MaxThink: Another one-pane outliner bites the dust

Posted by Listerene
Nov 27, 2018 at 05:37 PM

MacOS complains about Inspiration 9 but it runs, albeit with a powerfully ugly interface. Feature-wise, Inspiration has a better basic feature-set than OO with better text processing and mind-mapping but import-export is sad ... as you might expect for an app which hasn’t been updated in 5-7 years+ and has been, basically, abandoned in the general market. I don’t expect that an update is coming, any time soon.

IMHO, btw, MaxThink is better off dead. It had an awful interface—even in an *era* of awful interfaces—and I found its developer a pompous ass the few times that I met him. It’s not terribly surprising to me that he couldn’t master Windows programming; he’s one of those dudes who you could retire on if you bought him for what he was worth and sold him for what he thought he was worth.

BTW(2), if you’re looking for a good 2-pane outliner with very capable outlining and extensive rtf word processing in the text pane then it’s hard to beat the granddaddy of them all, TreePad. It’s simple. lightweight and feature-rich. For the most part, it’s like an MS Word which allows sub-documents for easy organization OR as a more stable Scrivener (albeit without handy things like tagging and corkboards). Unlike Scrivener, tables, lists, outlining and compiling panes into a single .rtf file work flawlessly. Treepad is Windows-only but it works great in Parallels (and probably VirtualBox) on MacOS because of its minimal requirements; working well on a 2GB Windows VM.