Nick’s Blog

Figtree (version 1.0) is a neat little application for viewing and manipulating trees. It is quite similar to TreeView, but Figtree incorporates a number of improvements including a cleaner UI, easier viewing of node labels, and an excellent method for collapsing branches. The later function should be particularly useful for generating figures for publication and for working with large trees containing 100+ taxa. Figtree’s main weakness is that it lacks a method for defining outgroups (it provides midpoint rooting only). Despite this qualification, I still highly recommend Figtree. Hopefully, future releases will address the rooting issue.