a million monkeys typing

Hmm… Is “TreeLine” on to something?

Posted January 7th, 2005 at 08:02am

Over at 43Folders.com is a call for GTD-ready applications and templates, with preference given to free and Open Source solutions. It occurred to me that TreeLine is just such a program, albeit not designed with GTD in mind. Basically, it’s a free outliner/PIM/freeform database, somewhat along the lines of the venerable Tinderbox. While it’s maturity does not yet reach anywhere that of Eastgate’s software (for example, you basically only have the latter’s “Explorer” view, and it can’t handle graphics AFAIK), it does have a number of other attractive features, not the least of which is that fact that it is Open Source and thereby modifiable by folks comfortable with Python/QT. It is also cross-platform.

Some would call TreeLine an Outliner, others would call it a PIM. Basically, it just stores almost any kind of information. A tree structure makes it easy to keep things organized. And each node in the tree can contain several fields, forming a mini-database. The output format for each node can be defined, and the output can be shown on the screen, printed, or exported to html.

Versions are available for Windows (in an easy-to-install package) and Linux. Given the libraries listed, I can so no reason why someone can’t install it on OS X as well, as long as he or she takes the time to install the libraries beforehand.

No calendar is included (yet), but I can’t see any valid reason why some very smart people cannot add it, as well as the ability to synchronise stuff to a server. In the meantime, it seems to be able to organise quite a bit, and is only limited by your imagination. “Structure-junkies” should be fairly impressed with the freeform database potential of the app, as well as the import/export, sorting, filtering, encryption, parent-child relationships, and XML capabilities. Treeline is still at version 0.10.2, but even at this stage, it demonstrates a lot of potential.

I’d love to see an XUL-based version of this application, if any Mozilla programmers out there are listening….