MaxThink

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Dec 7, 2007 at 10:04 PM

I have to comment on my only disagreement with Guido in this thread. Does the magical number 7 vitiate mindmaps. Answering this question points to where mindmapping is useful.

When you have arrived at superordinate categories, MaxThink seems to be the fastest software in implementing and organizing matter beneath them. What it doesn’t provide is the mechanism for arriving at those categories.

When you have a long list and are searching for organizing principles, limiting the display to 7 or so items is not productive. While you can only retain some seven items, you can group and regroup items in your list to form possible groupings. In a mindmapper you do this quickly, by saccadic eye movement, without having to scroll or reorganize. This is the stage where the mindmapper is useful.

Guido wrote:
>Above all, like in brainstorm, the
>user’s always focused on the parent and its childs ( keyword : magical 7, reason why
>mindmapping isn’t so useful at all ) without being confused by a list of sub-topics and
>sub-sub-topics.