I recently talked about a single-pane outliner, and decided to try out a two-pane outliner called The Guide. It’s a lot more feature-rich and mature compared to TKOutliner. Outliners are great for planning out your writing, storing information and even managing your to do lists. The Guide is great for planning your outline and offers a second window so that you can continue working and expanding your ideas. It has the look of a Windows help file but of course allows full rich-text editing and allows you to change background colour (for those who get headaches staring at a white background). Another really nice feature is that it can act as a lightweight wiki, storing all your information in one place : you can add internal (and external links) and can easily find information with the useful search features.

The Guide is completely portable, and less than 1 MB! All your work can be exported to RTF format.

A while ago I tried out TiddlyWiki after reading about its virtues – a single HTML file with a blog-like interface that could be edited through your browser and carried around on your USB drive. Great for to do lists and all kinds of things. Sounded pretty cool, but I just didn’t get it at first. And I’m a programmer to boot – how embarrassing!

Anyway, truth is I didn’t spend enough time with it. That’s me: if software isn’t intuitive enough for me to understand within 60 seconds, I get frustrated. It’s a bad habit but thankfully in this case I tried it again and I’m now addicted to Tiddlywikis. It’s actually so easy to use that I wonder why I had problems understanding it in the first place!

While I’m still using Mempad for general note-taking, I’m finding TiddlyWiki very useful for organizing research on a single topic and for organizing large projects. It’s also great for to-do lists!
There is a site that allows you to host your TiddlyWiki for free at Tiddlyspot. You can easily download your page to work on it offline and to carry a backup on your flash drive.