Throughline

Organizing your ideas during a brainstorming session is mandatory so as not to lose valuable input. A simple application such as Throughline can be of great help in this case, as it enables you to place topics on different index cards and create sub-cards to store various pieces of information.

Working with Throughline is easy, especially since it comes with a predefined set of cards and short usage instructions to help you get started.

It takes two clicks to create a new card deck. Then, you can start populating it with various cards, placing them wherever you want on the working board. There are various layout modes, the default being "freestyle", which allows you to drag and drop cards to any location. Throughline can also snap cards to the grid, place them in a single line or, if that helps you out, create a timeline.

Adding and removing cards is easily done via the buttons in the toolbar or the designated menu. Unfortunately, there are no associated key combinations for such actions so using the mouse is mandatory. The lack of undo and redo buttons is also a significant drawback since a card that was deleted by accident cannot be restored.

The content of each card in the deck and its appearance are customizable. Thanks to the built-in text editor, Throughline can edit the card text and its title, with user-defined fonts, text effects, colors, and alignments. Cards can also store clickable URLs and links to locally-stored files.

A card can have multiple sub-cards, which enables you to build a hierarchy of ideas and topics. A card that has sub-cards displays a small symbol in its lower right corner.

Throughline enables you to work with index cards to organize your ideas, then export the data either as a picture or as an RTF file that can be opened by any text reader. Overall, it is a handy application to have around, but it does have a few drawbacks and missing features that need attention in future releases to make the user experience more enjoyable.