historical timeline modelling

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 8, 2011 at 06:18 PM

Jack Crawford wrote:
>There are a lot of mindmappers out there, including heavy hitters like
>MindManager and iMindMap.
> >Alex, what makes MindView stand out for
>you?

Jack,

True; all mindmapping applications I’ve tried have their own particular strengths:

- Mind Manager is close to an industry standard so benefits from several plug-ins; interestingly, the Gannt chart plug-in has now been integrated into the main program.

- Mind Genius can create expandable/collapsible excel spreadsheets which are very useful for financial overviews.

- Concept Mindmap can read OPML directly and is very flexible design-wise (thanks to its integration with Concept Draw).

- Xmind is cross-platform, and Linux is fast becoming a very productive OS for me.

- FreeMind (and now its spin-off Freeplane) is, well, free, cross-platform and can exchange maps in Mind Manager format…

... etc

- Re Mindview, 2-3 things mainly make it stand out for me:

(a) it’s much more business looking* than most of the others,

(b) it can export AND re-import from MS Office applications;

(c) most importantly, the ease with which one can attach numerical values to branches and perform aggregate calculations is brilliant. With most other programs I need to create my project plan as a mind map, and organise my resources in Excel. Why? Because not all resources can be expressed as person-days as most mind mappers would have one believe.

In fact, prior to MindView I used a now redundant program called B-liner (http://www.varatek.com/) as a hierarchical spreadsheet. I guess my mind simply can’t think in tables…

*Here’s a similar statement from another contributor in this forum in the past:
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/5490