The future of TreeSheets: commercial? open source? something else?

[Wouter]

TreeSheets is a fairly mature application by now (on Windows and Linux at least), but it would be great to see continued development, and it has become clear to me that I can't continue to put significant time into it without some form of cash infusion. The question is how. I see some options:

A kickstarter. The main goal for this could be to Open Source it (guaranteeing future development can happen even without me), with stretch goals for popular large features (such as programmability/plugins, maybe a very lofty stretch goal for a mobile version since it requires a complete UI rewrite, etc). The problem I see with a kickstarter is that I don't really have much in terms of "rewards" to hand out, since the current and future TreeSheets are already free, and thus supporting such a kickstarter is only interesting to those users who are really fanatic about the program, and may be a small group. Alternatively the kickstarter could be about making it a commercial, but I bet Open Source is going to be the most desirable aspect to many supporters.

An alternative option, now that Steam supports non-gaming applications, is going through the Steam greenlight program, and actually make TreeSheets commercial, for a relatively low price (I was thinking 10$). Being on Steam improves visibility a lot, and could thus be a source of income that can support future development. Steam is effectively the only windows app store, now that the windows 8 app store only accepts new Metro apps (who knows wxWidgets will be ported to that someday). On the downside, it will require quite a critical mass of supporters to get it greenlit, and treesheets may not fit well with the Steam audience which so far are mostly gamers, who may not care for it.

I have of course already tried donations. While I am grateful for those that have donated, it is too small of a group to support development.

So, your opinion is required: what road to financial support for TreeSheets would you prefer? maybe something not mentioned here? If you like the kickstarter idea, do you see any way to make such a kickstarter more appealing to people who aren't already hardcore fans? what do you think should major stretch goals be (and at what levels)? are you willing to help promote it to reach the attention of more people?

[Timothy McDonald]

I think a wider audience would be obviously be a good thing and bring further support. I love the program and use it quite a bit. I have been real tight financially so I haven't kicked in a donation yet and I should. The hard part might be showing people that its an app they will use I gave it a try primarily because I have knowledge of your previous projects and reputation so I figured if you created it then it was worth exploring and its no surprise to me that I was rite and its useful. I really see this as your baby and if it needs to remain closed source to receive proper exposure and make it worth your while to then so be it. That said I would like to see it open source but this isn't really about what I like.

[Wouter]

Ron: Thanks for the ideas. Lifehacker would be great, as it certainly has a large following. Do you mean the "ask lifehacker" section? The questions there seem to be of general interest, so mine may be too specific.

Timothy: yes, I am worried too that TreeSheets may not be mass market enough to make this happen, as it is not obvious to most people why they would want this. It seems almost everyone at one point or another has used Excel to organize non-numerical information, and I was expecting that crowd to instantly see the point of TreeSheets, but that hasn't quite happened yet.

[Wouter]

Ok, I deleted my original reply to Ron because it was incorrect, and Google Groups apparently thinks its logical to also delete the original message it replies to?

Anyway, here's what Ron Pero originally said:

---------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Wouter

Now and then lifehacker.com posts a discussion where someone asks a question, then the readers are invited to solve the problem. Lifehacker might or might not be a good venue for this; there may be other sites that would welcome such a discussion.

In addition, doing such a thing would increase exposure of TreeSheets, expanding the userbase.

I'm not knowledgeable about sites where this would be most appropriate. If Lifehacker does it, it has a large audience.

There is http://www.donationcoder.com/. Not so large an audience I think, but an interesting approach.

Surely there are many other talented programmers in a similar situation. It seems like a legitimate problem in need of a solution.

You should do this where you get the most exposure. If that means kickstarter, then do it without exclusive benefits.

Just my $0.02.

[Ron PeroTreeSheets]

Hi Wouter

Discussions of the Day sounds more like it. Take a look at this page: http://lifehacker.com/discussions-of-the-day/

Ron

On 11/11/2012 05:36 PM, Wouter van Oortmerssen wrote:

Ron: Thanks for the ideas. Lifehacker would be great, as it certainly has a large following. Do you mean the "ask lifehacker" section? The questions there seem to be of general interest, so mine may be too specific.

Timothy: yes, I am worried too that TreeSheets may not be mass market enough to make this happen, as it is not obvious to most people why they would want this. It seems almost everyone at one point or another has used Excel to organize non-numerical information, and I was expecting that crowd to instantly see the point of TreeSheets, but that hasn't quite happened yet.

On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Ron Pero <rp...@magnadev.com> wrote:

Dear Wouter

Now and then lifehacker.com posts a discussion where someone asks a question, then the readers are invited to solve the problem. Lifehacker might or might not be a good venue for this; there may be other sites that would welcome such a discussion.

In addition, doing such a thing would increase exposure of TreeSheets, expanding the userbase.

I'm not knowledgeable about sites where this would be most appropriate. If Lifehacker does it, it has a large audience.

There is http://www.donationcoder.com/. Not so large an audience I think, but an interesting approach.

Surely there are many other talented programmers in a similar situation. It seems like a legitimate problem in need of a solution.

You should do this where you get the most exposure. If that means kickstarter, then do it without exclusive benefits.

Just my $0.02.

Ron

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[Andrew Norris]

Does anybody in the group know anyone who knows someone, who has followers / connection, and can rave about treesheets? 

All linked by 5 friends principle? 

As I do think perhaps publicity could be the issue. It may only need one fan with enough followers, to rave about it to get the ball rolling. 

So putting a call out to all readers of this, to think who they may know, and who they may know... 

As it is actually a very good product. I find it hard to believe I may be so unusual that only a few can see this. 

It may take some time to realise how useful it is, it was not taken to it at first I must say. But I came to see how neat it is! Very good product. 

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[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Andrew: agreed, publicity is possibly going to be too difficult.

