What is Sprouts?

Sprouts will be a free online service that lets you create graphical trees of related items using a visual designer. You can create your own projects, or publish your trees to share with others.

This is pre-alpha, so a lot of features are missing and stuff may break. But I'd really like your feedback so blog me your ideas!

Try it out. Run a demo of Sprouts to grow a tree. You won't be able to save your work, you'll need to request an account for that, but you can still see how it works.

Quick How-to...

• A default root is created to start you off.
  
• You add items from the pop-up menu on the nodes:
  • (Add->Node) creates a non-defined node which does nothing uselful yet.
  • (Add->Nodes from Search) is useful. Do a search and click the little "add to tree" link under the search results. You can add multiple results.
  • (Add->RSS Feed) lets you enter a valid RSS or Atom URL and then it populates the tree with all items in the feed.
  • Other types you can think of? I'm planning on a Flickr, Digg, maybe Technorati...?
  
  
• To open the link for a node, double-click, click the second icon, or select (Open) from the node's pop-up menu.
  
• You can delete any node from a tree, except the root node.
  

FAQ

How do I start growing my Sprouts?
You start growing a sprout into a tree by hitting the New button. This will create a root node of a new tree. Typically, a root is a specific topic or concept, like 'charities'. You can then start growing that sprout into a tree by adding branches (nodes) to the root. Any node can have any number of branches (or child nodes) connected to it.

How do I add nodes?
Each node has a dropdown menu. Mouse over or click on the little arrow button in the upper-left corner of the node's frame. Then you can selct to add a simple node, run a Google Search to add websites, or get the results of an RSS feed as new nodes.

How do I use the Google Search?
We're playing with the Google Search beta API to add search results to a tree. Selecting Add->Nodes from Search from the pop-up menu will bring up a window with a familiar search box to enter a website URL, or a search phrase. The results are grouped in a couple of categories. A little 'add to tree' link is displayed at the bottom of each search item. Click on as many 'add to tree' links as you'd like to generate new link nodes under the currently selected node.

How do I launch node links?
You can launch a node's related website, newsfeed, blog or video in a pop-up window by simply double-clicking on a node. Each node also has a dropdown menu, a launch button and a delete button. The pop-up menu also has a properties tab to view or change the node settings.

What are those little buttons for?
Each node has a dropdown menu button, a launch button, and a delete button.

How do I save my work?
At any time, ust hit the Save button to save your Sprout in your private account area so you can come back later to continue working on your projects.

Can I share my Sprouts?
Yes, we're working on that... You'll be able to share it with others by publishing it as a stand-alone widget that you can plant out in the wild.

Can we collaborate on a tree?
I'm not sure how to best handle this, yet. You could obviously give your password out to whoever, for now, but all of your trees will be accessible - and I doubt you'd want that if you start building anything serious or private. Guess this feature will depend on what the community wants.

Any More Questions?

Sprouts is, well, just a sprout itself and there are many features that I still want add. So, if you have further questions, comments or suggestions, I really do want to hear from you. Email us here, or jump over to our blog.