For the price it’s a great app

At first I didn’t want to buy the app because of the two other reviews but I bought it anyway during the 70% off sale. After having tested it for some time here’s my review:

1. The app DOES sync via iCloud. But the iOS app seems to be buggy and won’t register the sync correctly until you force a sidebar refresh. At first I thought the sync was broken but when I accidentally created a group in the iOS app the outlines from the Mac suddenly appeared. Syncing back from the iPad to the Mac didn’t require any extra steps. So there’s that: iCloud sync does work but there seems to be a little bug in the iOS version. (I hope the dev reads reviews in our little god forsaken Polish app store section).

2. The app itself is a great little outliner. For the price it’s really good. Of course it doesn’t offer features like Omni’s Outliner (which costs 50 to 100 Euros). But you can get simple outlines (the app supports only one column) done quickly. Even if it’s not visible on the screenshots the app can display multiple lines of text per outline item. You just have to turn this on in the View menu (the preferences setting only works for documents you create after you set the option - so the current outline won’t be affected. which can be a little confusing.). You can also hide the check boxes and disable the numbering.

3. I can’t say much about stability because I’ve been using the app just for one day - but it didn’t crash yet.

4. What’s a little annoying is that you don’t see the cursor when select an outline item (in OmniOutliner you always see the blinking cursor at the end of the item so you know exactly where text will be added when you start typing). This absence of a cursor leads to me pressing the Enter key which will create a new outline item and not start editing the selected one as I would expect. This is confusing because on OS X no control acts this way.

5. Also somewhat illogical is the choice to use the Tab key to switch between the sidebar and the outline editor and not to use it to indent outline items. BUT this is only a default setting and can be changed in the preferences! (You can re-bind quiet a lot of actions there so that’s a plus).

6. I like the uncluttered design. The ‘dark mode’ is nice. (There’s no support for styles and templates so if you need those this is probably the wrong app for you).

Overall: Great outliner. Can’t compete with Omni’s flagship for features BUT it gets stuff done and if you don’t want to create huge complex outlines which remind one of Excel then you will be a very happy camper with this app here. Another plus is the iPhone app which Omni lacks (they only support iPad).

j.szpilewski about Cloud Outliner – Nested Lists, v2.1