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Vic
I’ve done separate posts about two recent findings over the last couple of days: Diagramic and the filling in of a historical entry. Time now for the remaining new items in Mind-mapping.org:
Creately
Creatley is a nice on-line diagram-drawing software with mind mapping as one of the type of diagrams supported. It has a free version, and a Plus version with a rather special subscription scheme: Pay what you think it’s worth, provided you spare at least US$1/month! Creately can make Flowcharts, Network Diagrams, Organizational Charts, UML Diagrams, Sitemaps, SWOT templates, Wireframes, UI Mockups as well as mind maps.
CUECards
CUECards is a hierarchical information store based on a ‘card’ metaphor – something of an outliner.
MindDecider
MindDecider incorporates a form of mind mapping and uses it as a framework for information gathering, analysis and calculation that leads to decision support.
SpicyNodes
I’ve seen SpicyNodes described as mind mapping software. It really is not, unless you’re prepared to build a web site for each mind map you make. But it does use the hierarchical mind mapping style for connections between nodes.
Spicy nodes is a new approach to web site navigation. It would be interesting to see mind mapping software that could export the code needed to build a SpicyNodes web
InFlow
Inflow is social and organisational network analysis software with many ways of displaying relationships. It appears to be aimed at enterprises rather than individuals.
Hope to see you on Twitter before my next post. Visit http://twitter.com/VicGee and click on the Follow button on the left.
Vic
http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software
Here’s the latest on Mind-mapping.org updates:
MyThoughts
A Mac mind mapper with an elegant and flexible organic appearance.
Pathway
Makes a graphical “network” representation of your visited article pages on Wikipedia. A node represents an article, a connection between two nodes shows your ‘pathway’ from one to the other. You can save these networks.
Not to be confused with Wikimindmap which produces a mind map from a specified Wikipedia page.
Thinking Space
Android mind mapping app. Minimal information, no screenshots.
ThoughtMuse
Another left-to-right mapper, like Co-mapping and Meadmap. As with those, I see this as more a graphical outliner than a mind mapper.
ThinkingMap
FreeMind-compatible iPhone mind mapping application.
Here’s another of those ’not to be confused with’ iems: ThinkingMap is not connected to ‘Thinking Maps‘, a high-end educational tool.
Grab the RSS feed (hope that works – pls tell me if it doesn’t).
Vic Gee
http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software
Did you notice that my last post about new items in mind-mapping.org mentioned eight items but there were actually more in the database? . . . . oh never mind.
That’s because I was playing with a new entry that fitted a need I had, and chatting back and forth with its very capable developer, Wouter van Oortmerssen, as he tweaked it and even kindly met a few of my requests.
This is an outliner . . umm . . no, it’s a treemap . . . or maybe a spreadsheet. Well, none of them and a little bit of all of them. It’s TreeSheets, and I can only describe it as a new paradigm in capturing and organizing notes. More visual and flexible than outlines, less diagrammatic than mind maps and much more interesting than spreadsheets. And fast. Did I mention fast?
Some background on why I like this little application.
I use MindManager for mind mapping, Topicscape for organizing very large globs of information and Notepad++ for capturing those thought, ideas and tasks that pop into the mind from time to time, ready to be dropped somewhere else later.
For those who haven’t used it, Notepad++ is a fast, free application that’s quick and simple, like Windows’ own Notepad, but more capable and useful. I have a text file on the shared desktop of my main PC and a Quick Launch link to it on all the PCs in my office that I use. So that tool beloved of practitioners of GTD – the single collection bucket – is quickly to hand wherever I am. Well, almost single, there are the notes in my iPhone too.
But being a mind mapper, the last thing I really want from an ideas and notes dump is a long, linear list. And that’s where TreeSheets comes in. It has structure, it can express hierarchy and it has, to some extent, visual layout. It can even store images. Try that with Notepad++.
It is a kind of outliner in the sense that items are indented according to their level. It’s a species of treemap in the sense that it displays a hierarchy as nested rectangles, making each level smaller to occupy a fixed space: It has notes inside notes down to… well I have no idea. I took it to 20 levels, it showed no sign of flagging but I got bored. It has a touch of the spreadsheet because it starts as a plain, empty grid of cells, but then gets interesting.
TreeSheets overcomes the problem of deep nesting by continually reducing font size as the nested cells go deeper, all the way to 1 pixel (or less, for all I know). Ridiculous, you think? So did I, till I discovered that a simple swoosh of the mousewheel lets you zoom in and focus on a grid that, moments before, was all but invisible.
So now I have TreeSheets on all the PCs I use, and a link to my master sheet has replaced the link to the text file in the Quick Launch toolbars.
You’re probably wondering about the price. Is Vic in on the affiliate selling schemes now then, with all this praise? Is this going to link to one of those endless pages with yellow highlighting where you have to give your email address and pay $100 to get this exciting new product?
Well no actually, it’s free. And Wouter doesn’t even ask for your email. http://treesheets.com/
It’s still in development and there’s a new version every few days – just today I had an email from Wouter to say it can now print a sheet “with page setup, preview.. the works. Even does decent PDFs..”
