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Mind Mapping Software - What are the current top players now?
TaoPhoenix:
There's a bunch of Thinkertoys out there. Beyond a pen and a blank sheet of paper, I haven't found anything that fits all use cases for ideation, project planning, or info organizing. Not to say I haven't looked. But life is short and I have things to accomplish - so I abandoned the quest to find the perfect all-inclusive mind tool about 5 years ago. Now, I just use whatever I think fits best for what I'm up to.
Increasingly, pen and paper (or index card) seems to work best for what I do. YMMV. 8) :Thmbsup:
-40hz (October 07, 2014, 12:50 PM)
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Yeah, for me too, the maps are def for personal use only, not to look pretty to publish.
Great shout out here about old school paper! When I go that route, I like a mechanical pencil to slowly fill in more and more info into a moderately complex chart, and then a blue pen becomes "bold".
I researched my tree system as the secondary replacement to stickies and index cards - I write those fast on the fly, then on various days I just type them up. My program allows you to "hide" stuff so on a good day I type up 20 of my notes and hide them, and it gets them off my desk.
But there's function issues floating around here too. I often run into the case when one main them I am working on gets mentally interrupted by secondary thoughts. So you have to put those somewhere else. So a good system needs to handle a bit of overflow.
superboyac:
There's a bunch of Thinkertoys out there. Beyond a pen and a blank sheet of paper, I haven't found anything that fits all use cases for ideation, project planning, or info organizing. Not to say I haven't looked. But life is short and I have things to accomplish - so I abandoned the quest to find the perfect all-inclusive mind tool about 5 years ago. Now, I just use whatever I think fits best for what I'm up to.
-40hz (October 07, 2014, 12:50 PM)
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yea...basically. interestingly enough, i was enjoying drawing on the tablet so much that my new idea/note capturing tool may just end up being photoshop/clip studio...blank canvas, draw on it with a pen. save. it's kind of funny, but it may just end up being the winner.
ewemoa:
I haven't had much luck with feel, speed of response, and resolution on tablets so far. Some day perhaps...
I've been using a small whiteboard for sketching things out and a camera to take pictures for later viewing :)
dr_andus:
I am looking for a way to diagram out my thoughts, and create relationships based on them or identify new trends or connections between various topics, for research I partake in as part of my graduate studies.
-Josh (October 06, 2014, 11:00 PM)
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Actually those activities can be quite different, calling for different types of tools, especially as the amount of ideas (notes) grow.
- "diagram out my thoughts" - this can be done on paper, or on specialist hardware (I use Boogie Board Sync for small diagrams), or in non-hierarchical concept mappers (Scapple, VUE, CMapTools, Compendum etc.) or in hierarchical mind mappers (Freeplane etc.).
- "create relationships based on them" - drawing links is easy in concept mappers, a bit less easy in hierarchical mind mappers. A problem arises once we are talking about a large number of notes that can't be visualised on a single screen. Then we move onto:
- "identify new trends or connections between various topics" - which calls for specialist analytical tools. In the academic world there are the so-called CAQDAS applications, but they are clunky, expensive, and have very restrictive licences. For this kind of analysis I use the Navigator in ConnectedText, which is a tool for visualising the relationships between linked notes (where links express a relationship). The whole category of the so-called Zettelkasten tools fall under here as well, though probably not all of them have such visualisation tools.
wraith808:
Lately I've been using Gingko App - https://gingkoapp.com/app. Free for 3 trees, but you can upgrade for unlimited trees. It's a little bit different take on organization- not rightly a mind-map, but more of a mind-tree.
Two statements from the developer that show the aim of the application:
What goes in each column?
The principle is:
Left → Right = General → Specific.
There is no wrong way to use Gingko, and you can always drag things around later.
What can I use it for?
Short answer is: anything.
Use Gingko any time you want to write or organize something hard.
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They have an introduction on youtube:
And a couple of articles:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/gingko-an-online-word-processor-that-could-change-the-way-you-write/
https://gingkoapp.com/p/future-of-text/
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