[arm...@ono.com]

This small program has changed my life!
I'm not a professional programmer (yet). As open source software do not benefit me now.

in my case, I am using treesheets for all. I discovered it's cool even as IDE
I programmed in AutoLISP many years. But these months came another project and my problem was remembering all the functions created then.
As was well indented code, I think  import it  in treesheets , and ... ... I have the code now clearer than ever.
I have thousands of lines of code in a single file, but it's all very accessible. each function in his cell, and arranged in multiple columns by their type, and I found many more benefits. In a few ours, i was working again.
This is just one of the uses that I do the program. If I had more programming skills, certainly cooperate in its development. Although it was only for my own benefit.
I am now studying other languages, such as C and Java. Maybe in the future can help the project.

However, that does not stop the development, perhaps only 5 or 6 programmers need to be making small changes every few months.
Moreover, the power of the program is its simplicity. allowing everyone do their own functions, (not changing  the main program) would be an important advance. And then share what each  one has done.

There is much more  to say, but it's enough for a post.
thank you very much wouter

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Thanks for your kind words :)

Funny, I have done the same thing, pasting large amounts of code into TreeSheets, and finding it much easier to read as a consequence. Being able to organize in columns, and especially, being able to shrink unimportant code, makes a world of difference. Had thoughts about making it easier to use as a code editor, but realizing it would also have its limitations... a multi-column text editor with individual line sizes would work better.

Wouter

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[Ron PeroTreeSheets]

This sounds appealing to me too, as a programmer.

As an "organizer" and "brain stormer", this appeals to me: http://lifehacker.com/5959142/scapple-is-way-to-get-messy-ideas-down-quickly

It has an approximate similarity to what you are doing.

Have you sent a Tip to lifehacker? Nothing ventured, nothing gained...

Ron

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Programs like Scrapple have 3 major problems compared to treesheets:
- lack of automatic organization. Requiring the user to move existing elements around when there's no space for new items where you want them is initially liberating (not having to think about structure) but severely limiting when your data grows bigger
- use of screen real estate / information density. Especially when using TreeSheets with shrinking of text, the information density can easily be 10x of Scrapple or any mind mapping program.
- speed with non-trivial data sets.

I guess TreeSheets is set up to be supremely useable when using large amounts of data. Competitors look more neato with simple examples but break down easily in either usability, overview or speed. I have TreeSheets that contain literally a book's worth of data, and it is very easy for me to overview/navigate/edit. I wouldn't be able to imagine that amount of data in competing programs. In fact, I started writing TreeSheets when an unnamed competitor (mind mapper) got so slow it took like a second every time I re-arranged something, with only a few "pages" worth of data :)

As for lifehacker, the "discussion of the day" are actually responses to regular news articles that have been lifted out as the ones generating a lot of discussion, so not something you can submit anything to. And for regular lifehacker articles, "how should I raise money for TreeSheets" is way to specific a question, I had enough trouble to get them to post about TreeSheets at all (as in, "hey look at this cool new information management program", which should normally be right up their alley).

Wouter

[graha...@gmail.com]

Wouter,

This isn't going to be a popular opinion, but my feeling is that TreeSheets hasn't yet reached a stage of maturity which would allow it to be successfully monetised.  TreeSheets is innovative but, as yet, too non-standard to be attractive to enough people. I think it needs a final spurt of development to make it more popular. (It looks to me like nothing new has been released in over a year)  

What do I mean by this?  Well, for example, when I add a URL to a program, I want to to automatically turn blue and to be clickable to open the page/file, as happens in all other programs.  I don't want to have to learn a new keystroke to open it. This approach also means, in effect, that a URL needs to be in a cell on its own - a limitation.  I want to be able to add links to files by dragging them onto the sheet (the tutorial suggests that this is the case, but only if the file is in the same directory, which is unworkable for most people).  Sheets can't be encrypted or password protected, so can't be used for any sensitive data.  Lots of these little things, which run of the mill Windows users expect to see. 

I may be wrong on some of this stuff because I don't use TreeSheets.  When I try to find a place for TreeSheets in my information world, I come across these, and other, barriers so that I could only really use it for a small amount of what I do, whilst those things are already being done other programs.  I want to use it, and would pay to use it, but it doesn't quite hit the mark for me yet.  I would not like to see it open source. My experience with many open source programs is that they are created by, and used by, techies who don't have the end-user in mind when working on the programs, so that us mere mortals can have issues just downloading and installing them. Often, open sourcing can limit the market, not increase it.

If it works for you and a (relatively) small amount of others, that's fine, but to attract a larger following it does need to become a little more standard is some respects.  That said, it's incredibly hard to make much money from this sort of program.  Few succeed.  My computer is littered with great programs which have been developed then abandoned because the developer couldn't make them pay.  So I'd like to see TreeSheets succeed, but would also like to see it become more universally useful.

Either way, good luck!

Graham

[Andrew Norris]

A video would be good I imagine. Not take much time to record it? Post it up on clear view on main web page. There is nothing like demo that quickly shows what something is about. You could show how it could handle large amounts of data. And how easy it is to create, and how readable the data is. I know we have screen shots, but these could not capture it was well, esp. with large amount of data and hiding / zooming in and out. 

I love that I can quickly get an idea what something is about. It's easy to scan through the info and jump between detail / big picture of any part. And lots of info in such a small area of the screen, unlike mind maps, so less need to scroll about.

I mentioned I coded my own version of treesheets. It was useable in the end, perhaps not as polished as yours. Respect to you for doing this, as it was not easy to code. I may come back to it in future as I have a passion for PIM managers / visual ideas. For now I'm working on an advanced auto complete for programmers. 

[Andrew Norris]

Hi Graham, your thoughts are valued. 

Personally, I don't think the two points you may about dragging in a file and clickable URL would be THAT hard to do and would add to it. However, I don't think they are THE big picture of why it is not getting big coverage / downloads. If you can think of any other details like this please mention. They could add up I guess...

Personally, my instinct take take on this, is it could look better visually. And perhaps even more important, the website could look more professional, like it really is a company selling a product and not a guy experimenting. Need to think more like the best of the Americans. The best Americans really know how to sell something. Hard sell. 

I was up late last night and saw an add selling a fitness video. All people did was jump up and down. And it cost  $68 for the DVD! They did not half sell it. People with before and after examples of how fit they got, talking about it. Etc. It was easy to forget it was just people jumping up and down in front of a TV! Yet they could clearly afford TV advertising so I reckon it was selling well. 

