I've just posted about a new outliner/treemap application. It's not easy to nail down how to classify it really, but I've been using it for a couple of weeks and I really like it. Here's the post:
http://www.mind-mapping.org/blog/2009/02/treesheets-fast-organised-notes/

Regards
Vic Gee
http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software

Dear Vic,

Thanks for the heads up at this forum. I got your blog's RSS feed this morning and was sufficiently intrigued by TreeSheets to try it out straight away. Needless to say I am impressed.

For one thing, the program looks remarkably mature, straightforward to use and actually useful.

Indeed it does represent a different organisational paradigm, even compared to other 'hierarchical spreadsheet' approaches such as B-liner. I imagine that the 'tables within tables' approach will be familiar to people who have written HTML code, but I don't think I've seen it in any kind of PIM.

[Actually, this is partially wrong: I think AI base ( http://www.aibase-cs.com/ ) can place tables within tables, but it's not its key feature and it's rather .idiosyncratic compared to TreeSheets' common sense approach.]

Thanks again; I encourage others in this forum to check the software out and will be writing my own impressions over the next days.

Alexander

This is an intriguing application. I'm currently at home -- where I'm Mac-based -- but intend to check out TreeSheet at the office. This is timely, because I've been thinking more about keeping information in tables, or grids. I was looking again at the quirky, interesting Notebox Disorganizer, but the advantage of a grid is also its disadvantage: it's too rigid. But TS seems to bypass that problem with the nested tables. Thank you for the heads up.

Steve Z.

Steve,

I think that you'll be delighted to hear that you can exchange information with several other applications (Brainstorm, Natara Bonsai and mind mapping programs are a few that come to mind) with indented text. From the tutorial "copy paste any ascii text into a cell with indentation will create a tree structure according to the indentation". Similarly, exporting as text will produce an indented ascii file that can be read into the programs mentioned above.

It's particularly interesting to see Brainstorm files expand into a sort of editable 'Ballon view' something that Brainstorm aficionados have been wanting for ages. And it is here that the TreeSheets' advantage can be best demonstrated: it expands the traditional outline by adding an extra dimension, i.e. additional cells for every entry.

I am more and more impressed as I work on it.

Cheers
Alexander

Steve,

Wouter has just mentioned Mac and Linux versions based on the current code-base.

Vic
http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software

I endorse the earlier comments that this is an intriguing and potentially very useful application. Out of the box, it seems powerful and practical.

If the outlining functionality was further developed, I think I might use it as my primary text outliner. At the moment a Word outline does not seem to retain its indentation if imported into Treesheets, while the export facility to Word does not do this either.


Given the bugs in Notemap, I have been longing for a one-button import/export to Word from a single pane outliner. IQ seems to be getting close, Brainstorm development beckons and now Treesheets offers further potential.

It is not all gloom and doom after all.

Jack

Jack, have you tried Inspiration (www.inspiration.com). It's a bit clunky, but...

-c
==============================================================
Jack Crawford wrote:

I endorse the earlier comments that this is an intriguing and potentially very useful
application. Out of the box, it seems powerful and practical.

If the outlining
functionality was further developed, I think I might use it as my primary text
outliner. At the moment a Word outline does not seem to retain its indentation if
imported into Treesheets, while the export facility to Word does not do this
either.


Given the bugs in Notemap, I have been longing for a one-button
import/export to Word from a single pane outliner. IQ seems to be getting close,
Brainstorm development beckons and now Treesheets offers further potential.

It
is not all gloom and doom after all.

Jack

Cassius wrote:

Jack, have you tried Inspiration (www.inspiration.com). It's a bit clunky,
but...

Yes I have a licence for Inspiration and use it occasionally for business diagrams. It is one of very few apps that can toggle on the fly between text and graphics.

However I crave an elegant text only one-pane outliner that links to Word (both import and export). As you say, Inspiration is clunky and I don't really enjoy working with a lot of text, such as report writing. While they are trying to emphasize its potential business use, it was primarily designed for the primary and secondary education markets.


Jack

I've been playing around a bit with TreeSheets, and I am excited by the concept. The Zoom feature is great -- like hoisting to an individual cell, although in TS you can see an entire grid.

I do have some criticisms or suggestions (which I have e-mailed to the developer):

1. It would be nice to have the option of making the first row and the first column bold type to indicate they are headers. Additionally, it would be nice to be able to make any cell's text bold for sub-headers.

2. Editing in the cells is a bit restrictive because they do not support standard selection options. For instance, to select a whole word, one needs to sweep the cursor from the start of the word to the end of the word. This can be difficult sometimes, especially since the type scales. In a standard word processor, you can select a whole word by double-clicking on it, and subsequent words by keeping the left mouse button depressed after the second click and sweeping forward. For TS to be a work environment, I think it needs better editing in the cells.

3. Instinctively, I want to use the tab key to move from one cell to the next, but hitting the tab key seems to do nothing. It would nice to make this behave more like a typical spreadsheet.

As you said, Alexander, it works great with Brainstorm. That's a nice plus.

Steve Z.

For those interested in following Treesheet's development trajectory, a Google group has just been set up for further discussion and announcements.

http://groups.google.com/group/treesheets



Jack

Wouter -- TreeSheets' developer -- responded quickly to my suggestions and is kindly implementing all of them. I think he was already planning to introduce the ability to add formatting (bold, italic, underline) to individual cells. This is most impressive responsiveness!!!

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Wouter -- TreeSheets' developer -- responded quickly to my suggestions and is kindly
implementing all of them. I think he was already planning to introduce the ability to
add formatting (bold, italic, underline) to individual cells. This is most
impressive responsiveness!!!

He's also working on my comments about connectivity with MS Word. In fact he's going so fast I'm struggling to keep up with him! :-)

Jack

FYI, Wouter has already implemented the suggestions I made, as well as a few others. In fact, he had them done within 24 hours of when I suggested them.

treesheets.com

Steve Z.

Jack,

So it was you who asked for the MS Word export feature (through HTML)? Brilliant!

Everyone here who's struggled with exporting hierarchical notes from a PIM to Word should try out the latest TreeSheets build. Here's the history entry: "Added outline html export, which loads into Word as an hierarchical set of headers".

And here's my comment at the TreeSheets Google group: "Treesheets is worth installing for this feature alone."

Cheers
Alexander

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Jack,

So it was you who asked for the MS Word export feature (through HTML)?

Yes Alex, I plead guilty.

Quick export to Word has been one of my obsessions with the various products we discuss here. I notice that you've made similar suggestions to Wouter about Excel.

It's great to see another very interesting application being pushed along so quickly, with such creativity and responsiveness. (The other is InfoQube btw).

Jackl