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Mind mapping software

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Vurbal:
Also Compendium which is IBIS based.

I use The Brain extensively at work: found nothing better for project / information management (not a great mind mapper, as in brain-stormer, as such)
-Perry Mowbray (December 29, 2013, 12:48 AM)
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I installed CompendiumNG a few months back and honestly couldn't figure out how to do anything useful - possibly needed to follow some instructions or something. It was such a non-experience I forgot until I read your post.

Vurbal:
So I just looked at The Brain's webpage and it looks interesting at first glance but then I ran into one of the Pro version's features which happens to be one of my pet peeves. For collaboration (TeamBrain) you have to go through their server for no real reason other than probably making sure they control it. That's the sort of thing that usually guarantees I won't be giving the company any money. OTOH the free version seems worth consideration.

MindVisualizer looks similar to XMind at first glance - once again based on their website - although most of its features are in the free version of XMind. Actually after playing around with Freeplane some more today I'm considering switching back to XMind because it just seems like a much nicer experience. Also I seem to recall XMind doing better with many to many relationships. It might just be a lack of skill with Freeplane but that sort of embodies what I don't like about it.

Which reminds me of one other thing that some (maybe most) of the mind mapping software I've read about seems to get horribly wrong. Aside from a handful of superior offerings it seems like there's a tendency to focus on the visual layout as the structure of the data rather than just a representation of it. Doing it that way you're back to the old flat sheet of paper constraints and the result isn't a lot better than a list or outline.

TaoPhoenix:
...Doing it that way you're back to the old flat sheet of paper constraints and the result isn't a lot better than a list or outline.
-Vurbal (December 29, 2013, 02:24 AM)
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I just peeked at this stuff a couple of weeks ago. Vurbal your note here is a lot like what I took away.

As far as "Mapping" goes, I came into the discussion comparing it to my tog dog entry, the Tree Databases and one in partuicular.

The maps are rather pretty visually to be sure. But it looked like they broke down after more than some 50 items. A lot of space was wasted trying to find space for the circles not to overlap, and contain a readable label.

For the "knowledge sets" I do, it's all about the dependent nodes, much like the old comments about Subroutines and maybe one "goto" that you bought from Vannah White (US Game Show Wheel of Fortune joke) that's like an emergency bail out.

So for example if I were to index authors from issues of a magazine, you can index the stories by author name, and (use the goto) for a second sort by issue date when printed. But beyond that the point don't intersect much.

Same with tax law studies; I made a tree with the forms *in the order of the dependent information* - so for example doing returns on paper, it doesn't help you to try to finish the Capital Gains Tax worksheet that only kicks in on the back of the return, if you're still debating your small business points of interest on the front page. Using the "Goto", of course it's useful to also have the list of forms in form order number.

And that's it.

There isn't a wild spaghetti pasta mesh of lines all around the data. And instead of little circles, the node labels are just text.

TaoPhoenix:
The one use I would have wanted a map program (but couldn't find one ultra simple enough - coding snack!?) was just to capture all the web pages I visit and auto produce a tree with some nodes being annotations in between. It's fun to see the linkages when you go web surfing.

Fun tip - watch episodes of MacGyver with today's web resources. So then your tree would capture stuff like this:

Oil well fires/Needs High Explosives/create a shockwave/pushes fuel & oxygen away
Started by Myron M. Kinley/ Red Adair became most famous/
Uses of Water:
     gas turbine blast water mist at the fire/still used to clean turbines
     High-powered water sprays/Keep the fighters safely below critical temps
Recent advances in tech/Purple K dry Chemical/

Innuendo:
Last time I tried to map my mind every program I tried hung with a "Re-calculating route..." message.  ;D

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