Latest candidate in my pursuit of the ideal Outliner is TreePad. This is the most appealing so far:
- two-pane outliner: tree hierarchy on the left, node contents on the right. Simpler than Microsoft OneNote with it's confusing mix of tabs levels.
- The node contents are rich text that can contain formatting, images, tables (unlike OneNote) etc. Node editor is virtually a word processor.
- Nodes may contain hyperlinks to executables, web pages, other nodes in other treepad documents (unlike OneNote and better than leo's cloning which only works in the context of a single document). Hyperlinks go in article body, unlike Leo where they go in the tree node title, not a good place to put it in my opinion.
- Tree nodes may have an icon associated with it. Leo loads it's selection of icons very slowly.
- Not the fastest program I have used: the help file is a 5M treepad document and takes a good time to load up (1.5G Centrino).
- Simple installation: one of it's features is that it can be installed on a USB flash key and carried around. I haven't found a licence agreement yet to tell me if it has to be licenced on each pc it is used on.
- Robust encryption. Dare I trust it with my credit card numbers and passwords?
- Can export in many formats including XML, OPML (which strips internal hyperlinks), html-ish files parsable by python. It is important to me that data can be extracted from any proprietary file format.
- Documents can be exported as entire websites, complete with Javascript driven tree. Kinda tempting to examine the possibility of organising a website around with this, carryng it in pocket, publishing it, searching it, refactoring it, writing it to pdf... I find blog notes the best place to record things but web interface is not the best editor. Could type stuff in here and bulk move it to the blog.
It is commercial (£20 ish) but it is very polished (unlike Leo).
Peter's Moblog
Have decided on Treepad as well after using a multitude of Outliners. Just moved from MyInfo to Treepad Business Edition. Had also looked at AZZCardfile, Evernote, among others. May want to mention that the suggested file size for each Treepad outliner is 20 megs, unless going with their top of the line outliner. Like the support for linking easily with local files and web pages and creation of tables as well, which I organize several related bits of information in them for easy reference.