… this time with a fake palindrome name!
» Stealth: Imindi thought engine - Silicon Florist
Currently in stealth mode but scheduled to launch in the coming weeks, Portland-based Imindi promises to bring the visual aspects of traditional mind-mapping software to a broader spectrum of activities. The aggressive product vision, outlined on the Imindi blog, has the product helping with everything from collaborative writing to collaborative search to social bookmarking.
Thanks to the Mind Mapping Software blog, I’ve discovered the latest in a flood of visual mapping tools, Cayra. Read the rundown of features over there and then check out this screen cast I made that shows how Cayra moves. It’s pretty impressive. It looks like Cayra will do a better job than most mind mapping tools of adapting to the context of a particular bunch of information by shifting irrelevant stuff out of the way with smooth animations. It seems to achieve a compelling compromise between the contextualizing and 3d-ness of PersonalBrain and the gestalt of more conventional mind mapping software. It will be interesting to watch this tool grow. Oh, and it’s apparently free, at for now.
The Mind Mapping Software Weblog: Cayra, a new desktop mapping program, is announced
Cayra, which is currently at release 0.8.2. It’s built around the Microsoft .NET framework, and claims to combine mind mapping, concept mapping and topic mapping. The screenshot (above right) looks quite colorful and elegant.
Wall Street fat cat Merlin Mann sees the future …
One reason your boss is so twitchy | 43 Folders
I think one of the emerging leadership skills of the next five years will be learning how to do brilliant filtering — either programatically or by delegating information-sorting to others. To ultimately become someone whose system accounts for incoming data in smart ways and who never has to make excuses about too much stuff.
To help fill the demand for Chinese language education for foreign learners with a real competitive advantage, HaFaLa Chinese incorporates mind maps as well as animation and story into an innovative learning package.
Catching the Book Worm — china.org.cn
In collaboration with Mindmap Research Institute (Shanghai) and the Chinese Character Research Institute, the Shanghai-based Taotu Animation Technology Co Ltd has published a series of multi-media toolkits for overseas Chinese-language learners.
Based on the Mind Mapping methodology, the so-called Hafala Chinese learning tool enables non-Chinese learners to acquire 2,500 Chinese characters in a systematic way within months, according to Elizabeth Yu, from Taotu.
This is nice to have at a higher level of geekery. Now you can have all of your to do items from all of your mind maps exported instantly into a format that is understood by org-mode, a fantastic organizer that runs in Emacs. See the Tools page to download the latest version of the MindManager To Do Extractor.
The latest version of this handy utility, available in our Tools section, formats the output a bit more nicely & lets you specify a list of files to ignore.
Here is a nice, short overview of what PersonalBrain does and where it fits into the mind map software spectrum. If you haven’t yet, I urge you to check out PersonalBrain. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux and the files can move between the three os’es effortlessly. This is a great feature for people like me who use multiple operating systems.
On any operating system, PersonalBrain is one of the most sophisticated personal knowledge management tools you’ll find. It’s great for organizing bookmarks or files into an ontology of your own devising. It is probably on the same level as other mind mapping software as far as complexity and capability, but is stronger than mind mapping tools in metadata and organization of topics and not as strong in presentation.
Even the free version of PersonalBrain would be a great addition to any knowledge worker’s toolbox.
Technology News: Software: Mind Mapping Goes 3-D With Personal Brain
Called “Personal Brain,” recently released in its fourth edition, TheBrain Technologies’ latest mind mapping software is amazingly easy to use, especially considering the complexity of the tasks that it’s handling. When you create a map, you’re immediately prompted for your central thought. After you name it, it appears on your display framed in “bullets.” The bullets are called “gates.”
Great news. The existing version of NovaMind for Windows is the best hand-drawn / artistic mind map analog I’ve seen yet. Not only do they design great software, but all of the dealings I’ve had with NovaMind sales and support so far have been a pleasure.
NovaMind News » Blog Archive » NovaMind 4 Pro for Windows enters beta testing
“NovaMind 4 Pro for Windows represents a major rewrite of much of the Windows version of NovaMind, with a much improved user interface, better usability and many new features. We look forward to completing the beta testing and releasing the production version in the next few weeks.”
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.
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.