I hope you like it as much as I do.
Vic
http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software
On Mind-mapping.org this week there are four new entries in the master list - three graphical and one a related development platform.
bCisive
bCisive is software for business decision making and diagramming. It supports building and communicating business cases as well as documenting the reasoning behind decisions.
GenIE & SMILE
GeNIe is a user-friendly development environment for graphical decision-theoretic models. It is the Windows user interface to SMILE, which is a portable library of C++ classes implementing the models.
Outliner 2.0
Outliner is an outliner for mobile phones and PDAs. It lets you create your outlines with desktop software and import them.
Vic
http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software
Some new information organizing and visualization software for you. Things got behind as I put together the web-based mindmappers reference pages (see my post of 14th December, 2007) and continued working on the interoperability reference resource. The web-based one is done, as previously announced here, and the interop one is approaching first publication.
But the entries for the mind mapping software database kept piling up, so I had a clear out over the holidays, and I bring you six new programs.
Dendroscope
Information mapping for a very specialised area, evolutionary biology, but this could be stretched to other forms of hiearchical visualization, and anyway it’s free.
LinkSViewer
This is a web-based service that gathers together information about people, companies, educational establishments and all sorts of relationships and turns them into an interconnected map. A concept map of sorts.
Shared Space
An information management tool with a mind-mapping influence.
Skrbl
Not a mind mapping tool, but an on-line whiteboard that would allow collaborative mapping.
Surfulater
Organize files in an advanced form of outline, with graphics and web pages in a browsing screen.
Solution Language Tool
A mind map and activity map editor. No easy download for the free trial, instead you must fill in a form having five mandatory fields.
Finally, a historical note: Rationale has been in the database since July 2007, but I just learnt of Reason!Able that it replaced, and added it for the record.
Happy New Year!
Vic
Update: Corrected spelling of Surfulater. December 28, 2007
You know all those web-based mind mapping applications? Well, I’ve been happily digging around for the past couple of weeks and putting all the information together and at last it’s published. Now you can see at one web site which applications are totally free or, for the subscription ones, what you get for their free limited option.
Here’s the front page:
http://www.mind-mapping.org/web-based-mindmappers/
The pages show which ones are absolutely free, the costs and options for the subscription ones and what you can get for free at those sites, and what level of publishing, sharing and collaboration each supports.
Most importantly, there’s a visualization to show at a glance which web-based mind mapping application can import or export MindManager and FreeMind:
I’ve included some web-based outliners as well, and some diagramming and whiteboard sites, provided they support sharing or collaborations.
So now there’s no excuse. Get out there and get mapping, get collaborating and share your maps – while it’s free!
Vic
There are five additions to the mind map software list at Mind-mapping.org this weekend: Imindi, PAUX, UML Explorer, Mappio and yalips.
Imindi – Something to watch – with interest. It has high aspirations but little information on actual progress so far:
Mappio – This is not officially out yet, but it’s accessible and you can sign up without waiting. I made a little mind map of mind-mapping.org with Mappio, but I’ve blogged about that already: http://www.mind-mapping.org/blog/?p=63 This is web based:
PAUX – Information management sofware with a visual element, an outlines element and a claim to a “multidimensional mindmap”. I have no idea what the pricing is. It says: Free “in the context of a development partnership” and there is no information about how it is priced outside such a partnership. This is a thumbnail of the only image I could find of how the UI looks and feels:
UML Explorer - Part of the ModelMaker family, this UML tool can make mind maps and is at a good price point for a product with such capabilities:
yalips – Yes the lower-case name is the way they’ve registered the trademark, so I won’t capitalize it. Makes you wonder where the name comes from. This is another UML diagrams product that goes much further in the diagramming, and includes mind maps. Reasonably priced for such a product as well:
As usual, there’s more information with full-size images at mind-mapping.org
Vic
This weekend’s update to Mind-mapping.org brings a lively and colourful new mind-mapping product, Cayra; VORG Express, a free information manager; and a development platform for throw-away web applications that revolves around a MindManager mind map.
Cayra - This is an attractive program, free for now, that produces colourful maps that don’t have to represent a pure hiearchy. It can therefore produce a limited form of concept map as well as mind maps.
VORG Express – VE is a free information manager that also has diagramming capabilities. It has a big brother, VORG Team, which costs US$48 a year per user. There are other products in the family that are aimed at vertical markets: Finance and medical.
SnapXT – Finally, there’s SnapXT that uses a MindManager mind map to build collaborative web applications. The key to its original approach to application development is that the connection between the mind map and the application is “live” – changes to the map can be reflected in the on-line application.
Vic
The new entrants to mind-mapping.org this week are:
Taonotes – a reasonably-priced outliner.
Dia – free diagramming software with the ability to draw mind maps, but it has no features specifically aimed at easing mind map production. Then again, it is free.
XWiki MindMap – an add-on to XWiki that lets you introduce mind maps (made in FreeMind) to a wiki.
Vic
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