Mind versus tree navigation; html versus rtf editing

Posted by Tom S.
Mar 19, 2007 at 11:25 AM

Graham Rhind wrote:
>I think a distinction needs to be made between mind maps (as I know them, which, as
>Cassius said, could be expressed in a tree-like linear form); and non-tree-like
>navigation/outliner systems, such as Personal Brain.
> >An item in a tree can have one
>parent, and multiple children. That’s the basis and at the same time the limitation.
>After that, most tree-like outliners have to think of (mostly awkward) ways of
>creating internal links between branches, such as creating virtual copies of the
>files or having text wiki links.

This is where I thought UR exceled. Consider the screenshot below:

http://www.kinook.com/UltraRecall/Screenshots/AdvSearch.png

What caught my attention about this program was the iittle frame in the lower right hand corner, “Item parents”. What that means is that you can place the item in multiple places in the tree and see, in one shot, where all those places are. A click on the folder or item in this frame brings you to that spot in the tree. This provides perspective and makes navigation much more nimble. It’s a very simple idea but very effective. Indeed, I found this list to be much more effective than trying to follow the connections in PB3.

Tom S.