Crap products can sell. So useful ones like treesheets should be able to. 

Andrew. 

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[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Graham,

I definitely see you point, and you may be right.
The thing is of course, that of the example "polish" features you mention, there's literally endless amounts of them. When it comes to bringing programs like this to a certain quality level, the saying (paraphrasing) "when you think you're 80% done, get ready for the remaining 80% to finish it" is certainly very true.

It is also generally hard to make something "intuitive" when it contains so much new way of doing things that have no equal in existing apps. TreeSheets will always be somewhat confusing to an Excel user, no matter what you do.

It's a chicken and egg problem. I have certainly already taken TreeSheets much further than I originally envisioned, when it was just "Wouter's ideal spreadsheet/outliner/mindmanager mashup". Now you could argue I should invest a lot more time in it before it is even ready for something like a kickstarter, and that may be right. The problem is that nowadays people are migrating their information organization needs to the web/cloud at a rapid rate, and I see the market for desktop apps declining, so getting significant growth out of a very new app is a huge risk. When it comes to using more of my own time/money, I prefer less risk :)

Wouter

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[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

A video is good idea for promotion in general, whatever direction I may take. Noted.

Show me your version sometime, I'd love to see it. Or a screenshot :)
What does the autocomplete do?

Wouter

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Hmm, I guess I am the reverse, when I come to a free app that has a super slick website, I think, hmm, what are they trying to sell me? does it have ad-ware, subscription or some hidden cost? Whereas when I see a very basic page that looks much more in line with the software it is more trustworthy to me :)

But yet, a better page could help, again to promote it in general. I can of course post-pone the idea of a kickstarter or whatever, work on these superficial things some, and see if interest increases first, but I am not sure it will... it's been out for 4 years now.

Wouter

[David Lynch]

I think the killer app to gain popular threshold is allowing
horizontal pane viewing. I attached an example.

Cheers,

David Lynch

[Andrew Norris]

David,

I much agree. Treesheets could benefit a l lot from this as a killer feature I feel. May need some work to fine tune it and get it to work in an intuitive manor? Or it may just work? Well worth a go / experimenting I feel. Reminds me of treenotes, was very useful to have the note structure on the left hand pane. May only need one level on the left like notes, and combined with the tabs as notes does. Not sure, so experiment. 

ps. treenotes is a very old program, here is a screen shot http://www.dextronet.com/img/treenotes1.gif there are other pims out there along similar lines too. 

Andrew.

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[A. Biom]

not sure, in which form of cash influx should take place
but i would like treesheets becoming more mainstream, it was really hard for me to find it!
i think there much be done some more work on marketing
then, even payments or donations, would increase

[Clyde]

I'm reluctant to post a reply that is contrary to the majority opinion of Treesheets. Part of the reason is that I'm a fan of Treesheets. However, I am not currently using it. Oh, I have in the past, when I had needs that Treesheets was the best or only choice.

The reason I'm not using it is because I don't currently have the complicated information organizing needs that makes Treesheets so useful. In the past I've had a need for organizing complicated and large sets of information in ways that are compact and highly flexible. Treesheets is great for that. However, that makes it overly complicated than a more normal note taker/organizer.

I'm currently using Springpad for my notes and organization. It's simple, online, with just enough organization for broad, diverse collection of stuff. No, it doesn't have the ability to organize to the depth that Treesheets does, but I don't need that right now. I also think the features of Springpad fit 99.47% of the market. The vast majority of people have information organization needs that fit Springpad and very few have the needs for Treesheets. Those few that can make use of the brilliant features of Treesheets love it and are willing to spend the time to learn it and even explore interesting ways to expand it's use. Alas, that is a small market segment.

So, I think Treesheets is great, but it is and always will be a niche tool. It won't and shouldn't be changed to fit the mass market. With that in mind, it focuses your development, marketing, and potential funding in limited ways. I don't think it will ever be a big money maker. I don't think it will ever capture a big chunk of the market. If it does, it's probably because it became something other than it's current mission. It looks like a great open source and group project, but that kills the idea of making money for our beloved author. OTOH, if it doesn't it probably won't get all the customization and growth that it's fans want. If this conundrum continues, it will stay a small, but much loved niche tool with limited money making potential.

My $.02,

Clyde

[Andrew Norris]

Clyde, you make some great points that could help target the market. But don't forget that it's a very big world out there and many people have pcs. There is still the potential to make a very nice income from such niche markets i feel. Think of all the students out there. And the engineers all of whom could benefit from the visual way that treesheets makes complex info so much more organised and readable. I read recently about a guy who became a millionaire from selling software that manages meals for schools. 

Sent from my iPhone

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[Clyde]

Good points. Yes, you can make money on niche products - if you aim it very well at those markets.

There are many of us who like playing with new software, new ways of thinking, and new ways to organize. I'm one of those. I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out Treesheets. Mostly I enjoyed figuring out how, when, and where Treesheets would be useful. It took serious rethinking about ways to organize data. It was mind opening and a lot of fun. At the time, I actually had some complex data that really were helped by Treesheets.

However, most people are used to software that is quick and easy to learn and use. Online advertising, reviews, and opinions of software/apps needs almost instant connection with the minds and needs of the viewer to catch their attention. Treesheets doesn't do that. The first glance sounds like a note organizer. Alas, it has a learning curve to figure out how to do anything in it. It has a learning curve to figure out what to do with it. Those learning curves are throwing off users in a world that is looking for simple and quick. Besides, most people really don't want to think that hard.

I suggest that you (with your devoted users) start collecting sample Treesheets to illustrate the many ways that it is and can be used. This might be a little tricky as there are probably has a lot of proprietary information that may not want shared. Still if we could show these niche markets exactly what they can do with Treesheets, those markets will grow. i.e. We will try to make specific customers quickly and easily see how they can use Treesheets. It will also start to catalog what those niche markets really are. When we've figured out those, we can figure out how to make money off them.

2 more cents,

Clyde

[Rich Persaud]

On Nov 23, 2012, at 10:49, Clyde <lugh....@gmail.com> wrote:

Good points. Yes, you can make money on niche products - if you aim it very well at those markets.

