[stan]

Years ago there was a program that beat most of the current outlining software available by a longshot. For some reason, the model was pretty much ignored and everyone went the way of standard linear outliners.

This program had some wonderful features which I've never seen anywhere else, including "burst" which took an entry consisting of a paragraph of text and split it into separate entries for each sentence. You could arbitrarily select any number of entries (not necessarily contiguous) and "unburst" them into a single entry. They had something called "binsort" which allowed you to quickly step through a series of entries and put them in different categories (you can do this in any outliner, but this was particularly elegant). You could select a group of entries and randomize the order (this was for brainstorming, helping you to find less obvious relationships, etc.). There were a number of other features as well that facilitated the thinking process.