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Your choice of mind mapping software
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Posted by Graham Smith
Oct 17, 2006 at 02:03 PM
Although I have several different mind mapping programs (Mind Manager, Mind Genius, Inspiration, FreeMind and Axon) I don’t feel that any of them really what I am looking for. All of them are excellent in their own way, but I none have found a place in “my comfort zone”
Any one got suggestions of what else I should look at.
Thanks,
Graham
Posted by NW
Oct 17, 2006 at 08:58 PM
Hi Graham,
I regularly use MindManager and have used FreeMind in the past. The other program I have is PersonaBrain http://www.thebrain.com. I have also tried Cmaps (http://cmap.ihmc.us/). These are more ‘concept’ maps rather than pure mind maps, for when the ‘central idea & branches’ layout doesn’t match what you want to do.
Regards,
Nigel
Posted by A.Research
Oct 17, 2006 at 11:45 PM
I think mindmapping in a literal sense should not be restrictive, but Tony Buzan trademarked mindmappers are essentially only radial trees. IMHO this is a clever marketing strategy because it can attract many users with only a few keywords: mindmap, radial thinking, left right brain (non-scientific claim (see Wikipedia/mindmap)). You can of course fill the screen in any graphics program (like Visio or SmartDraw) where you can map processes better.
Another thing I find disturbing in mindmappers are the thick underlines below the text. I learnt in Information Design that text underlines should be used only sparsely, an example of a table was given: Compare the readability of a table having black cell borders with light colored borders. But mindmappers with their radial trees are more or less forced to use underlines to visualize the tree relation. The first thing I would do as mindmap user is to lighten up the branch colors if possible. In conventional trees indents are sufficient. Since those mindmappers are trees (hierarchies), I think comparing their feature list with those of conventional outliners would be appropriate.
Posted by Graham Smith
Oct 18, 2006 at 06:55 AM
Nigel
>I regularly use MindManager and have used FreeMind in the past. The other
>program I have is PersonaBrain http://www.thebrain.com. I have also tried Cmaps
>(http://cmap.ihmc.us/).
Thanks, I have tried these in the past, but certainly in the case of PersonalBrain, some time ago. I shall give it another look, but I suspect that part of my problem is not really defining what I want from the porgram as most of these programs go well beyond Mind Mapping and stray into diagrammimg, time management and information management.
Graham
Posted by Graham Smith
Oct 18, 2006 at 07:30 AM
>I think mindmapping in a literal sense should not be restrictive,
I think this is part of my problem as my main use of mind mapping is the idea processing/brain stormimg approach introduced by Tony Buzan back in the 1960s, which is still what I associate as Mind Mapping. This needs something that works very quickly, and for that I find Inspiration very good. The other aspect is the use of distinctive visual images to help remembering the map, if it is being used as an aid to memory
However Mind Mapping programs have extended well beyond that, and indeed the concept of mind mapping is being used to describe a type of diagram rather than a type of thinking process. This has led Mind mapping programs becoming diagramming programs and information managers and often making them fairly useless as mind mapping programs. I think this is the motivation behind the Tony Buzan approval system.
It is also part of the problem I am having with Mind Mapping programs, what I want for pure mind mapping isn’t what I want when it comes to presenting a diagram in a mind map “style” But the better diagramming based tools tend to be poorer mind mapping programs.
Graham