If a subset of the code is open-sourced, others can help port to mobile platforms and more niches can be monetized.  This distributes new development and marketing costs, while protecting revenue to fund improvements on the currently supported platforms.

There are many of us who like playing with new software, new ways of thinking, and new ways to organize. I'm one of those. I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out Treesheets. Mostly I enjoyed figuring out how, when, and where Treesheets would be useful. It took serious rethinking about ways to organize data. It was mind opening and a lot of fun. At the time, I actually had some complex data that really were helped by Treesheets.

The best tools change their human creators, leading to the creation of better tools.   If there was a business model for human self-modification (a.k.a. learning), PIM creators would be rich.   But it's currently more profitable for each new data schema to result in a new application or company, which then captures the revenue.   

Spreadsheets made it easier to manipulate numbers, but spreadsheets are likely more portable between humans than treesheets.  Thus, the flexibility of general-purpose PIMs yields special-purpose content that has an audience of one.   This is only a negative if we confuse creative modelling with publication.  

If treesheets assist thought, then widespread adoption requires easy data import (from a world where data is now viewed as money) and easy data export to publishing (rather than thinking) tools.  How can a combination of open-source and closed source/API bridge the gap to tools that excel in data capture (e.g. Evernote, Linux Tomboy, MS OneNote) and publishing?

However, most people are used to software that is quick and easy to learn and use. Online advertising, reviews, and opinions of software/apps needs almost instant connection with the minds and needs of the viewer to catch their attention. Treesheets doesn't do that. The first glance sounds like a note organizer. Alas, it has a learning curve to figure out how to do anything in it. It has a learning curve to figure out what to do with it. Those learning curves are throwing off users in a world that is looking for simple and quick. Besides, most people really don't want to think that hard.

TreeSheets has always reminded me of Ecco Pro, which has loyal users 15 years after its demise.  Binary

patching has been used to add new features (like Lua scripting) to Ecco.

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/26/comment.guardianweeklytechnologysection

  http://blog.technolawyer.com/2011/10/smalllaw-super-pim.html

I suggest that you (with your devoted users) start collecting sample Treesheets to illustrate the many ways that it is and can be used. This might be a little tricky as there are probably has a lot of proprietary information that may not want shared. Still if we could show these niche markets exactly what they can do with Treesheets, those markets will grow. i.e. We will try to make specific customers quickly and easily see how they can use Treesheets. It will also start to catalog what those niche markets really are. When we've figured out those, we can figure out how to make money off them.

Users with complex treesheets may be able to replace proprietary data with samples from public datasets, e.g.

   http://freebase.com

   http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets

   http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-web

Rich

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Clyde,

I think your case is quite typical. Certainly the more this discussion goes on, the more it becomes obvious that TreeSheets' strength is the complexity it can manage, but only few people need that. Making TreeSheets competitive with the many simple information managers out there may not be possible without killing a lot of what makes it great for the complex case.

Wouter

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

David,

Yes, I think this idea is worth implementing, even though I was originally against it, because it duplicates functionality which is already available in TreeSheets.

Your example screenshot shows basically nested TreeSheets views. While that is most flexible, it also requires special UI features for opening a nesting level, removing them, and displaying what is currently nested, and as such could make things a little more complicated.

I think an alternative design is to just have 1 level of such indirection, meaning there are 2 panes, a left pane with a windows explorer style tree, and a right one that displays the regular TreeSheets workspace, zoomed in to whatever is selected on the left. That is simpler from a UI perspective, and familiar to many users. It would also allow a neat extra: for the left tree to show all open documents in tree form, not just the current one, for even quicker switching. The TreeSheets document would remember what nodes on the left are expanded or not.

I would favor the latter, but I am open to hearing what others think such a feature would look like.

Wouter

[Andrew Norris]

Personally I would prefer 2 panes, like tree treenotes  http://www.dextronet.com/img/treenotes1.gif  

treenotes also combined it with tabs, the first of a batch of pims to do this.

so that when the tab was pressed, it changed not just a new doc, but the whole left pane. i.e. effectively a whole load of treesheets under each tab. And all nicely organised in an explorer style window, with hiding too. Well worth looking at treenotes, i liked the way the cursor / shift / ctrl keys could be used to easily organise the explorer window. 

[David Lynch]

I think a simple file and category tree on the left pane would require
a new file to maintain, and that would introduce too much complexity
and difficulty for sharing files.

I agree with the sentiment that data organization is often a niche
project. I believe the reason is because we are more interested in
READING than in AUTHORING content.

That is why I think it may be even a higher priority to develop LINKS
to treesheets files on the web, that load automatically into the link
node inside Treesheets Software.

At first I did not like the idea of multiple panes either, until I
realized it was super helpful to keep a table of contents view of
things at all times.

David

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

What new file? This wouldn't require anything new, it is simply a different view upon the existing tree structure.

Wouter

[David Lynch]

That's good.  I'm all for what makes sense from coding perspective.

I say often when you can't choose between two options, do both. 

If it is much easier to implement 2 panes, then it would make sense to implement the explorer style pane before undertaking a larger design addition. I'm not sure treesheets are conducive to explorer trees. I felt adding a window pane may complicate the code. I was not sure that allowing infinite panes would complicate the code much.  It seems scroll bars for at least the y panes would have to be developed.

I look forward to using whatever you decide to develop.

David

[Stefan]

What about going social? Put the Code in a public github repository, then people can fork it and develop their own features and do the minor work for you. I would be glad to learn a little bit more coding while working on this program. Also creating tutorials in different languages would be nice. 

For my part i would like to add the github repo to my eclipse and review the code now and then, when there ist time. And when i find a bug or add a new feature i send you a pull request. 

Also the program would gain publicity. 

Just my 2 cents. 

[arm...@ono.com]

the other day, I was thinking about the features that the program needs. And in a moment, the list became very big. much more than I thought before. I think the project needs a team of programmers. And above all, that the development of the project, keep the simplicity and efficiency it has now.

