[extropy-chat] Mind Mapping Software - Suggestions?

Jay Dugger jay.dugger at gmail.com
Wed Aug 9 04:16:56 UTC 2006


Tuesday, 8 August 2006

I've used both Mind Manager from MindJet and Freemind for work and
personal projects. At work, I've used MM for project management and
that works quite well. (At least one division of SGI uses MM for the
same task.) It worked well for this, but I had problems because no one
else on the project used mind maps at all! I also kept a master to-do
list for all of 2005 with MM,  used it to analyze and modify perl
scripts when I didn't know the language, and a few other tasks.

Mind Manager has a slightly better feel to it, integrates with MS
Office products, has better style support, filters, handles large maps
well, and crashes less often than does Freemind. MM also has a very
high price tag: US$350 unless you get an educational discount.

Freemind, which I now use at work for cirriculum development,
technical writing, and private project tracking, does perhaps
two-thirds of what Mind Manager can do. It runs pretty well, and if
you get all of the neat plug-ins, it might do about three-quarters of
what M.M. can do. Freemind also has an open source advantage. Zero
cost, and some very neat things can get built from it. For example,
there exists a script to import one's del.icio.us bookmarks into a
mind map, open source wikis that incorporate freemind maps, and even a
tool to turn freemind maps into flash animated mind maps! Oh, and
freemind can import Mind Manager maps.

You can find my bookmarked links about these over at
del.icio.us/jay.dugger/freemind and at del.icio.us/jay.dugger/mindmap.

In short, I make two recommendations. Mind mapping software works
better for me than paper; use software. Try freemind first to see if
it mind mapping improves your work. Switch to MM if and only if you
must, for Office integration or if the lacks of freemind irritate you,
or if you can cheaply get it.

Mind mapping software has limits and drawbacks. Collaborative mind
mapping posed challenges for me, esp. with the expensive Mind Manager.
Even freemind has this problem to some extent. You can spend more time
explaining the technique than working on the project! Also, take all
the claims about saving time with a grain of salt. I find that mind
mapping takes longer than usually claimed. I usually spend more time
thinking about the mind maps than I would without them. Most of this
is not just map-fiddling. That's more or less automated on the
machines I use through programs like ActiveWords (another program I
wish ran on Linux). I just spend more time thinking about the task
with mind maps. Feature--not bug! It resembles using speech to text
programs. My writing usually ends up better because it gets more of my
attention.

-- 
Jay Dugger
http://jaydugger.suprglu.com
Sometimes the delete key serves best.



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