I’ve been looking for a lightweight outliner program to handle my piece-meal thesis work. I discovered Maple, which seems to be what I was looking for, from this list of outliner programs for Windows.
It lets me organize my writing into manageable sections, then easily work on each once I have the sources at hand. Also, I can export the tree as a flat file in doc, txt, html, or rtf.
In my ideal world, it would have support for footnotes or endnotes, but I guess you can’t have everything.
Maple
By Crystal Office Systems
Free 30-day trial, $21.95 US to buy
Filed under: Computer, Files, Organization, Research, Software, Thesis, Tools, Windows, Writing
Academic Lifehacker 
There’s a list of 63 outliners at mind-mapping.org (it’s not just mind-mappers). Most of those are desktop software, but Web 2.0 has produced some on-line outliners as well. As they’re browser based, you can get at them from anywhere with a web connection, and even collaborate with others on a single outline.
– sproutliner.com is a basic on-line outliner that lets you share outlines
– thinkfold.com is a collaborative on-line outlining application
– loosestitch.com is similar
Then there’s all the web-based mind map and concept map tools . . .
Regards
Vic
http://www.mind-mapping.org
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software