I think the focus is on excel excessively. There are many possibilities in activities that we have not taken into account, for example, in education. This would require some specific functionality.

programming in the document itself, has many difficulties I can not imagine the solution. For example, by reference cells.

programming for the cloud, is something that is very far yet, but it is the current trend of all programs. at least you need a file viewer CTS, programmed in HTML5. I think this would be a big jump, but ultimately necessary.

only these three areas, we need the work of three specialists, and there are many more.

I use the program as much, which is why I always think it should be able to do. I dream of something like "TreeSheetsPRO", and would like that some day it were possible.

I do not know how it works exactly Github, but it seems a good idea.

[Stefan]

From my point of view I agree with Wouter, the program is quite mature by now, but i also would like to see some more development.

I really like the idea of a HTML5-Viewer, as far as i can imagine this would be the way to a native android app. Then it would be possible to rebuild the editing functions in this viewer.

Github is working as a distributed version control system. It can be used for free as long as the repositories are kept public. Then everybody would be able to "fork" it, adding features and squashing bugs in his own version. If those should be merged into the "official version" a "pull request" is sent to wouter an he can integrate it.

Going this way would enable many users to contribute to the development process and save wouter significant amounts of time.

[luke]

My vote is to head done the open source route. I think it could result in a number of benefits for the application. Mainly the potential for more programmers to contribute (less work for yourself, larger pool of experience available), the ability to compile on different platforms/architectures (only being 32bit is slightly restricting, not all 64bit distro's come with 32bit compatible libraries with a stock install)   and greater adoption by more linux users and distributions. Currently I only have Slackware running on my machine, and although wouldn't consider myself a "hardcore" threesheets fan I think its a great tool and use it for organizing all my data/plans when working on projects. I also currently provide a build script that repackages the ubuntu package for Slackware http://www.iquidus.org/treesheets. It has been submitted to SlackBuilds.org so once its approved hopefully there will be more slackers using it :)

The biggest benefit i see with open sourcing it is greater adoption by the linux community, although ubuntu does have the largest user base having packages available for more distro's and architectures (x86_64, ARM) would be great (ease installation) and if it were open source there would be the potential for it to be included in popular distributions by default (linux is seriously lacking in good data organization/spreadsheet tools).

Of course this doesnt help income, but it would help increase the user base I think. As far as money is concerned, have you contemplated offering a cloud like service for users to save their work too? making it easily accessible from multiple locations (and automatically backed up off site) sorta of like what evernote does for note taking. Something like that could work, allowing the software to be open source and free ($) while hopefully providing income from subscriptions to the service.

very interested to see where this leads

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Wouter <aard...@gmail.com> wrote:

TreeSheets is a fairly mature application by now (on Windows and Linux at least), but it would be great to see continued development, and it has become clear to me that I can't continue to put significant time into it without some form of cash infusion. The question is how. I see some options:

A kickstarter. The main goal for this could be to Open Source it (guaranteeing future development can happen even without me), with stretch goals for popular large features (such as programmability/plugins, maybe a very lofty stretch goal for a mobile version since it requires a complete UI rewrite, etc). The problem I see with a kickstarter is that I don't really have much in terms of "rewards" to hand out, since the current and future TreeSheets are already free, and thus supporting such a kickstarter is only interesting to those users who are really fanatic about the program, and may be a small group. Alternatively the kickstarter could be about making it a commercial, but I bet Open Source is going to be the most desirable aspect to many supporters.

An alternative option, now that Steam supports non-gaming applications, is going through the Steam greenlight program, and actually make TreeSheets commercial, for a relatively low price (I was thinking 10$). Being on Steam improves visibility a lot, and could thus be a source of income that can support future development. Steam is effectively the only windows app store, now that the windows 8 app store only accepts new Metro apps (who knows wxWidgets will be ported to that someday). On the downside, it will require quite a critical mass of supporters to get it greenlit, and treesheets may not fit well with the Steam audience which so far are mostly gamers, who may not care for it.

I have of course already tried donations. While I am grateful for those that have donated, it is too small of a group to support development.

So, your opinion is required: what road to financial support for TreeSheets would you prefer? maybe something not mentioned here? If you like the kickstarter idea, do you see any way to make such a kickstarter more appealing to people who aren't already hardcore fans? what do you think should major stretch goals be (and at what levels)? are you willing to help promote it to reach the attention of more people?

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[Toby1Kenobi]

What about the Humble Bundle?

People pay what they want for cross-platform DRM-free independently developed games, and it works. Each bundle generally generates more than $1,000,000 which I think mostly goes to the developers. I know that Tree Sheets is not a game, but the Humble Bundle people have branched out in the past - one bundle was music, another was eBooks and the current bundle includes one movie. All you need to do is convince the Humble Bundle people to do an apps bundle and then convince them to put Tree Sheets in it. I think an apps bundle would be a great idea, and don't know why they wouldn't do it. Furthermore, if they do I think that Tree Sheets would be the ideal candidate for the bundle.

BTW Wouter, I don't want to see Tree Sheets die so if you do abandon it please ope-source it first.

Toby

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Thanks for all the ideas.

A lot of people vote for Open Source, and yes, this would be my eventual plan too. Thing is, as I tried to explain, my problem nowadays is that my ability to substantial time into any project is tied with being able to earn money from it, and OS doesn't help there unless you have a very specific plan. I have also ran Open Source projects before (most notably the Cube Engine project), and the amount of time it costs to deal with the community, and reviewing/applying patches is in total a great deal more than just developing software in private. It is certainly no time saver.

Cloud anything is certainly where the world is going, but "porting" treesheets to the web in whatever form is a major new engineering effort, where the existing codebase is largely useless (C++ / wxWidgets). Doing this right might well cost as much effort as making TreeSheets was in the first place. A native mobile version won't be quite as complicated but not trivial either.

Humble Bundle is a fun idea, but I very much doubt that these people are ready to branch out to tools just yet.. certainly they'd have to find at least 4 more tools to bundle as well. Additionally, I'd first have to establish TreeSheets as a commercial product for a while, otherwise, what is the point of putting it into a bundle like that? If it is already free, it isn't a "deal". In this direction, I'd think Steam would be a better direction (since they already have tools for sale nowadays).

