Mac nerds love two things: RSS readers and outliners. I spent well over a year using Windows 11, and a lot of that time searching for native RSS readers and outliners for the OS.
The Mac is an embarrassment of riches in these two categories.
OmniOutliner is the GOAT of macOS outliners, and it remains one of the best apps I use, full stop. I love Bike, too, and use it all the time. And I’ve tried (but not purchased) Kosshi. Zavala, of course, is another great (and free) option across the Apple ecosystem. Long ago, there was Folding Text… which is back! Another great outliner is MindNode, which reveals the structural similarity between mind maps and outlines.
Outliners are classically a top-to-bottom affair, with parents and children that you can focus on or hoist to narrow your view. Traverse takes a different approach, offering one view (of several) that show parents to children left to right, or horizontally. Think of Column view in macOS. This is a great use of space on widescreen displays, which is pretty much all of them these days.
Traverseis another player in the outliner space from Outliner Software, and I’m well impressed. Traverse uses OPML files. You can export to Markdown as a list or file, CSV, or even stream to Marked. It supports links to nodes within an outline, but Hookmark works in the app, too.
There’s a lot going on in Traverse’s inspector pane; you can convert nodes to to-dos, mark the node with a color, or add a note (one of my favorite OmniOutliner features).
Traverse offers three distinct views: Outline, Writer, and Column views. Outline view shows each line as a visually distinct node, with a round-rect drawn around the node. Writer view is a simpler mode, with reveal arrows to expand and collapse nodes. Column view is the most interesting, with nodes spilling left to right across the screen. While the first two modes are standard fare for an outliner, column view is a neat twist on the presentation of an outline.
There’s an iOS version of Traverse is there, but the app is a limited or companion version of the Mac’s (it’s also free). You can open and edit OPML files in iCloud, but it uses a folder on iCloud, where the Mac version’s defaults to a location in your home library (you can change the location on the Mac if you want to share Traverse’s Library. On iPadOS, Traverse’s Column view isn’t available on the iPad. I’d say that’s the central feature of this app, and hence a notable omission.
Where OmniOutliner, Bike, and Folding Text are document-based apps, Kosshi, MindNode, and Zavala are database-based apps. Traverse looks and acts like a database app despite using OPML files, which you can reveal in the Finder by right-clicking on the document’s title in the app’s library pane. This allows you to round-trip between other applications, sure; Traverse will prompt you to import external files to the app’s library, though.
An outline can be a project map, a writing structure, a research database, a decision tree, a study plan, a product roadmap, or a way to take apart an idea until you can see what it is made of.
Traverse leans into that. It is not trying to be a full task manager, a notes archive, a mind-mapping canvas, or a document editor. It is focused on helping you build, browse, reshape and export structured information.
I took a PDF of a chapter of New Jersey’s Administrative Code that I reference a lot for work, and used Microsoft’s Copilot to create an OPML file that contains the full text of the chapter. I pulled that into Traverse to get a sense for how it would handle a large document with many nodes. The color coding for levels is a nice touch.
Traverse uses Apple Intelligence on your local machine, but you can also add other models to employ agent skills.