Triumphant return of Smereka TreeProjects

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 14, 2011 at 10:39 PM

Well! I love it! TreeProjects is back with a bang! I’ve been drafting a brochure using Scrivener for Windows and TreeProjects side by side, because in a number of significant respects they’re actually very similar. And impressed though I am by Scrivener, I’m afraid TreeProjects wins: it’s easier to use, it’s (much) faster, and it actually indexes the files it stores (Scrivener does store lots of different kinds of files - but doesn’t index them. Definitely a weak point!). TreeProjects even supports in-place file editing, which is really rather neat (not that I feel any particular desire to do that, but it’s clever). The attached file preview in TreeProjects is also much faster than Scrivener, which is rather ponderous when it comes to viewing files.

Scrivener does have its Scrivenings feature, plus the amazing “compile” function. But I’m not convinced they outweigh the speed and convenience of the updated TreeProjects. I’d be interested to hear other views on this, especially from MyInfo users (a similar concept).

What’s won me over, after a period of time working pretty intensively with both programs, is that you can build a database of relevant literature, drafts etc. very quickly in TreeProjects. You sort-of can in Scrivener, too, but there are more bits and pieces to remember: TreeProjects does many of the same things, but uses simpler tools (tags, references etc. rather than groups, collections, folders that can be more than folders and so on). I guess it’s very much a personal preference, but my vote goes to TreeProjects this time round. Let’s see how Scrivener continues to develop (it’s still early days).

Yaroslav - the thing most obviously missing from the current iteration of TreeProjects is in-file links - you can’t create links from one note to another within a TreeProjects file (i.e. by creating a link from selected text), although you can link to more or less anything else. Yes, you can create aliases (“References”), but it’s not quite the same. That would be my next big feature request!

Cheers,
Bill