Still searching for something that makes this the "flagship of the tree outline managers for power users" because it appears to offer nothing particularly special compared to its payware competitors - treepad, tree notes, treedbnotes, mybase, etc.

It's a minor feature that's missing here but Treepad and others have an exe compiler, enabling users to produce a stand-alone ebook from the file in addition to free reader software. That's an advantage if you want to distribute a file easily and it might be missed here by some. Other than that, this is just Yet Another product.

Freeware alternatives: Keynote NF http://sourceforge.net/projects/keynote-newfeat/

(Keynote was one of the first freeware tree note programs that was abandoned awhile back. Keynote NF is an open-sourced clone that continues in development. It does everything that Maple appears to do and quite a bit more, actually.)

Maple isn't a bad product; just nothing special compared to alternatives.

Don  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+130)

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This is in reply to Harley (today's #15), but this issue has come up often enough in the past that I thought I (as a former developer) would take some time and comment during today's free software offering for the benefit all of those who do not earn their living developing computer software.

Despite the fact that the product is free today, comments about its normal price are VERY relevant, and VERY welcome.

The people who benefit from the GiveAwayoftheDay website are not just those who are getting commercial grade software for free. Those of us who produce software for a living benefit from it also.

In return for surrendering the revenue for one of our products for an entire day, we get a) visibility across the planet for our company and our ENTIRE line of products, b) hundreds of people (not directly associated with our company) volunteering to do advanced Beta testing on our product AND writing reviews about it, and c) LOTS of business intelligence: which products (open source or otherwise) are perceived to be the competition, which features are considered to be vital (and which are valuable, and which are useless), and (finally) pricing information - does the group of people who visit the GAotD website (while not IT professionals, are more "computer literate" than the general public) think that our product is worth our normal asking price?

Setting the price point of computer software has always been difficult, especially now in the 21st Century's global open market. On the surface, it appears to be easy to determine the cost of developing the product - you just multiply the number of hours it took to develop the product by how much we pay our programmers for an hour's work. Then add in a portion of our overhead costs (heating, lighting, electricity, & etc.) and a bit of profit (so that investors will invest in our software development company rather than a company that publishes books) and let the market know about it.

But it is not that simple - there are so many factors that whole books have been written about it (see your nearest business college bookstore for samples). As this is already a long comment , I will just give two examples: 1) what languages should we allow for the user interface? English (a language which is actually a merger of the German, French, and Latin languages) is well on its way to becoming a universal trade language (much as Greek was in ancient times, and French in the Colonial era). But today, the native languages of a greater number of people are the Oriental languages (such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) or Slavic languages (such as Russian, Czech, or Polish). When you use a specific language, it means you intend for your product to be used by the people in that specific market. THIS means you have to learn and abide by the LAWS of the nation(s) that help govern the citizens within that market (laws that seem to be constantly changing). The EU has a series of regulations that seem very arbitrary to the Chinese, whose regulations mystify the Americans, and so on. So the language(s) chosen for the user interface has a number of cost implications. 2) Maintenance cycles - do we intend to use a large number of small updates (such as the Mozilla Foundation does w/the Firefox web browser) or would we prefer a small number of large updates (in the manner that the Microsoft Corporation uses "Service Packs" to maintain the Windows operating system). There are advantages and disadvantages to either choice, that besides affecting the cost of the product, also affect the image of the company. For example, if we chose the model of "a large number of small updates" are we giving the impression that we are releasing software full of "bugs"? Or are we giving the impression that we care a lot about our customers and are constantly working to make their user experience better. (Or both?)

We live and do business in a very complicated world - the more accurate information information we can receive from websites like this one, the better. So PLEASE, let us know whether YOU think the normal price of these products is correct, too high, or (heavens forbid!) too low.

Thank you very much, GAotD Staff for letting me stand on this soapbox ... I will now step aside and allow others to provide more typical comments :-)

DougS  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+42)

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This is an awesome program to keep track of large amounts of info.
Another use is to organize snippets of code - recent builds allow it to assign passwords to nodes too, which is great.
One minor issue I still don't know whether it's fixed or not (will download it later, sorry): portability failed on my XP SP3, only system I tested Maple 7.3.
Their support is remarkable I may add.
Overall a great program, all thumbs up!

Oneiros  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+32)

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Maple seems on first look, to be limited by the lack of tabs which allow one to create many folders (trees) in one database. Having to open a new database for every tree is tedious. It is like having a file cabinet with only one drawer. The overall look is basic and a bit unappealing, utilitiarian. It could use some new skins with some eye appeal. But, for the job it was designed to do, it is obviously effective.

arend  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+26)

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#7: Thanks for the on-target review of Maple -- and especially for the great tip about the freeware Keynote NF. Sometimes you find the best freeware by reading these reviews....

Roy  –  13 years ago  –  Ritieni questo commento utile? sì | no (+24)

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