OmniOutliner 3 Professional has gone public beta. All the best stuff from newer competing outliner/organizers, but at The Omni Group's level of quality. OO 2 users can upgrade to OO 3 Pro for $50, or to OO 3 Plain for $20. The public beta is free; the beta software will expire at the end of next January.
Simultaneously, I'm looking at DevonThink, another Mac OS X life organizer with fancy search features. DT makes me realize that my lazy troubles with using a plain outliner for life notes could be greatly alleviated with a separate content pane. I think OmniOutliner Pro 3 can do something like this, but I can't quite get it to work right. (Curio may also be worth a look in this regard.) DT does cross-note links, Wiki-style and otherwise, a compelling feature. Quite disappointingly, DT's "outliner" is anything but, simply "groups" but with checkboxes; I don't think the DT developers know what an outliner is. If DT actually had an outline document type, I'd be sold. DevonThink is $40.
Merlin's thread on DevonThink has useful comments and suggestions. Ted Goranson is discussing outliners and life tools. A complaint heard here, which I share, is DevonThink's opaque database. My first thought after seeing these tools is to integrate them with my 'net accessible wiki, which appears too difficult to attempt with DT, at least not without AppleScript or serious hacking.
Some commenters in both threads seem to think DT is only really useful for large collections of notes. Some even say they use both DT and VoodooPad in a complementary fashion, which might be worth considering. VP boasts an open database format, making VP-to-wiki a possibility.
One commenter on Merlin's site suggests forgoing an organizer and simply using Mac OS X Finder, with files and folders. The operating system provides search (even search of PDFs), and every file type is supported by definition. While he has a point, especially with the upcoming Mac OS X 10.4 Spotlight feature (which the DevonThink folks are already trying to rebut), my first thoughts are obvious: I need speed and easy at-a-glance access, which means one click instead of two, and no waiting for apps to open. Seems like the real point is, maybe these ought to be OS extensions instead of self-contained organizer apps.
Thanks for your summary of the 'Outliners'. I have been using Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac for a semester now. It has a function that works a bit like an outliner, but very limited. Though it records sound with it, so you can always go back to the sound at the time of typing a comment.
What I would like to have though is an application in which I can easily add notes to sheets (PDF) in an outliner style. But I would also be able to add my notes I took during reading the literature. In other words, I am really on the interaction between OmniOutliner and DevonThink.
I need to have a look around for what else is there. Thanks for your post though!