I love that Dynalist is actively developing the outliner. Here’s on killer feature I think would take it to the level of website hosting, which I would use for my main public website with info and project links.
It’s a pretty simple idea, as the title says, auto-collapse on next section expand and pinning.
Pinning (to keep open, or closed, after an expand/collapse all) by an author would allow highlighting relevant ‘heading level’ info. Like the first paragraphs of a wikipedia article. The reader could then drill down into specifics like on the wikipedia mobile pages. Furthermore with pinning the author could keep open current projects, like open tabs of a browser, for readers and themselves to launch from. (A quick way to implement this would be to integrate it with the checkboxes, and make the ‘hide checked’ option behavior to collapse lines instead of disabling all interaction. I think the logic works if any checked item is collapsed even if subitems are not checked, but that could be a settings option.)
Auto-collapse on main level expand would be an efficient way to read an article without scrolling, while allowing the reader to pick their path through the single page ‘website’. Pinning here would allow the reader to keep open different parts for comparison or a browsing trail.
Auto-collapse is used in many sidebar table of contents navigation panes, and is an intuitive way to present finer headings from main level ones. I would suggest even nested auto-collapse would really allow drilling down into branches until the last list. Moving to the next list while drilled down, is another intuitive way to move from branch to branch of information.
I’m willing to be a Pro member to help implement it, but I think offering it to everyone would make Dynalist the de facto outliner on the internet (Notion is really headed in this direction, but doesn’t have any outliner features), especially for personal websites, curations and launch pages, from which many further business revenues streams could be achieved from the tag pane and backup features, etc (though again those could really amplify wider public adoption if they were in the gratis version), or integrating SEO features for Google searches and other website and business services like multiuser support for teams.
PS, a couple of buttons at the top for readers navigation like toggle expand/collapse all, and expand all first level headings would be really helpful for this as well. And, while I’m thinking of it, Workflowy had the ability to share each nested line individually, which allowed for sharing a section publically while keeping the rest of a list private. That also allowed separate sublists to be shared and basically published as separate websites for different topics. I’m having to create another account to separate personal and public info, which means I have to use them in different browsers, which is a pain. Also, you might consider open-sourcing parts of the webapp on GitHub to allow for community development, or allowing public extensions to be written. Thanks!!
One last idea… the up/down arrows could be used to auto-expand/collapse through the list, by moving through items. …Oh, and double-clicking a bullet for zoom-in could free up an icon for pinning… and with the menu as the right click on bullet, it would be great to be able to turn off the menu and zoom icons that flash on every mouse movement and is distracting from the content.