What is Fair Witness?

Fair Witness, a striking new variation on an old software theme, incorporates elements you normally associate with outlines, database, and spreadsheet programs. The result of this unique combination is an application with considerably more depth than traditional outliners have. Fair Witness is an invaluable tool for capturing, organizing, and following through on project ideas. As its name implies, the program serves as an accurate and impartial recorder of all the thoughts and plans that go into a project, whether it's managing a department or writing a thesis.

Much Mure Than an Outliner

Under the skin. Fair Witness is essentially an amalgam of outliner and database program, with some handy presentation and project-management tools thrown in. Although it isn't a substitute for your word-processing, database, or spreadsheet application, it performs some important functions of all of these. In comparison with other software types, it comes closest to replacing your outliner, although Acta and MORE users will likely hold on to those packages for their printing capabilities, which are more flexible than those Fair Witness offers.

To begin developing and organizing a project with Fair Witness, you create ideas and subideas and arrange them hierarchically, just as in an outliner. Fair Witness gives you free rein to drag your ideas around: reposition them; and indent, outdent, delete, insert, expand, and contract entries.

After you've typed in your first flush of ideas (you can always add more later), you organize them by dragging them into category bins that you set up at the bottom of the screen. These bins ease the organizational process by letting you see clearly what remains to be categorized properly.

You can view your outline as a whole or in part. When you drag an idea to a small hierarchical pop-up menu at the lop left of the screen, it becomes the current “headline.” Only the topics below that headline are visible, but you can move back up the tree by using the pop-up menu to see more of your outline. A useful option that’s missing from other out!itiers places all ideas that are at the same level in the hierarchy on separate pages so you can simply flip through them.

Once you've recorded the basic ideas that form the foundation of your project, it's time to start attaching information to these ideas. This is where Fair Witness goes we11 beyond basic outliner programs. You can, for example, attach job titles and salaries to the list of employees involved in a particular project. To attach information, you create an information chart, a spreadsheet like series of columns that holds text, list, date, number, icon, picture, and rating data. Sounds can also be attached to these columns. The spreadsheet rows represent the ideas and sub ideas in your outline.

To create custom reports and views of your data, you can hide selected columns and rows, save your views, and switch among them at will.

Text columns are designed to contain notes, names, tasks, and titles. You can even create a series of entries within a single text cell. This ability lets you save earlier versions of your data, including time stamps, or list more than one entry in a cell, such as a set of names assigned to one task. Series data can be displayed simultaneously or paged through, entry by entry.

List columns are essentially text columns with predefined entries (such as lists of people) that appear on a pop-up menu. Lists must appear as ideas with subheads somewhere in your outline. The subheads then become options on the pop-up menu.

Icon and picture columns hold graphics data. Icons, which must fit in a 32-x-32 pixel area, can be pasted in or drawn onscreen in fat bits. Icons can be attached to categories, so that the bins at the bottom of the screen display the appropriate icons. Graphic elements of any size can be pasted into a picture cell via the Clipboard. You can't directly import pictures, but you can resize them once you’ve placed them.

Number columns are self-explanatory. Formatting options are limited to choosing the number of decimal places. You can’t add things such as dollar signs or percent symbols. Limited calculation functions let you obtain aggregate data for sets of subideas, such as the average, sum, minimum, maximum, and count.

Date columns deliver project-management capabilities to Fair Witness. You can store single dates or durations within date cels. In the basic information chart, dates are shown in text format, but switching to Fair Witness' time-chart view lets you see them graphically as milestones and bars. You can enter dates in either view, although it's often easier simply to click and drag a bar in the time chart than to type two dates in the information chart.

All date columns currently showing in the information chart are displayed in thelime chan simultaneously, so you can set up one column for projected dates and another for actual ones and then see how they overlap. You can also change the symbols used for each of the date columns, so you can distinguish them on the combined time chart. A serious omission, however, is a key to the chart symbols (an upcoming new version is expected to correct this problem).

How Do You Rate?

Finally, an unusual ratings column lets you tally votes and scores for lists of ideas. Several rating schemes are possible, from simple ranking to weighted averages of many voters over multiple criteria. Fair Witness can display numeric results in a column in the information chart or as a bar or pie chart.

In addition to working in the structured environment of the outline and information chart, you can view and enter data on a free-form “white board" that can be as large as 100 x 100 inches. The free-form view is perfect for moving ideas around, finding links among ideas, and brainstorming as a group. It also lets you set up organization charts and project flowcharts with boxes and arrows. You just click on an idea to drag it anywhere on-screen. You can even align messy data by use of a special command.

Connect Me and Go Back are HyperCard-like features that help you navigate complex Fair Witness documents. Connecting two ideas attaches an arrow button to each. Clicking on the button takes you directly to the connected idea. Go Back keeps a list of all the ideas you've traversed (up to a number you specify), and you can call it up and retrace your path.

To further customize your Fair Witness reports and views for presentation, you can change the font, style, size, alignment, color, border, width, and background pattern of any cell or group of cells. Next, you can decide whether to show all the contents of a cell or just the first line. You can also sort by any text, number, date, or symbol column, in ascending or descending order. The ability to sort by symbols such as check marks is especially valuable, although we wish Fair Witness supported multilevel sorts.

Fair Witness' Find command looks for a particular text string and can replace it globally with another. The Search command can pinpoint text, numbers, dates, and symbols in any column. It can also select or deselect all ideas that match or don't match the search criteria.

Printing is WYSIWYG. Simply arrange your data on-screen as you want to see it primed, whether it be the information chart, time chart, free-form white board, or ratings chart. You can set page breaks manually with a vertical ruler. A handy Preview function lets you adjust margins visually and add headers, foolers, and page numbers. One pet peeve is that column formats are not saved with layouts, so if you prefer one format for printing and another for on-screen viewing, you must manually change formats every time you print.

Fair Witness can open and save text files in tab-delimited formal. Text files saved with Acta and MORE open with hierarchies intact, but text files saved with Fair Witness can be opened only by a word processor or a spreadsheet program, because regular outliners don't allow for columnar data.

Fair Witness comes with a prodigious ammount of documentation. The three manuals and a videotape are all designed to help you understand the concept of a work processor, the term invented by Chena to describe Fair Witness. A1though we would have preferred a more streamlined approach, the manuals are clear and well written. The technical-support number is displayed in huge type in several places throughout the manuals, and we received instant, courteous, and extremely knowledgeable replies to our questions, many of which will be addressed in the new version of Fair Witness that will be available by the time this review appears.

Fair Witness is System 7-compatible, but the only specific System 7 feature it supports is TrueType.

The Bottom Line

Although Fair Witness appears unique at first glance, it's really a superoutliner that's helpful for managing a wide variety of projects. People already use outliners as tools to brainstorm and to organize their work, but Fair Witness goes a good many steps further than outlining software. It extends the concept in a way that's both intuitive and useful for managing projects to their completion. We could quibble and say that to be a true work processor, it needs even more features, such as a linked address and phone directory with label-printing capability or more calculation functions, but that would be missing the point. The point is that the program defines a new and welcome product category that will likely burgeon in the near future.

Waring, Becky. (January 1992). Fair Witness. MacUser. (pgs. 50, 52).

Download Fair Witness for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II