Had listened to a recent episode of the Linux Action Show and there was a quick review of Freemind, Mind Mapping software. The host mentioned that he was using it all the time now for notes. Better for keeping organized notes than a text editor and better for putting up related text than a graphics program as the canavas automically resizes.
Nice review and I decided to look into it. I had learned basic mind mapping techniques on paper years ago but never really got into the style. On paper you can’t move things around once you’ve placed them there and it is too easy to hit the edge of the paper while you are writing down your ideas. Software mind mapping resolves those issue.
So playing around with the program to see how it works for keeping notes and trying to organize thoughts and ideas. It is fairly easy to use and does have a nice style to it. Looking around at the site I also found a fork of Freemind called Freeplane. Even though if you look at any top x lists for mind mapping software you will see references to Freemind but not Freeplane and download activity of Freemind is much bigger, Freeplane seems to have the most active and most user responsive development which means a somewhat more complete feature set.
Freemind gives you 73 icons that you can put in your nodes for graphical representation of your ideas (which is supposed to be an important component of mind mapping.) That may sound like a lot but is fairly limited in what you can express with it. You can manually also enter your own images if you have what you want and have them organized. But most images, and even most clip art, are too big for the documents.
Freeplane on the other hand allows user created icons, comes with more icons out of the box, and there are a couple of readily available add ons that give you a lot more icons (over 700). For some people the extra icons is an important feature, for others maybe not so much in their text/idea documents.
Another feature I liked of Freeplane is the ability to place free standing nodes on the screen that aren’t attached to the main node tree. You can then later decide to move them back into the regular node tree or you can have stand alone nodes on your screen. A standard mind map is supposed to be a single theme and all ideas branch off of that but it is nice for making documents that you have the flexibility of placing things where ever you want them on the screen.
Anyway, both programs are very handy utilities for brainstorming, taking notes for educational purposes, just making general notes or to do lists for yourself, for outlines and maybe even for creating organized full fledged informational documents. I have been using notepad for years to make to do lists at work and trying out Freeplane this week for my to do lists and so far I’m finding the format to be very nice for keeping ideas organized and being able to prioritize what I’m working on as well as readily capture any momentary ideas that need to be added to the list.
I’d certainly recommend trying mind mapping programs out. There are other titles out there as well both desktop applications and web based mind mapping sites but these two are fully cross platform and completely free so are a very good place to start.