers are really quick to respond to requests compared to Omni Group - you just hit a wall of silence with them. Takashi (developer of TAO) often has a new release with a requested feature within days of asking. That's worth a lot more than glitter!  
(Version 3.0b5)

ANONYMOUS  You invariably get a swelling of OmniFans whenever something new rolls around. To them, OmniGroup can do no wrong, even when they release a basic outliner for $70 -- they'll be first in line to literally waste enough money to buy a PDA. Think about that for a minute -- is this program really worth the over-all net worth of a PDA?

To the person who thinks OO3pro is more powerful than TAO -- I suggest you do a bit more research before you just automatically assign OO3 a higher value based on your prior experience and obvious bias. I've been using OO since version one, and I've been waiting for 3 for a year now. I'm quite ticked at Omni for what they've done here. First, they've barely updated the software, and secondly, they put all of the reasonable updates into a ridiculously priced "pro" version, leaving an artificially dismantled version at still yet ten dollars more than the original OO cost. I'm sorry, inflation has not gone up that much.

So I started looking for other outliners, and boy were my eyes opened. Yes, Hog Bay NoteBook really does do quite a lot more than OO3Pro. It happens to have nearly every pro feature (excluding styles, which are the most outrageously unnecessary feature I've ever seen, bar none!) for less than the cost of OO3 Standard.

I'm not even going to go into TAO that much, because it has so many power outliner features from the glory days of power outliners, you probably don't even know what all it can do, so you cannot recognise the power of its functions. If you live in something as remedial as OO, I can understand. And yes, it does stylesheets too -- in a more intelligent way than OO3Pro, in my opinion, too. Prettier? No, but functionally, yes. Which is all that really matters. You can throw pretty rings around crap, but it its still over-priced, marketing crap.

For people who come from a background of more powerful software, it is quite obvious how basic OO is, and OO3Pro has done extremely little to advance it. The only thing it has going for it is columns. TAO will have those shortly.

Finally, you analogy with BMW is most amusingly accurate. BMW, like Omni, excel at getting a drooling fan base and gullible outsiders to spend far, far more than they should on something which can be had for a fraction of the cost. I'm sure you meant something complementary by that, but I sure do not see it.  
(Version 3.0b5)

ANONYMOUS  You're kidding me, right? Comparing what OmniOutliner Pro clearly is on track to become to Hog Bay?

This application is going to be a seriously powerful and useful tool, just like OmniGraffle Pro already is. And OmniWeb too. I can't imagine my net experience without OmniWeb. I wouldn't be able to do my work without OmniGraffle Pro. And I know that OmniOutliner Pro will fill the same need. I'll be online, buying it, as soon as it's for sale.  
(Version 3.0b5)

MRANDRE  Everyone's got an opinion, so I won't accuse the previous reviewers of being on crack. I will instead note that I strongly disagree with assertions that Omni products are severely overpriced, and that competing products do "Just as much".

Hog Bay is a fine product. TAO is a fine product. I've used Hog Bay extensively. I've looked at TAO and been unimpressed. Both are cheaper than OmniOutliner, and for a reason. They do less. Near as I can tell, they are both outlining programs, whereas OO3 is an outliner/database. I haven't seen a similar combination of outliner and database elsewhere. And I most certainly haven't seen one that is as easy to manage, and so gosh darn beautiful. The potential uses of OOPro 3 boggle my mind.

Now, maybe you don't care if your app is beautiful, and maybe you don't need a database embedded in your outline. Maybe giving your headings a dropshadow isn't high on your priority list. Maybe writing your novels and managing your lists and managing your finances with the same app isn't a priority to you. Maybe you just want an outline, thank you very much, and if the options are limited, and you don't need to handle column structures. Then TAO and Hog Bay cost less and will cover your bases. But to suggest that OO3 does not contain more power presented in a more attractive and powerful way is dishonest. Some people drive Fords, and some people drive a BMW. OmniOutliner is a BMW for those of us who want the very very best. If that's what you want, welcome.  
(Version 3.0b5)

ANONYMOUS  70 bucks? wha?  
(Version 3.0b5)

DKI  when is omni going to learn that charging outrageous prices for stuff *cough* this and omniweb *cough* that isnt even close to head and shoulders above the competition is ridiculous and only hurting them?

Hogbay Notebook is cheaper, does more, is all around better.

i've yet to recommend any omni product because it's good stuff, but far amazing/innovative, and the prices are laughable. this is certainly no exception.  
(Version 3.0b5)

WHAT A JOKE  If you are going to spend this much on an app, you'd may as well just apply the funds toward a substantial app like MS Office and get sooooooo much more for your money. This is a joke at best and only a fool would spend this kind of money for this app...a joke for the money. ZPro what? Yeah, right...  
(Version 3.0b5)