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Freemind's Underrated/Underreported New Feature for Non-Followers
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Posted by Foolness
Dec 14, 2012 at 07:10 PM
There’s a recent rant thread (http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4635/) looking for a clone feature and the FreeMind page as of this visit:
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FreeMind_1.0.0:_The_New_Features
Clones: nodes and its sub-nodes can be cloned. The two copies will then be synchronized
Collaboration: two or more people can work simultaneously on the same map
Restore complete session
Location based mindmapping
Spell checking on input
I didn’t post there for three reasons.
1) Freemind doesn’t have all the features the author requested and it’s still a mindmap though I’ve always personally categorized fishbone software as pane outliners disguising themselves as mindmaps.
2) Freemind is still clunky and is not my recommended mapper compared to Compendium. (Even for the rant thread, if he had been looking for a mapper instead of an outliner, I thought Compendium especially the old version had better seamless drag and drop pics and url icon handling for the Windows version.) I just happened to recently found an outline template that is structured exactly on two axis and fishboning seemed like the perfect excuse to retest Freemind.
3) I didn’t actually download the new version and it was the old version of Freemind that had new features I didn’t thought Freemind had. It was just coincidence that the topic was there. I was planning to make a new thread here about Freemind because the feature is hidden in places where, unless you reread the help files, you’d missed it.
The (old) new features are:
>An entry has a RTF style field now. In short, Freemind has caught up with other fishbone software and it’s still the only one on the desktop that’s free, cross-platform and popular.
Here’s the tricky thing. There’s actually “three” types of text field now. If you just press insert, Freemind still thinks it’s a basic no format text field. Only when you type and edit a long sentence inside the field do you get the second field which is just a pop-up text box with no formatting but makes for easier editing of the words much like Compendium’s default text field.
The third format box ONLY appears if you highlight the text and press “ALT+ENTER”. The program asks if you want formatting (and will continue to ask if you don’t remember the decision) and only then will Freemind show an editor with bold, italic, underline and a way to insert tables.
>Freemind has drag and drop
This one I don’t know how old the feature is but I’ve only discovered that you can drag the nodes like an actual nodes and it’s no longer just a fishbone line. Maybe it was always there but I just didn’t notice because the way the program registers that area, you have to highlight the right side of your text field in order to find a small oval besides your text. Holding the left mouse button while that oval is clicked (it turns red) allows free form dragging. Not that it’s much use but it does reduce most of the wasted space a fishbone software tends to create.
>Freemind has filters
In the left side of the toolbar where the zoom is, there’s a funnel. Click that and now you can insert words that filters out your maps which basically allows a reverse style of PersonalBrain where you no longer have to always find for the words and then find next for the words. The filter saves the word in a file so it’s clunky for one time filters but it’s kinda sorta allows Freemind to have tags now and makes Freemind a truer free alternative to PersonalBrain’s feature where before there was none. I still prefer Compendium’s folder structure but at least mapping innovations are moving on again in the free arena and it’s moving in ways that are different from outliner innovations.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 14, 2012 at 08:52 PM
Thanks; this is interesting. I’m not aware of an other mind mapping software supporting clones, though it’s been a while since I watched that scene.
Interestingly, some of the Freemind developers had forked it to Freeplane due to the slow progress, but now Freemind seems to be catching up. There’s no mention in the Freeplane site of clones at least.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 14, 2012 at 08:55 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
Thanks; this is interesting. I’m not aware of an other mind mapping
>software supporting clones, though it’s been a while since I watched
>that scene.
I think it is unusual, but TheBrain has had that ability for a long time. Whether you want to call TheBrain a mind mapper or not, is another question.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 14, 2012 at 10:25 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>TheBrain has had that ability for a long time. Whether you want to call TheBrain a mind mapper or not, is another
>question.
I wouldn’t actually. Its paradigm is much more open (connect anything to anything, and any “node” can be used as the home). Dynamic animation aside, structurally it is a concept mapping tool, especially in its recent incarnations where the connectors have their own properties.
Mind mappers are little more than visually enhanced hierarchical outlining tools. As such, they suffer from the “everything is miscellaneous” weakness of outlines, i.e. they can’t include the same item under different branches. Clones offer a solution to this issue but, again, though quite easily found in outliners, I have not seen them in ‘standard’ mind mapping applications.
Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 14, 2012 at 11:02 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Mind mappers are little more than visually enhanced hierarchical
>outlining tools. As such, they suffer from the “everything is
>miscellaneous” weakness of outlines, i.e. they can’t include the same
>item under different branches. Clones offer a solution to this issue
>but, again, though quite easily found in outliners, I have not seen them
>in ‘standard’ mind mapping applications.
In terms of outlining, a standard mind mapper is even more limited than a standard single-pane outliner, as in a mind-mapper you can have (in fact you are forced to have) only one level-1 item (everything else being level-2 etc.), whilst in an outliner you can have as many level-1 items as you like.
Interestingly mind mappers in this sense are more similar to wikis, as in a wiki you are forced to define a home page (index), which is your single level-1 item - although you are not forced to link everything else to it, as you are in mind mappers.
ConnectedText has a tool to view wiki pages as a mind map, though only those pages will show in the given view that have been connected. In fact I’ve just realised that this feature makes CT a mind-mapper with cloning ability, as discussed in this thread (although it won’t let you reorder the items in the mind-map view: items are displayed in the order of creation or modification, unfortunately).