Wouter

[sunhome]

I am of the opinion that you should open up a shop and start selling TreeSheets.

Getting some income and experience selling & marketing TreeSheets will be a big benefit. My observation has been that there seem to be niche markets where people would be happy to buy your TreeSheets. Why I say this is the audio plugin market is a software market I am familar with and is extremely competitive, yet whenever a new synth or fx plugin come out - Everyone still tries it out to see if it's adds something they are lacking.

1. So all those users of ithoughts, evernote, mindjet, xmind, thebrain, etc ... will give your product a shot as well. You just have to push your advantages and build in that direction, but the usability will have to be increased in Treesheets, imo.

2. Many times the interface of these audio plugins have that WOW and it is important to many - yet, even though in the end it's the sound that really matters for audio plugins. You will need to add some sizzle in addition to usability.

Regards, James

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

James,

Thanks for your insightful comments. I am not sure if the audio tools
are comparable, since their function is incredibly specific, and
TreeSheets is extremely general. It is easier to sell software very
specific to niche audience, because these customers basically have few
other options, if they want that particular audio effect, they'll have
to pay.

TreeSheets on the other hand can be useful to anyone organizing any
kind of data. That is super generic. The problem with that is that
those people also have thousands of alternative options.

TreeSheets has a niche to some extend in that it is particularly good
at scaling up to levels where traditional approaches (spreadsheet,
text editor, mind mapper etc) break down. But reaching the people that
need that is a marketing problem.

How do you get as many people as possible to try TreeSheets when you
don't have a marketing budget? Well, by making it free, for starters.
I've sold other software in the past, and noticed that having a
commercial version already reduces the number of people that want to
try the free version, since they already know that if they like it, it
will cost them money. Instead, they prefer looking at or sticking with
the completely free solutions, of which there are many. Especially
with storing large amounts of data, proprietary software is scary.
Yes, Excel is a commercial program, but its data can easily be read by
lots of other programs and its UI (the spreadsheet) is essentially a
standard, a commodity. TreeSheet doesn't have that.

So my plan with TreeSheets from the start was to make it free, such
that it could reach the widest possible audience. Once you have a
large audience, monetizing it is possible. Now, in its 4 years of
existence TreeSheets has reached many loyal fans, but it is still a
rather small userbase. Making it commercial at this point would
therefore translate in very few sales and likely not help it spread.

Yes, adding additional (visual) polish would definitely help. Your
link to "Things" is a good example of that. Things has a huge
advantage besides that though, that it is a much simpler, more
specific app that users will instantly recognize as a todo list app,
and for the masses of average users, that is preferable over
TreeSheets. You want to track due dates for your tasks in TreeSheets?
Of course you can! Decide yourself if that goes in an extra column or
row, or in a sub grid, or what format you want it, etc. That level of
flexibility is great for the organization fanatics, but confusing for
the average user. I am not sure if that is fixable without making
TreeSheets into something else alltogether.

The bigger problem is that these plans come down to: "you just worked
a long time on TreeSheets and it didn't turn into a profitable
undertaking, simply now work again a long time, and maybe eventually
it will". That is definitely the reality of the world, that those who
just keep persisting, eventually get where they need to be. And sure
enough if I just throw everything at TreeSheets the next years, it
will grow and get somewhere. Maybe. But there's a lot of things I
could be working on, and that approach just has diminishing returns
for me.

It doesn't help that as a programmer, I am really good at designing
and implementing these kinds of tools, but suck at all the promoting
and marketing you need to do in todays internet age. Yes, it's
required, but I'd rather spend my time making something new and see if
that resonates with a larger audience more easily.

Wouter

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[sunhome]

Hi

Ok - I have been getting more accustomed to TreeSheets and it's interaction with my workflow over the past two weeks. While working with TreeSheets, I must say the application runs very zippy and is very stable. Kudos on that end!  While working with TreeSheets some ideas have come to mind regarding it's development. 

1. I found an IOS app called Daedulus Touch, http://daedalusapp.com/ that would be an powerful front end for TreeSheets on a portable device. I realize you mentioned that in your Ted Nelson's ZigZag software that a weakness of "ZigZag" is that "it requires constant navigation" and that might apply, but the idea of one cell presentation that with a swipe of your hand can navigate in the four [or more] directions to a new cell would be considerable better that all the spreadsheets apps I have been using on my IOS device. Plus Daedulus Touch is an extremely elegant app, and the way that it makes use of storing the stacks as text files makes this a serious tool. {I personally use your indented text export, frequently.}   

2. I keep wondering what about developing TreeSheets as a plugin for Google Spreadheet/Excel/Open Office that way you don't need to compete via cloud services/gui/etc and can focus on core ideas ?

3. I found an interesting forum post that sums up 'information thermodynamics' as SpaceNexus explains, "There is a conservation between the energy (time, effort) of information entry and corresponding information retrieval." I would like to hear from you where TreeSheets fits currently in the entry vs retreival equation. Please have a read of the post by SpaceNexus in the thread "Brain and Evernote, I'm in trouble"   The forum post is http://forums.thebrain.com/post/Brain-and-Evernote-Im-in-trouble-6134484

Regards, James

[Mike]

I'm new to TreeSheets but like what I see so far.  I would be happy to purchase the app (a Mac version) and would be willing to spend $15-30 if I could feel confident that the app would be around for a while.  

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

James,

1. I would think one cell at once on screen is way too small a
granularity, and navigation is not straight forward in that case. On a
mobile platform, just pinch to zoom style UI with something similar to
the current layout would work better I think.

2. I have looked at "piggybacking" TreeSheets on something else for
cloud support. Certainly Google Docs is not as easy as it sounds, as
e.g. Google Drive doesn't store local files, merely links to them. So
saving to Google Docs can't be done through a file format, it has to
be done by communicating with their API, and even then you're assuming
you can translate into something that makes sense in a Google Doc
(i.e. an indented text tree, since Spreadsheets are too limiting). So
far, the easiest way to make TreeSheets somewhat cloud aware is to use
DropBox, with the "auto reload documents" option turned on. To edit on
a device that doesn't run TreeSheets, you could export to indented
text, and use one of the many dropbox-aware text editors out there. I
am looking into maybe making working directly on text files in
TreeSheets an option, as is working with OPML (since there's editors
for that too).

