Best Free Outliner I'm not a great fan of outliners - my brain doesn't work that way. Some folks however, swear by them and if that includes you, then you should check out Keynote, a freeware program that has a dedicated band of followers. Its major design attribute is its ease of use. Words like "natural" and "seamless" come close to the mark but really don't capture the essence of what is really a great design. What do you do with it? Well to quote the web site “KeyNote is used by screenwriters to draft screenplays, by medical doctors to keep patient databases, by developers to store source code snippets - and to everyone it serves as a place to put all the random pieces of information that have no particular structure of relationship to other data, and do not fit easily in task-specific applications such as word-processors, databases or spreadsheets.” Unfortunately the program is no longer being developed but is totally usable in its current form. If you find that a turn-off you might like to consider NeoMem [2] as an alternative. It's not really a dedicated outliner rather more of a general purpose note taking program that can be used as an outliner. It's a kind of hybrid of a database and word processor that's designed to allow you to organize, store, hyperlink and search information. That bland description totally under-sells the product. It's one of those programs that you really need to use in order to understand the potential. It works with all Windows versions so try it. Another possibility is FreeMind [3]. It's an Open Source program "mind mapping" program written in Java that can serve as an outliner as well. Functionally it's closer to Keynote than NeoMem. It's slower than Keynote but is more powerful for mapping complex relationships.
Code:
[1] http://www.tranglos.com/free/index.html Free Mozilla Public license, Windows 98 and later, 1.7MB [2] http://www.neomem.org/ Free MIT X11 License, all Windows versions, 680KB [3] http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Free Open Source, any system with Java, 3MB.
No comments:
Post a Comment