Dear friends,

I'm pleased to announce that TreeProjects version 2 is released. TreeProjects is a two-pane outliner that supports RTF-based note taking, transparent realtime indexing, searchable file attachments, web capturing, reminders, and more. Please visit the website, http://personaldatabase.org , for more details.

In version 2, the following important improvements were made:

- The user interface is now even faster, more customizable, looks better, and is simpler by default. ( Screenshot: http://personaldatabase.org/screenshots/general_1.png )

- File attachments of certain types can be previewed inline in the item view of TreeProjects, so a single click will show the contents of a file attachment, not just information about it. ( Screenshot showing a PDF attachment preview: http://personaldatabase.org/screenshots/preview_pdf.png )

- Microsoft Office files (DOC/DOCX, PPT/PPTX, XLS/XLSX) can also be edited inline in TreeProjects. You can work with an Office document in the same way you work with a rich text note. ( Screenshot showing editing an Excel file: http://personaldatabase.org/screenshots/edit_excel.png )

- The built-in rich text editor has also been improved. For advanced operations on rich text items that are not supported by the built-in editor (for example, advanced table editing), a button is added to open the item in an associated editor, make the advanced edits, and have them back in TreeProjects in a couple of clicks.

- On 64-bit Windows systems, TreeProjects can now access and use both 32-bit and 64-bit text filters. This removed search limitations that affected indexing some file types on 64-bit Windows.

- A lot of smaller improvements and bugfixes were made. Most of them were inspired by user suggestions and bug reports made using the dedicated error reporting tool. User-contributed translations of the user interface were added as well.

TreeProjects 2 remains at the same price ($49), and this major update was free for 1.x.x users. The current version of TreeProjects is 2.1.1.

Thanks for reading, and thank OutlinerSoftware for providing an opportunity to make this announcement.

Yaroslav Pidstryhach (the developer).

Does it now, or will it soon support Outlook 2010 Email - i.e. drag drop from Outlook?

Hi Ian,

There's a generic mechanism of text capturing in TreeProjects - it allows to paste any text copied from any application using a global shortcut. It happens in the background, without your leaving the source application. You can use this mechanism to quickly store your emails in TreeProjects as part of existing items or as new items. Other than that, currently there is no special support for emails in general, or Outlook in particular.

I plan to look into previewing email messages saved by Outlook as files (msg or eml files), the way Office/PDF files are previewed now. If you have other email workflow in mind, please write back.

Yaroslav, thanks for the information. Just a quick word of encouragement in your work; it's great to see Treeprojects advancing in leaps.

From a user point of view, the main thing I miss is the handling of shortcuts to web material and local files, i.e. in addition to attachments, but I see in the roadmap that this is at the top of your list anyway!

I use Ultrarecall, which shares many similarities with Tree Projects. One place where Ultrarecall produces data loss is if you work on an embedded file (e.g. Word file), exit the Ultrarecall database, continue working on the Word file, then save the Word file. That saved Word file is just in a temp folder that gets erased.

If one's working on lots of projects, files, and databases, sometimes this could happen (also if your computer crashes). I've asked before for at least a simple warning before the Ultrarecall db is closed down that embedded files are still open and being edited. Or some temp file system that doesn't erase everything each time UR is reopened (and is a bit more forgiving of such errors). But no movement on that front.

I tried to see what happened with tree projects. I imported a Word document. Started editing it externally. Shut down tree projects, then saved the word document. Those saves obviously didn't get carried over. So, would you consider putting in a warning at least -- telling the user that you cannot exit the db without closing all opened files?

This would be one way to distinguish Tree Projects from Ultrarecall.

Finally, I assume there's no easy way to import data from one to the other--even if some of the metadata are lost. Thanks for an interesting product.

Hi JerryK,

Yes, TreeProjects does warn you if you're editing a document inline when exiting (i.e. in the "edit" tab), but there's no such warning if you're editing it externally, and no recovery attempt based on temp files from the previous session. I added this issue to the issue tracker.

Y.

Yaroslav Pidstryhach wrote:

Hi Ian,

There's a generic mechanism of text capturing in TreeProjects - it allows to
paste any text copied from any application using a global shortcut. It happens in the
background, without your leaving the source application. You can use this mechanism
to quickly store your emails in TreeProjects as part of existing items or as new items.
Other than that, currently there is no special support for emails in general, or
Outlook in particular.

I plan to look into previewing email messages saved by
Outlook as files (msg or eml files), the way Office/PDF files are previewed now. If you
have other email workflow in mind, please write back.

Yaroslav

Take a free tool like http://taskcoach.org - you can drag and drop an Outlook Email into it. Then you can right click the new item in Taskcoach -> open attachment - which opens the original email in Outlook.

Using a tool like Treeprojects, I'd want to manage "everything" within its interface. So I'd want to manage information relating to various work projects - which for me would always include various email threads - then I'd generally have a need to reply/forward something relating to some email, and rather than have to go and search for it in Outlook, I'd want to be able to simply launch any specific email from Treeprojects, like I can do with Taskcoach. Or Mind Manager, or TaskMerlin, or many others ...

Regards, Ian

So just being able to copy/paste the content of an email is not much use (to me).