CarbonFin Outliner – Note-Taking and Outlining App With Easy Drag-n-Drop Re-Ordering

Download CarbonFin Outliner ($4.99)

Today’s app is the curiously named CarbonFin Outliner which at its heart is an app that captures your thoughts, lists, and notes as text … but offers a few unique and simple ways to organize those text items, or bullet points.

The universal app is $4.99, and an app that I keep handy on both my iPhone and iPad when I need a simple container for organizing an outline.

What is an Outlining app?
Let’s consider why you need a specific “outlining” app when you could just easily jump into Evernote, or OneNote, or Notes, or even Microsoft Word, and create a bulleted outline there.

To me, an outline is just some bullet points with extra structure – I can indent or out-dent my sub-points, and I can do all this with hitting Return to quickly create a new bullet point, or Tab to indent a point.

The BIGGEST advantage of a dedicated outlining app is the fact that after getting all my bullet points down, I can then MOVE or RE-ARRANGE the bullet points easily.

In Microsoft Word for example, I can copy or cut a slice of my outline, and then paste it somewhere else, but that gets just messy. I’d much rather just be able to drag a bullet point (with ALL its sub-points included) to another location in the outline.

THAT is one of the significant differentiators of a dedicated outlining app.

Bonus features include attaching “notes” to each bullet point and the ability to search everything.

And THOSE are the main reasons I turn to CarbonFin Outliner.

Typing and Editing
I can open CarbonFin Outliner, tap the PLUS sign for a new outline, give it a name, and start typing. Initially, I just keep typing to get everything out of my brain, knowing that I can re-arrange and edit later. I type the first bullet point, hit Return, and type the next, repeat, repeat, repeat.

When I need a sub-point, I can just hit Tab on my external keyboard to indent. Or if you’re using the on-screen keyboard (or an external keyboard), you can hit the space bar on an EMPTY item to indent, or the backspace (delete) key to UN-indent (Out-dent?)

You can also use the little left & right arrow buttons in the menu bar to indent or out-dent items.

Expand/Collapse and Re-Arranging
If you tap the 3 dots in the menu bar, that offers several other features including the ability to “Collapse All” so that the entire outline is reduced to just the main headings. The “Expand All” option does the opposite.

You can tap the little arrows in the left margin to individually collapse or expand sections of the outline.

You can also select a section of your outline and tap “Zoom” which just focuses the outline on that specific sub-tree. Tap the circle X in the upper right corner to go back to the full outline.

But the best part is that you can re-arrange, or re-order your outline by tapping the 4-way arrow toolbar button. This goes into the re-ordering mode, and now you can drag the “hamburger grabbers” on the right side to move points around. If you grab a point that has sub-points, ALL of the points will move with you!

This is one of the best features of CarbonFin Outliner that sounds simple, but it’s rare to find any other app that will allow you to re-order this easily by tapping and dragging.

Notes and Numbering
When you’re NOT in re-ordering mode, the right side has a little notepad icon, which you can tap to add notes to each bullet point. This is EXTREMELY handy to add more info to a point, but keeps your outline clean.

And you can choose whether you see the notes in the outline or not by tapping the “Outline Info” – you can turn off all notes, or elect to just show a 1-line preview of the note.

While you’re in the “Outline Info” options, you can also choose to turn on “Show Numbers” and CarbonFin will add the appropriate numbering scheme to your outline. If you re-order the outline, CarbonFin adjusts the numbering appropriately.

Searching and Syncing
You can search through all your outlines from the search box in left panel, or you can search in the active outline by tapping the magnifying glass over on the right side.

You can also apply “tags” to outlines for easy filtering.

To make sure you never lose your outlines, CarbonFin offers the “Outliner Online” service for free so that your outlines will sync amongst your iOS devices AND be available online through a web browser, so you can get to them on your Mac or Windows computer.

If you prefer, you can sync your outlines via Dropbox, and also the OneDrive option for synching was added in early 2019.

Thank goodness that CarbonFin offers Outliner Online because that might be the best way to export and/or send your outlines to others. Weirdly, the Outliner app does not have a native option for “printing” the outlines, but you can access Outliner Online to print or download outlines.

You CAN email an outline from the CarbonFin Outliner app as plain text which is helpful. But also CarbonFin stores your outlines in OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) which is actually compatible with other apps like OmniOutliner and even iThoughts. I really like creating a visual mindmap in iThoughts, and then exporting the text over to CarbonFin Outliner.

Conclusion
CarbonFin Outliner is a wonderfully simple app for creating an outline and then ORGANIZING your bullet points. The app was originally developed in 2008 and I am thrilled to see that it is still being supported by the developer!

You can download CarbonFin Outliner from the links below, and be sure to sign up at www.appsinlaw.com to be notified of new app reviews.

Download CarbonFin Outliner ($4.99)