Brainforest 4 does OPML

[Angus McIntyre]

I haven't seen this mentioned here, so I thought I'd point it out. 
Apologies if this is old news.

The Palm outliner BrainForest from <http://www.ultrasoft.com/> has 
recently been upgraded to version 4.0 and one of the changes is that 
the desktop client can now import and export OPML. I've done some 
very limited experiments with OmniOutliner, and it appears that you 
can now 'round-trip' - export a document from BrainForest, import it 
into OmniOutliner, change it, re-export it and re-import it to 
BrainForest.

I also took an arbitrary OO document and exported it as OPML, then 
imported it to BrainForest, which also seemed to work.

One minor problem is that BrainForest expects notes to be in an 
attribute called "note", whereas OmniOutliner expects them as 
"_note". This means that when you import OPML to OmniOutliner, 
BrainForest's notes appear as a column called 'note' (rather than as 
OO's inline notes), and if you import OmniOutliner OPML into 
BrainForest, the notes disappear. However, it's easy enough to fix 
that with search/replace in a text editor.

Another issue is that if you export a project tree from BrainForest 
move it through OmniOutliner and reimport it, it's reimported as a 
'standard' tree rather than a project tree. That can be fixed by 
going to the Tree Preferences item and changing the tree type, at 
which point everything should be back to normal.

I haven't experimented in depth, so there may be other gotchas, but 
at least for simple cases this seems to work reasonably well. 
BrainForest Deluxe Edition (which includes the desktop client) is 
$24.95, the upgrade from v3.0 to v4.0 is $14.95. I have to admit that 
I wasn't that impressed with the upgrade until I found the OPML 
import/export: v4.0 is a fraction prettier than v3.0, but some of the 
'new features' of the Palm software such as the timeline seem to be 
things that were briefly in earlier versions of BrainForest when it 
was owned by Aportis and then vanished when UltraSoft took it over. 
If you already have a round-trip solution that works for you based 
on, say, AppleScript, you may not find v4.0 to be a 'must-have'.

I'm not wholly sold on BrainForest as a Palm outliner in general; 
there are aspects of Progect that I like better (such as the fact 
that Progect is free, among others). But it's fairly capable and the 
fact that the desktop client now imports and exports OPML is a plus.

Disclaimer: I have no connection with UltraSoft, except that I use 
their software and am mostly satisfied with it.

Angus