Miriam Posner's Blog – Page 16 – Digital humanities, data, labor, and information

March 25, 2009March 26, 2009

My favorite tools: Organize ideas with OmniOutliner

Ugh, the blank page. Nothing sends me spiraling into procrastination faster. OmniOutliner can’t eliminate my fear, but it does help. It’s a little hard to describe this software, because you can use it in a lot of different ways. Its authors describe it as a tool for “idea organization,” and that’s about right. OmniOutliner makes it really easy to make bulleted lists with as many subsections as you want. You can also drag and drop images, files, and webpages right into the document.

I use it in a few different ways.

Continue reading “My favorite tools: Organize ideas with OmniOutliner”

March 25, 2009

Flowgram: put interactive multimedia presentations on the Web

Flowgram looks like it could be an interesting tool for putting teaching materials or presentations on the Web. It allows you to build presentations using PowerPoint slides, websites, your own images and documents, and your voice or music. Once you’ve built a presentation, you can share it by linking to it, embedding it in your website, or putting it on Facebook or other social networking sites.

It’s free (registration required) and you don’t have to download anything. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to work in Firefox, but it did work in Safari. The creator and player interfaces loaded really slowly but were pretty straightforward once they showed up. I wouldn’t use Flowgram to make anything crucial, at least not until it’s more stable and better established, but it could be fun to play with — and perfect for digital storytelling.