Weird new Mac outliner: Tree

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