MaxThink

Posted by Franz Grieser
Nov 17, 2007 at 12:45 PM

>I saw all of the positive reviews about MaxThink on the MaxThink website so I gave
>MaxThink a try last night. I wasn’t impressed. I prefer NoteMap.

I think the reviews relate to Maxthink for DOS - at least that’s what the title in the browser windows (“DOS Version”) and the dates and the price indicate.

>Is MaxThink really
>the power software for upper level thinking? Am I missing something?

That’s exactly what I asked myself after installing the software yesterday and looking through the example file.

When going through the website and the short “videos” (nothing more than simple presentations in Flash format, no screenshots of the software), I thought that there were a number of tools to “help you think”, to structure your writings. But I failed to find that in the software.

It is true: Maxthink comes with 55 questions that will help you produce complete information on any topic. But I thought that would be part of the software - and not only the contents of a Maxthink file.

So, I’d say: It’s a 2-pane outliner, not a idea processor.

Compared to Notemap, Maxthink may have a superior feature set - I haven’t compared them, yet. But the interface is ugly and cramped. The icons are really small, and there is a lot of them in the toolbars. The toolbars are fixed: You cannot remove or rearrange icons, you cannot hide the toolbars or move them. The windows are also fixed - no way to make the left window smaller or wider. There is no hoist command, you cannot open part of the outline in a separate window.

The help file is kind of strange: Don’t expect a how-to explanation. There is a “TOC” but there are no headings and no contents. Through the index you get explanations of the commands - and a lot of practical advice on how to structure and organize data. A nice touch: It’s the only help file that I know of having entries for “Noam Chomsky”, “Socrates” or “Aristotle” in the index. :-)

>I uninstalled
>it from my computer.

At the moment, I cannot see a reason why I would need it. But I’ll keep it installed for a few days.

Franz