It’s interesting to see the comments about linearity and notes. I’ve really wanted to like mind mapping tools and have tried a few. All of been frustrating as all of them see to be strictly linear in nature. I haven’t found one (or figured how to in one) have multiple links to multiple nodes or have conditional structures. I think of a web of nodes all interconnected but all the tools I’ve seen are limited to strict hierarchies which I can do with any old outline.
What a timely thread.
I just received an “attaboy” note from a project manager who was quite impressed with my usage of a mind map to present the various options for the problem they are trying to solve.
I use them daily.
The fact that I can slide stuff around and see most of it at once is very helpful, and the nicer mind mapping applications can export the finished map to Word or PowerPoint, generating a nice slide deck.
An example of the kind of intractable problem I use one for:
I am involved (as a tiny cog in the machine) in a massive project that will affect dozens of downstream business systems, each one with their own project team, priorities, and challenges.
There is just no good way to begin understanding forty or fifty different business systems and the impact that your project will have on them. The knowledge is difficult to understand, complex, and comes in disjoint chunks.
I started a mind map that covers my own understanding of all of these systems and their individual issues. It seems more natural to use than digging through spreadsheets or linear documents.
Eh…there are some similarities to be sure, but I think there are some key differences too:
Yes, it deals with hierarchical information, drawing relationships between the items, which are collected across a range of some sort.
I think the key difference is that a mindmap usually takes a central concept and radiates outward into details, rather than taking a bunch of disparate items, making connections and working inward to come up with a final conclusion.
If you chose a team you thought would be national champion, then mind-mapped who you thought they’d have to beat (and who they’d have to beat, and so on) to get there, then you’d have a true mind map that looked an awful lot like a bracket. But it probably wouldn’t match up with the NCAA seedings, so it might be of limited use.
You could describe that as a form of mind map, but it exploits only a very small limited subset of the features (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
I think it falls into one of those things where if Mind Maps are roughly in line with the way you think, then it’s a real useful tool. But trying to force fit someone with a different style to using Mind Maps simply doesn’t work.
As an old fashioned pen and notepad kinda guy, I tried Microsoft’s OneNote on a flight once. It works **for me **just the way I have always wanted something to replace notebooks with. It’s the greatest thing since the spreadsheet was invented IMHO. While I like to evangelize this program, I also realize that for the majority of people out there it’s not the best thing since sliced bread that I think it is.
You might want to poke around some of the offerings from Eastgate Systems and see if any of them include features you’re looking for. I haven’t used any of their recent products, but Eastgate was active in the early development of hypertext, so if anybody knows about multiple links it should be them.
China Guy, is there software out there that does sort of same thing as OneNote without the Microsoft pricetag? AFAIK Microsoft usually does not invent new classes of software, or even new ways of implementing an existing class, but rather just copy and improve existing ones. So what are existing precursors to OneNote?
the De Bono bit is interesting. The guy did succeed in evangelizing a whole lot of people into his ideas. Or a subset of his ideas. Or into a personal brand regardless of idea validity or applicability. In any event, there either already exists or else hypothetically could exist a whole ecosystem of tools marketed specifically to De Bono followers, including new and improved mind maps.
Well, it probably alienates a lot of people simply because Windows often goes to it as a default printer, and when people finally notice it, they’ve already taken apart and put back together their printer in desperate frustration. Upon realizing that OneNote is the culprit, they don’t want anything to do with the thing for their remaining lives.
I have no idea. A quick look at Wiki makes it seem like it was developed at Microsoft or at least not a baked out acquistion. Here’s wiki’s take on notetaking software: Comparison of note-taking software - Wikipedia
I’ve converted an awful lot of traditional pen and notebook users into OneNote fans. If you’re wired that way, OneNote is the bees knees. It’s $68 at amazon. Again, i go back to my point that just because a program is great for me, doesn’t mean that forcefitting it for others will be successful.
In my job I have occasionally had to design new business processes, or new clusters of equipment, that have to fit in with existing systems. The mindmap chart format is good for that. It is also called a ‘brainstorming’ chart, and that’s exactly the context where it works best.
There already exists a collection of so-called ‘thinking tools’ out there, many of them devised or popularised by Edward De Bono - some of them seem contrived at times, or hard to apply to the real world, but they mostly do have genuine applications, and do produce worthwhile results.
The guy is a bit ‘out there’ precisely because he lives and breathes this stuff - and little else, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the ideas themselves. The deliberate design of new thinking methods is (IMO) a domain with quite rich potential. I’m glad to see it being implemented in schools today - we had nothing like it when I was growing up.
