We've known, since starting work on Fargo last year, that the outliner had to work great on all devices. When we hooked it up to Dropbox the need became even more apparent. The same outlines that we work on on our Macs and PCs had to work well on iPads and Androids.

A bit at a time

• So this is how we're approaching it. A little bit at a time. We solve a few problems, make it work a little better, come back later, and make it work a better. Eventually we figure it out.

• The reason this is the best approach is that while we had excellent prior art for desktop outliners dating back almost 30 years, there isn't any good prior art for mobile device outliners. So we want to go slowly so we make better design choices.

• Today, with Fargo 0.52, we're shipping the first iteration of mobile support. In this release we smooth out the interface on tablets. Following is a list of changes.

General note

• The changes below only apply when Fargo is running on a tablet device.

• The functionality in other environments is unchanged.

Double-clicking

• When you double-click, the event was intercepted by the system, and it would cause the text to zoom in.

• Now, when you double-click, it expands the headline the bar cursor is pointing to.

Landscape and portrait

• When you switch from landscape to portrait or the other way around, Fargo correctly adjusts the outline display.

Tapping wedges

• Tapping on headline wedges has been made easier. The tappable area is larger for the iPad.

Single-tap on a wedge

• You can tap once on a wedge to expand, tap again to collapse.

Reorganizing

• Use the Outliner menu to reorg the outline. No change.

• Dave

We've gotten a lot of feedback on the initial user experience for Fargo, and decided to take another look.

The result is a new intro dialog.

This is what the previous dialog used to look like.

I wrote a blog post about this feature.

Dave

Navbar

• The Fargo navbar is now fixed when vertically scrolling.

• Kyle

Icon chain

• The icon chain to the left of the outliner is now fixed when vertically scrolling.

Tabs

• If there is an error loading an outline into a tab an error box will now display at the top of the outline describing the problem and offer the option to try again or close the tab.

• If you ever run into a situation where no tabs are present, navigate to the #prefs folder within the Fargo folder on Dropbox and remove the file tabs.json.

International characters

• When we save files to Dropbox, Dropbox attempts to detect the encoding (ASCII, Latin1, UTF-8) of the file. Sometimes their encoding detection is incorrect. This caused international characters to occasionally be encoded incorrectly when reading an outline back into Fargo.

• This release has a change in it to avoid that encoding problem. Files are now read from Dropbox in a (binary) way that prevents the auto-detected encoding from being applied. International characters should no longer be encoded incorrectly.

• Kyle

The big change in 0.48 is the introduction of Small Picture Reader.

It's a separate app, in a web page, as with all our apps, that is used to read outlines, the same way Readability is used to read web pages.

To use it

• 1. Prepare an outline in Fargo that you want to share.
• 1. When you're ready, choose View in Reader in the File menu.
• 1. Reader should open, with your outline displayed.
• 1. You can then send the URL of that page to friends or colleagues, or use the Tweet icon in the left margin to send it to your Twitter followers.

Tips for readers

• Reader is always checking to see if your outline has updated, and when it does, it automatically displays the updated outline. This can be disturbing if you're reading an outline, you can lose your place.

• If this bothers you, click the lock icon in the left margin. Reader will hold on to any updates, and only show them when you unlock it. When there are changes the lock icon will change from gray to green.

Demo

• Here's an example of an outline from Fargo being viewed in Reader.

Restoring tab state

• There was an issue with refreshing Fargo when the last active tab was renamed or removed from the Dropbox folder.

Dropbox error reporting

• An error box will show above an outline if there are any issues with saving an outline to Dropbox.

• Dropbox error box screenshot.

• Kyle

A general note...

We have heard reports of people losing work in Fargo.

We're looking into them, and working on fixes, and will report when we have them.

In the meantime -- at least some of the problems can be worked around by reloading Fargo.

Tips

• 1. Reload at least once a day to be sure your connection with Dropbox is active.
• 1. If you make changes to the Fargo folder, reload Fargo after making the change.
• 1. You can back up all your work by making a copy of the Fargo folder.

• More coming soon.

• Dave

For this release be sure to hold down the Shift key and hit the Refresh button to be sure you have the latest version.

Untitled document

• Changing the title of an Untitled document will save a new OPML file based on the new title and remove the untitled.opml file.

Charset encoding

• If a file is read from Dropbox and the character set specified within the Content-Type header is ISO-8859-1 the contents of the file will be decoded from UTF-8 to avoid character encoding problems.

On Windows instead of the "Cmd" symbol for menu items, it should now say Ctrl+.

The Preferences command moves to the System menu, and its name changed to Settings.