3. Yes, cool post, sums information organization issues well, and I
think TreeSheets suffers from similar problems since information entry
requires more "thought" than flat text systems. Certainly, for a lot
of people that like to hoard information but only infrequently look it
up, a system like Evernote is indeed superior to TreeSheets (or
TheBrain). TreeSheets is for "Information Organization Fanatics" :)

Wouter

[Rich Persaud]

> TreeSheets is for "Information Organization Fanatics" :)

Some large enterprises make $$$$ on the fanatic organization of information.

A marketing survey of TreeSheets users may uncover enterprise use cases, to justify a high-priced Pro version that underwrites the development and distribution of the free version.

[John Rojas]

Hello Everyone,

Just wondering if there is any work being done on this App and what was the outcome of this conversation.

Thanks!

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Sadly, I did not feel I would be able to derive income from TreeSheets. So the good news is that it is now Open Source, the bad news is that I took a demanding full time job right after, and have been able to work on TreeSheets only very minimally.

That might change in the future, we'll have to see.

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[John Rojas]

Wouter,

We have all been in the same place.. the full time job is always the highest priority.

Thanks for making it Open Source... I don't code in C++ anymore - have you considered porting to another language ?

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

What other language did you have in mind?

Note that the TreeSheets code is very cpu intensive, for rendering in particular. Writing this kind of app with a similar structure in languages like Java or C# for example would make for a very sluggish experience, using a lot of memory. That, and the portability of these languages is (ironically) limited.

Also, rewriting apps in other languages is a lot of work. Not sure what we could gain by this.

If anything needs rewriting, it's the UI layer, such that it could be ported to mobile one day. And there's currently only one language that is fast across all mobile platforms, and that is C++.

[Adam Kruszewski]

Hello Wouter,

First of all it is great to hear you got a full time job, as the basic necessities and provision for your family (or future family) is the most important.

Still if you would ever think about returning to more focused development on TreeSheets maybe you could just tailor the applications (or actually add as minor additional features) into field of Getting Things Done methodology (by David Allen) and a more focused outliner. I think it wouldn't require much effort as basic support for those two you have already built in the application.

Right now I'm moving away from MacOS X back to Linux after few years of using Mac exclusively and there are two applications I can't live without, those are OmniFocus and OmniOutliner by OmniGroup. Actually I was searching for replacements which would also work in windows (as in my work right now it will be the OS I will have to use), and accidentally I stumbled upon TreeSheets and I think it is the best alternative I have right now (belive me -- it is hard to find if you look for outliners or gtd like apps. I stumbled upon it from an ubuntu forums thread about Scrivenier alternatives for Linux).

OmniFocus is GTD inspired personal productivity software. Right now I could manually almost recreate the great features of OmniFocus right in FocusTree just using search function and some conventions in structuring the projects and tasks (see attachement); it would just require maybe to create pre-defined 'search filters' and add the functionality to 'hide' (fold) the grids that doesn't hit the search term and are not top-level (or something like that) or something like that.

For OmniOutliner-like functionality you would just need to add some style navigator where you could create and change the styles of cells without the need to change it individually in each one.

Oh, and btw. LifeHacker site is/was very dedicated to omnigroup products so I think if your 'child project' would be announced there in more focused than general way, like it is right now on the main site of the project, there you would find your further users.

PS. And there are few open source applications kickstarted successfully even without some additional perks, see and IDE for Lisp/Clojure called LightTable ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table ), but first it would need to get some 'mockups' of future promised functionalities and more targeted users (ie. not everyone have the imagination in our over-worked economy to know where he could use such a general information manager in his daily tasks).

Just my 0.02 €.

Best regards,

Adam.

[Ron K. Jeffries]

I hope this is ok to post: http://fargo.io is an interesting web/browser outline centric tool. Written in Javascript, and main engine is open source code by Dave Winer. It works great on laptops,  is not wonderful (my opinion) on mobile devices such as my Note 2. Reading is ok, creating on small screen sucks.

It uses Dropbox as file store.
Ron K Jeffries

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Adam,

I am most interested in expanding TreeSheets in ways that allow the user to implement any kind of organizational scheme, be it GTD or others.

I am not sure what you mean by a "more focused outliner". TreeSheets is meant to be much more than an outliner, for one, it is 2-dimensional organization rather than just 1 :)

There currently is already a feature to minimize that which is not included in the search (View -> Filter). Also, if you frequently need to see things from a different perspective, Edit -> Grid Reorganization -> Hierarchy Swap may be able to do what you need (see the tutorial file for an example).

Search filters, style presets etc could all be added, but require additional UI.. I'm trying to be minimalistic with that. Maybe a copy style feature would be a good start.

TreeSheets has been announced on LifeHacker in the past. They seem pretty picky on what they post.

Light Table was indeed surprisingly succesfull, but that doesn't mean it is easy to replicate. It will need some lucky "marketing". I wouldn't be against revisiting the idea of a kickstarter. I am not sure what big features I could promise. A mobile version would be obvious, though that would be useless without some kind of cloud storage (unless it was tied to dropbox or whatever).

[Adam Kruszewski]

Wouter,

I am not sure what you mean by a "more focused outliner". TreeSheets is meant to be much more than an outliner, for one, it is 2-dimensional organization rather than just 1 :)

I know it is much more, and I see this exactly as a "PR problem". Unfortunatelly people looking for outliner or gtd applications can't find such a great tool (at least I couldn't) cause they are not looking for a general tool that can do both (and even more). So if it would have some builtin 'modes' of operation and approperiate 'tutorials' for those I think it would be more visible to further users. Just like Omnigroup have done with their outliner, Omnioutliner have exactly the same 'engine' as OmniFocus, both are outliner based (actually omnifocus came to being after people started implementing GTD in omnioutliner), but people looking for gtd software aren't typing 'outliner' in google and vice versa (and forget about typing 'spreadsheet').

And also TreeSheets to compete in outliner market, it does need to have styles (just like style navigator in LiberOffice). People are writting whole documents (and even novels/books) in outliners nowdays, so it needs more streamlined formatting support.
 