I can’t say I agree that Edward De Bono appears to me as deliberately promoting a personal brand, or gathering followers. As far as I can tell, he cares very deeply about the domain of thinking, but I don’t see that he’s trying to own it.
Mangetout, I was not implying that I am in a position to evaluate De Bono’s personal worldview. It was more of a sociological observation. Impact of any public intellectual, be it Kurzweil, Gladwell, Sailer or Osama can be studied as a sociological phenomenon regardless of their own personalities. There must be lots of potential PhD thesis topics hidden here somewhere 
I personally am suspicious of popular teachers of thinking because I suspect them of being anti-analytical until proven otherwise. Given the anti-analytical trend in modern culture and in particular amongst the sort of people who are likely to be dissatisfied with their thinking processes in this day and age and be willing to pay for solutions, that seems like a fair approach.
That being said, mind maps themselves, if built according to appropriate models, can be uber analytical. But then again, they may well be also uber holistic or anything in between. I guess this is kind of like writing - prose can be clear, detailed and insightful or it can be convoluted just-so BS. The process of typing up the text as a bunch of paragraphs by itself imposes few constraints on the writer.
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I haven’t found one [mind mapping tool] (or figured how to in one) have multiple links to multiple nodes or have conditional structures. I think of a web of nodes all interconnected but all the tools I’ve seen are limited to strict hierarchies which I can do with any old outline.
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Thank you! The same thing was irritating me when researching/evaluating mind-mapping tools not too long ago. The only program I found that would let me do this is Visio.
Nice site, thanks! Looking at screenshots, it looks like their $250 Tinderbox product allows for this. I can’t tell about their $80 Twig offering.
StephenG and MobiusStripes, could any of you guys please clarify your point about the features that you find missing in many apps out there?
Do you mean that you want 2 edges from node A to B and not just one? Or what does multiple links to multiple nodes mean?
What do you mean by conditional structures? If you make an edge with a caption “will make the deal if sum is above one million”, is that an example of conditional? Or do you mean something much more elaborate?
I’ll try to find the files I experimented with. I was working on a new project and trying to decipher terms and structure within an organization that was new to me. I think I ended up using Visio and getting a rough relationship down but struggled with with entities that would have multiple parents or could be cross-linked.
Some of the links to tools folks have provided in the thread look promising though! Those did not come up in my generic “mind map” software search. (Plus I was probably looking for open source stuff on the first pass anyway, or whatever we already owned.)
Yup, exactly – I wanted to have some nodes that were linked to from 2 (or more) entries that were “higher” in the hierarchy, as well as having multiple entries “lower” in the hierarchy.
For instance, if I were making a mind map of “Everything”, I might want to have an entry for “Bears”. Now, “Bears” should be a sub-entry of “Animals”, but also of “Things that are brown”… and most programs (FreeMind was an open-source one, MindJet was a paid one, and I could look up the others) didn’t allow that. I’d have to have “Bears” be below one or the other, but not both. I could make a second entry for “Bears”, and put it in the other category, and even link the two … but they insisted on showing the two “Bears” nodes as separate.
I can’t speak to this, I’m sorry. As I recall, all of the programs I looked at let you label the links between nodes, and even use multiple types of links.
Likewise, I don’t want to appear to be overly-defensive of De Bono - I have a few of his books that I picked up second hand. I find some of his methods useful and provocative - I find others childish and prescriptive - but I think that’s the point - he’s published a massive variety of tools, and people can evaluate/accept/reject them as appropriate.
He’s an interesting character, to be sure - and has made some really weird statements (such as prescribing Marmite as a solution for middle-east conflict).
Dunno - for me, one of the strengths of mind-mapping techniques is the lack of constraints. If you’re mapping a hierarchical tree of dependencies, and you decide you also need to describe properties of some of the members, you can - it’s a different flavour of data, but you just choose a different shape or colour to make the difference obvious. If you then notice that some of those properties are the same for several members, you might want to sketch links between them and a new object that describes that property in detail.
-It’s a deliberately non-constrained, mixed-media, mixed-data way of setting down thoughts - doesn’t work for everyone, or for everything, but for some things, is ideal.
that’s exactly what I meant in my previous post too 
. In essence, I think that an analytical person would make analytical maps and a non-analytical one those more appropriate to his way of thinking. So the model is not in the software but in the user’s head, at least for a hypothetical “ideal” tool that does not get in our way with the particular philosophy of its makers.