Outlining and concept maps (Scapple, TheBrain, ConnectedText...)

Posted by Hugh
Nov 11, 2013 at 06:11 PM

And you’ll want Scapple to do all that, and still pay $14.99?

Scapple is an electronic form of “napkin concept-mapping”. As that implies, it really isn’t intended to be competitive with the “big” mind-mappers, concept-mappers or outliners (as the developer keeps saying), all of which cost at least double and in some cases 10, 20 or more times as much. I wouldn’t ever use Scapple to outline a book - except in the most generalised “outline” form - but I would and do use it to outline a scene, a memo or a business letter, for which I find it appropriately useful. I certainly wouldn’t put it in the same category as The Brain or Connected Text.

There’s a tendency to aggrandise and hyperbolise software that is continuously adding functionality and tries to do many things. And then a little later we tend to knock it down again for being bloated, too big and difficult to learn. So it’s interesting when a developer says: “This is what it is: it’s designed to be simple and it isn’t going to indulge in function-creep”. I can’t think of many such applications in the realm of outliners and mind-maps. Opal may be one, Tree may be another, Taskpaper and its Markdown-influenced, outliner relations Folding Text and Oak may be others.