There currently is already a feature to minimize that which is not included in the search (View -> Filter). Also, if you frequently need to see things from a different perspective, Edit -> Grid Reorganization -> Hierarchy Swap may be able to do what you need (see the tutorial file for an example).

 
Thanks for the tips, I'll look into those :-) Right now I'm slowly planning how to move all my lists to treesheets.

Search filters, style presets etc could all be added, but require additional UI.. I'm trying to be minimalistic with that. Maybe a copy style feature would be a good start.

TreeSheets has been announced on LifeHacker in the past. They seem pretty picky on what they post.

As I'm one of the readers of the site and I know that they publish everything that have GTD in the name or at least it looks like it ;-)

 

Light Table was indeed surprisingly succesfull, but that doesn't mean it is easy to replicate. It will need some lucky "marketing". I wouldn't be against revisiting the idea of a kickstarter. I am not sure what big features I could promise. A mobile version would be obvious, though that would be useless without some kind of cloud storage (unless it was tied to dropbox or whatever).

Dropbox, owncloud, google drive -- most have approperiate libraries that are developer friendly I think (as it is their business). So I think it doesn't need to be tied to single one, Kingsoft office for android allows to use 5 or 6 of those.

Those ware just my ideas to ponder around when you'll have more spare time of course, as I see TS have a great potential, it just needs a little more streamlined ui for some of the 'standard' tasks. Just like perspectives in eclipse, ie. if you want gtd, here you have the tools and conventions at your finger tips; if you want outliner, here are the outlining tools and others are hidden to not distract you too much; if you want to plan your personal finances, here it is; for free-form notes there is notes perspective and so on (heck, I don't know how hard it would be to embed a scripting language like IO/Lua and expose to it the gui of the TreeSheets but such perspectives maybe could even be written by advanced users in a more-distant-future)

All in all the tool is awesome :-)

Best regards,
Adam.

[Chavoux Luyt]

Hi Wouter,

I realize it is two years later; Treesheets have been open-sourced and you got a full-time job programming other things. So just my 2c. I am a fairly new Treesheets user (and found it after searching for open-source gaming engines ;-) ).

Open-source was a good option in my view. What you could also do, is to have a dual license (like MySQL) with the open source license aimed at your current, mostly personal, users and a commercial license for companies that want to use it company-wide. To sell it to companies you might need a "sales team" and a "support team", however. Maybe some of the avid old-time Treesheets users might be able and willing to help out here? At least some of the support you could handle yourself. You could possibly have a sales/support team who would be paid a percentage of the clients' subscription in exchange for supporting their clients. It would be their jobs to be able to sell Treesheets to a company as the best answer to a company-wide mind-mapper/organizer/data sharing application. Now, that is the part that I don't know about: how easy it would be to convince the clients that they need this software and how useful it will actually be to a whole company. Some use cases I have read here would indicate that it can indeed be very useful, but I have no experience with that. I only know that a commercial product (=income) will depend on building a commercial client base and great personal support is the best way to achieve this.

Cheers,

Chavoux

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

Thanks for your thoughts!

Selling to business is a chicken and egg problem because of the initial investment it requires, unless, like you say, somehow someone wants to put lots of time into this for no upfront pay. If such a person exists, let them step forth :)

From the little I know about B2B, businesses are extremely conservative entities. You'll have to convince someone at the business (someone with spending power) that using TreeSheets is going to improve some number they care about (cost, time, productivity?) with some hard facts. That is really not easy.

Then there's the obstacle that for the endless office workers that barely know how to change a formula in Excel or make a nested table in Word, TreeSheets is going to feel positively alien, despite my attempts to make it feel similar to Excel.

Third, most businesses will expect to be using business apps with cloud storage and extensive cooperation features. TreeSheets has none of that. How will businesses use TreeSheets? Like they used to have Word files on network shares like 10 years ago? TreeSheets doesn't even have a locking mechanism.

TreeSheets also need to be installed, unlike most cloud business software today.

Very small companies may potentially want to adopt TreeSheets and can overcome this, but they also tend to have little money to spend. Big companies can possibly pay for big support contracts, but will have the above issues.

I think the cloud angle is by far the biggest problem of those. Sadly, implementing that is not easy, especially if you're also expecting cooperation features. I don't see a way out of that besides other programmers stepping up, or a substantial cash infusion.

[bretonja...@gmail.com]

Ive been using Treesheets intensively for four months now. I log all my work in one tree. i record daily activity in a month/day/task branch. I record meeting discussions in another. I track building code issues in another.

Having just in the last week gotten office 2013- and more specifically Access- im looking forward to playing around with exporting .cts to .xls and then linking into Access.

Anyway, in the four month retrospect, a few ideas have jumped out.

Most 'mind map' programs stop at just that: visualizing thoughts and ideas. What about when you need to visualize HTML? Visualize a windows folder structure? Visualize census data? Does the tree visualization just stop being useful?

Treesheets does two things:
-Makes it easy to visualize tree data
-Makes it easy to modify tree data

However, where is the data?

Imagine an HTML or XML parser built into Treesheets. Or maybe a file path parser for folder structures. If you are a king nerd you pride yourself on reading git archives. Now it could be easy for the rest of us: a git visualizer.

Now imagine a step beyond parsing: employ the treesheets commands to make new folders. Or set up new archives. Or insert new paragraphs into HTML. All done from the clean and simple (and standardized) GUI you have here.

One final thought.

Large corporations have the ability to use barcodes and RF tag and the like to track stuff so that employees can log stuff in with a scan gun. Like maybe you don't actually create treesheets as a mobile app, but you create a smaller mobile visualizer that you can snap photos / scan QR codes and send them back to your tree on your computer. Kinda like you spend one day on the back end building your tree, and the rest of the time you spend casually populating it with content. You built the tree, you know the keywords, so go on your phone, snap a photo, enter a keyword, let it search your tree, and then drop it in.

[Wouter van Oortmerssen]

That's definitely an interesting idea.. though it sounds like that would need a plugin system. Allowing modification would greatly complicate things, having to keep things in sync.