Tree Review: A New Kind of Outliner

Outlining is an important part of any education system, whether you’re a student or a teacher. This explains why there are so many outliners out there. And, for the most part, they look the same; they use indentations to show what hierarchy the item is in. And this system works great. It means you don’t have to learn much before trying a new outliner. Well, today I will tell you about an outliner that works a little bit differently from the rest. It’s called Tree, by Top of Tree.

Tree gives you two ways to view your outlines: Listview and Treeview. Listview is your normal, everyday, outline view that uses indentation for children. Treeview, however, displays children on the right side of the parent. When in Treeview, you will see a little arrow at the right end of a box (if the box has a child). When you click this box, the child expands to the right. You can also do a bit of a hybrid between Listview and Treeview. If you click the big triangle on the left side of a box, Tree will show that box’s child below it, like in a regular list. But, this will not effect the child’s child or the parent, so you can still display some expanded to the right. If you want to resize a box Treeview, just click and drag on the divider at the top of the outline that corresponds with the box you are resizing. You cannot resize individual boxes, only a certain hierarchical level. So, Treeview, does not replace a mind manager, it is just another view for an outline.

The rest of Tree works exactly as you would expect it to. The toolbar buttons allow you to add, remove, indent, and outdent boxes. The Show Family toolbar icon will expand a whole family (parents and children) based on which way the family was expanded last (right or bottom). Although there is a show family toolbar item, nowhere is there a hide family toolbar item, or even menu item.
The Label toolbar item allows you to label a box a specific color. If you click on a box and then click the Edit Note toolbar item, you can edit the box’s note. The note text will be displayed in grey right under the main text for the box.

Tree also supports importing and exporting to a few formats. To open a OPML file, either go to File > Open or just drag it onto Tree’s icon. To import from a plain text document, just go to File > Open, or drag it onto Tree’s icon. You will then see a dialogue which allows you to view the text file, and choose an encoding to import with. What is strange is that even when you export with Tree, it cannot import notes as notes; they are just children. To export a document, just go to File > Export, and choose a format and encoding. Although Tree does allow you to import and export, you only have the choice of two formats (three including its own), and you can’t even get notes imported from files exported with Tree.

Tree, by Top of Tree retails for about $42.79 and you can download a free trial from their site. It has very few features, but does include a new view for outlining. However, for the price, I suggest you look elsewhere at products like OmniOutliner or OmniOutliner Pro.

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