Weird new Mac outliner: Tree

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Posted by Chris Thompson
Feb 17, 2009 at 01:18 AM

There’s a new Japanese outliner out:
http://www.topoftree.jp/en/tree/

It’s based on the idea that you should be able to expand/collapse parts of the outline both in the traditional way (vertically) *or* horizontally across the screen. It sounds odd but it’s an interesting concept that does make better use of screen space and also makes better use of spatial memory.

You could do the same thing with the most recent version of MindManager and its automatic layout algorithms… in fact you can do more, but MM slows down once you’ve got more than two dozen nodes under automatic layout making it more frustrating than it’s worth IMHO.

I like the general idea a lot. In a sense these kind of outliners are structured mind-mappers, which make a lot more sense to me than how mind-mapping has been presented in software in the past.

—Chris

Posted by Wes Perdue
Feb 17, 2009 at 02:30 AM

Chris, thanks for the heads-up. Very interesting app.

It’s about $43 US according to Paypal. Note also that the included help is in Japanese.

A couple observations. It can hoist children into a new window. It writes out OPML that OmniOutliner can read in, and it can read an OO-exported OPML file with notes.

Posted by Tom S.
Feb 17, 2009 at 05:45 PM

I would like this better if the information revealed when expanded horizontally was different from the information revealed when expanded vertically. For instance, perhaps a horizontal expansion could show parent information while a vertical expansion could show children.

Tom S.

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