Axon Thought Processor

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2170

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-08-31 12:54:54

Does anyone have experience, impressions, views, or thoughts about the Axon Thought Processor (http://web.singnet.com.sg/~axon2000/)

This program has something like the same relationship to “mind mapping” programs that Grandview seems to have had to the outliner in MS Word. It is maybe an order of magnitude more powerful. It has graphical devices allowing a huge number of levels (at least someone else thinks the number of levels available measures an aspect of power). It avoids some of my objections to Buzan style programs by: a) allowing connections in any combination of directions, as opposed to insisting that they conform to an outliner hierarchy (If you are going to use a simple hierarchy, you eliminate most of the advantages of a graphical format, while retaining the disadvantages of limited textual display.)And by b) allowing you to label links. (To me an unlabeled link that doesn’t denote hierarchy is too imprecise. Everything ultimately is somehow “linked” to everything else.)

The main reservation I have may reflect incompatibilities between my cognitive style and graphical devices. To me having to think about what the diagram should look like to convey an idea is a distraction, too far removed from the substance of the work. Thinking about how to say it seems to further my understanding, but thinking about how to draw it—how to depict abstract concepts visually—seems detached from understanding it. I wonder whether more visuo-spatially oriented individuals make these graphical choices fluently.

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