Mindsystems Amode on Bits

Posted by Derek Cater
Jul 2, 2009 at 07:36 PM

I bought Amode about six weeks ago and have been very impressed with it. It is a very capable product, is extremely intuitive and has a very responsive developer. I think it is a steal at the Bits du Jour offer price.

At the highest level of organisation within an Amode ‘Solution File’ are ‘Projects’, which you populate with ‘Topics’ and ‘Subtopics’ (there are no restrictions on the number of levels to the hierarchy) in a tree. Each topic and sub-topic has a notes pane, which supports cut, copy and paste, text alignment, bullets and numbered bullets, tables, image insertion, spell check, etc. Notes can be imported from and exported to various MS Office and OpenOffice document formats. And Amode is ink-enabled, so ink notes can be taken on a tablet PC, which I am now even more pleased to have.
In addition to the notes pane, for each topic and sub-topic you can link or embed any number of external files, whether they are documents on your hard disc or web pages. Linking allows you to keep the size of the Solution File low, while embedding is best if the Solution File will be opened on a range of computers. And whether attached or embedded, the file is opened by its native programme (which you must have installed, of course).

Also, for each topic and sub-topic, you can set a number of project management variables, such as start and finish date, priority, percentage complete and dependencies with other tasks (finish-to-start, start-to-finish, start-to-start and finish-to-finish dependencies are all possible). You can assign resources (physical and human) to each topic and sub-topic and you can set their hourly or daily rates. You can also set up default and custom calendars. Having assiduously plugged this information in, Amode will produce a cost quotation for you, if you so wish. Dependencies and resource allocations operate across all projects in a single Solution File, which is a good reason to group a number of projects within a single Solution File rather than create a new File for each project.

In addition to the tree view, you can select to display any topic and sub-topic in Amode’s Calendar and/or Gantt views. The calendar can be zoomed to the day (in increments from five to 60 minutes), working week, seven-day week or the month, while the Gantt view can be zoomed from 15-minute to monthly intervals.

All of these features are presented in a very user-friendly way. As I said in a previous posting, anyone who has used a two-pane outliner, an electronic calendar and a Gantt-chart-producing project management software programme will feel at home in Amode within half an hour.

The developer is responsive too. Of the three minor bugs I have reported, one was corrected in the second of the two updates released to date, while the other two are due to be remedied in the next or next-but-one update, which, I am told, will see some significant enhancements to the notes pane functions. The developer also promises new viewing modes in the second major release of Amode, planned for next year, I believe, which must surely mean the incorporation of a mind-mapping mode.

Amode is being marketed to businesses as an alternative or complement to mind-mapping software and appears to be generating some buzz in that sector. That will likely entail a healthy revenue stream for Mindsystems, which should mean that Amode will be developed for years to come, which in turn means that we should be safe in throwing our information into it.

All of this power and flexibility means that Amode is now taking care of most of my project needs. I write my reports in it, with each topic or sub-topic representing a single text section, exporting to MS Word only for the final formatting. I usually choose to display the tree in the calendar view, to structure my writing week. Project meetings are entered as topics and displayed in the calendar. I link various documents on my hard disc to these meeting topics, for easy reference during the meeting, while I take meeting notes in the notes or ink notes panes. When planning or monitoring the implementation of projects I import existing Gantt charts into Amode (if they are in MS Project format) or I create one afresh, each line on the Gantt chart equating to a topic or sub-topic, with dependencies applied. I then input progress against the Gantt chart into Amode as the project unfolds.

The only downside to Amode that I have discovered to date is that it is going to severely limit my ‘justifiable’ CRIMP opportunities ;-)