Curio 5.0

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 18, 2008 at 01:40 PM

quant wrote:
>Could you please explain, why are you so excited about those “mind maps”?
>Every and
>any notetaking software that has a tree has basically “mind maps”. The only
>difference is that instead of all children being below its parent, half of them are on
>the right and another half on the left.

I have some ambivalence toward mind maps myself. For me, large mind maps (or diagrams) start to lose meaning. However, I do find that slapping together a diagram is a good way to start a project, because it creates organization of ideas without necessarily creating a hierarchy. Let’s face it, even a straight list is a hierarchy, as what comes first seems to have the most prominence (think of the list of actors in the cast of a movie).

Also, you can add other visual cues to a mind map that you can’t in an outline. For instance, say you are planning an marketing campaign and one of your headings is “advertising” and another is “target audiences.” With a mind map you can use an arrow or a line to connect which ads are targeted at which audiences. You’d need a columned outline to get the same idea across… and then it wouldn’t be as visual.

Nevertheless, mind maps are restricting, and that is why I’m excited by Curio 5.0. With Curio, I can build a small mind map to get started, then use outlines to add detail to each of the major nodes. For me, it is the best of both worlds.

Steve Z.