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ThinkSheet
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Posted by Lucas
Dec 5, 2009 at 01:29 AM
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
Posted by Lucas
Dec 5, 2009 at 04:21 AM
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.
Posted by Manfred
Dec 5, 2009 at 04:08 PM
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
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 6, 2009 at 10:01 AM
(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”
Posted by Lucas
Dec 6, 2009 at 12:52 PM
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.