Stephen G. Harms is creating a mind map of western philosophy to aid readers of Daniel Miessler’s “most influential books” list.
stevengharms.com » Blog Archive » A Mind-Map to Western Philosophy
“I gave some thought as to how I could give a rough sketch of Western intellectual development in a broad-strokes sense that worked visually. Enter FreeMind. FreeMind is a mind-mapping software ( Free! ) that exports to PDF.”
I just added the Tools page with its first entry, a crude tool for printing out the text of all branches in a folder full of MindManager maps that have task information associated with them. Enjoy at your own risk.
Mindjet has released the new DevZone for MindManager 7 add-in and periphery developers. Good news for those of us that have been waiting for it, thought I’m not sure when it actually began appearing because I stopped looking for it a while back.
Here is a nice write-up from Investor’s Business Daily about how useful mind mapping software can be. I’ve highlighted below a nice success story from the article. They mention other mind mapping tools that most people haven’t heard of, so good for, for example, FreeMind, Labyrinth, and VYM.
Makers Of Mind-Mapping Software Visualize Success
On a friend’s tip, Brasher started using MindManager last year. After taking a brief tutorial, he was running the software in 15 minutes. He says it’s boosted his productivity.
“This is the first piece of software that I turn on in the morning, and the last one I turn off each day,” he said.
Brasher uses the software to visualize his 20 largest accounts as spokes that emanate out from “Alan’s Opportunity Management” on his computer screen. In the past, he used clumsy, multipage text documents to manage each account. It was “a nightmare” to pinpoint certain details and pick out client relationships, he says.
With MindManager, he designates each sales opportunity by a green dollar sign. Red flags pop up to mark each priority or action item. Yellow smiley faces are used to show customer groups.
“We use the software to educate my team, because a picture really is worth 1,000 words,” Brasher said.
I came across this interesting post about how mind mapping is being implemented in Second Life to explore Web 2.0 technology. I couldn’t find much information about it at all, but I imagine that if you use Second Life you’ll find more information in the SLUrl.
Mind Mapping Web2.0 in Second Life | Metaversed
“Though as yet the Second Life build is pretty minimal, consisting of some nice graphics of the mind map and some globes that give out notecards and web links, the project isn’t lacking in ambition, wanting to map ” The computational hardware, software, and human systems that handle the ever-increasing amount of available data” and the functionality of the inworld system is in a permenant state of development much like the web2.0 tecnologies it catalogs.”
“Sparx updates Enterprise Architect modelling tool - ZDNet UK
To extend creativity capabilities in UML environments, Sparx has improved the tool’s requirements-management features and brought in a new “mind mapping” profiler to help capture creative-idea development.”
Nice! I would often “fake” mind maps in Enterprise Architect using use case diagrams, winnowing brainstormed pseudo-use cases into the real thing. This is a very welcome edition to a really great software engineering tool.
From Chuck Frey:
“According to the Tinderbox website, a Windows version is supposedly also under development - but Eastgate has been saying that for years, and I have yet to see evidence that it is moving closer to reality. Still, I remain very skeptical that it will ever see the light of day.”
I totally disagree. I remain hopeful. Much of what we see in the Macintosh version of Tinderbox today is a result of code refactoring that has been done as part of the development of the Windows version. A Windows version of Tinderbox would be such a huge succes. I can’t see Eastgate letting it go, especially with the amount of work they’ve put into it. I believe that they just want to do it right, and it’s taking a lot longer than expected. Announcing these things is something that developers often regret.
Incredible updates in this latest major revision of what I consider the best visual mapping tool on the planet. I still believe that this program alone is enough of a reason to buy a Mac. I’ve used Tinderbox to design software, create websites, create large amounts of documentation for software systems, and as a general personal knowledge management and organizing tool since I bought my first Mac a few years ago.
“Tinderbox maps are more flexible and expressive than ever. Choose new shapes for your notes, or expand a note to see its text as well as its title. Add a progress bar to notes about tasks, or a badge icon to highlight special notes. Switching prototypes is easier than ever with the new prototype tab. You’ll see more detail inside containers and agents. And everything simply looks better.”
As reported by Larry Baldwin on the unofficial Tinderbox mailing list, Eastgate has created a new forum for Tinderbox users.
