Press Room

Handheld Computing Magazine, Issue 4.0

Bonsai: A powerful and polished outliner by Harv Laser

If it's a full-featured outliner you're looking for, it's unlikely you'll find anything better than Natara's Bonsai. This is a tremendously professinal quality product, at a reasonable price. You can creat basic outlines, asn as you grow used to the program, delve into more sophisticated features such as priorities and completion percentages. Sometimes, software just makes sense - a thing of joy, and this is one of those times.

Installation is simple - download one big file, run the Windows installer, run the Windows side of Bonsai, create your first outline (anything will do even a single line), then do a HotSync with your Palm. Documentation is provided as an Adobe.pdf file, which you can read on your desktop or pritn out. This is no skimpy read.me file. It's incredibly complete, crammed with screenshots,clear, and never leaves you guessing. It's obvious that Natara took very good care and a lot of time to include a manual as first-rate as this. Once both Windows and Palm OS parts of Bonsai are installed, and you do your first HotSync, you're all set, and you can create and manipulate outlines on either machine.

Bonsai's outlines can contain mutiple levels of indentation - up to 10, which should be plenty. Of course, you can fold entries to hide or show only the main outline points, or reveal their "children" and sub-sub-sub child details - again, up to 10 levels deep.

As you work with an outline, you can edit and change text in place. Drag and Drop entries, add or delete children, all with ease. An outline can be as simple as you want - right down to a shopping checklist, for example, that lets you tap off completed items - or it can be a full-blown detailed multi-level time-sensitive prooject. Outline items can be exported as memos. There are nine different filtering attributes you can apply to items, such as only showing items of a chosen priority level.

Any outline item has a maximum of 140 characters as its limit. That should be more than enough for most users' needs. The Palm OS outline size limit is set by how much memory you have available on your handheld.

Bonsai lets you date and time-stamp items, and even change them from one type to another with popup menu selections. Notes up to 32k can be attached to items. To do items are either done or not done. Project tasks can disply percentage of "done-ness" from 0 to 100. And of course, a find feature lets you quickly find specific entries.

More Preference settings let you tell Bonsai how to behave when you create and manipulate, change, add, and delete your outlines and items. Printing is supported from beoth the Palm OS and Windows sides, and the Palm OS Bonsai also supports portable keyboards.

There just isn't enough space here to say what's good about Bonsai. The only downside is the lack of Mac support.