Here's a nice, little-known gem I came across during a recent bout of outliner searching:

ThinkSheet (developed during the 90's by Richard Marriott)

http://www.fishermarriott.com/thinkshe.htm

Although developed especially for special learning needs, the program turns out to be surprisingly powerful. It integrates rearrangeable notecards, mind mapping, and outlining (through sub-notecards). It can import an existing RTF document (it will just make each paragraph into a separate card), and it can export to a word processor. It's pretty cool and appears to be well-designed. And you can use it for free for 180 days!

Incidentally, I also came across a fascinating article about outlining and the writing process by the developer of the unfortunately no-longer-available SuperText. Here's the citation:

"A Writing Support Tool with Multiple Views"
J. Barrow
Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1997), pp. 13-30

I posted the full text here: http://is.gd/5cJry

Lucas

In case anyone tries out ThinkSheet, I should just mention one oddity: When exporting to a word processor with default settings, sub-notes seem to get converted into a 1pt font size, making the text look like it's just a line. So a few adjustments are necessary.

Interesting ... it works sort of like "Visual BrainStrom" (See http://www.brainstormsw.com/ for the text-based version). And the mind-map view is better than aerial view.

Manfred

(1) ThinkSheet looks very interesting; thanks for the heads up!

(2) The link to the paper brings up the following error message (though I've already logged into Google):
"Sorry, the page (or document) you have requested is not available"

Alexander: Sorry about that---I just fixed the sharing permissions, so the link should work now (let me know if it doesn't).
Thanks for letting me know.

Yes, I can see that ThinkSheet very much seems like a graphic version of Brainstorm, but it is also very much like a crude version of Tinderbox, although ThinkSheet has one mode that TB does not have, namely the Mindmap mode. Too bad it hasn't been developed to meet more modern requirements and appearance.

Steve Z.

Speaking of Tinderbox, it looks like the long-awaited Tinderbox 5 is finally nearing release. It'll be interesting to see if the Windows version finally sees the light of day (my guess is no).

-- Chris

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Yes, I can see that ThinkSheet very much seems like a graphic version of Brainstorm,
but it is also very much like a crude version of Tinderbox, although ThinkSheet has one
mode that TB does not have, namely the Mindmap mode. Too bad it hasn't been developed to
meet more modern requirements and appearance.

Steve Z.

I love the "Find" feature. I'm CRIMPing up. gB