Re: Do MindMapping programs really help in MindMapping?

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2922

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-03-08 20:11:45

It is rare for me to touch pen and paper and have something legible come out of it. For me making marks on paper is too effortful a process, whereas I can type accurately at high speed.

So my question hasn’t been comparing computer programs to pen and pad but comparing mind maps to outliners. It seems, by the way, that while outliners never completely recovered from the demise of GrandView and More, mind mapping programs are doing fine. Figuring out what happened to outliners requires, it would seem, a theory that also explains why mind mappers didn’t suffer the same fate.

Part of it is that if you create a skeletal outline, it looks like what it is, skeletal. While one can create a skeletal mind map and call it a masterpiece. Perhaps that’s too cynical, because I am beginning to get some of what the advantage to a mind mapping program is. They depend on your ability to greatly compress substance, so that a phrase meaningfully stands for much for knowledge. This depends on the user having a particularly deep understanding of his subject and the subject being the kind where such compression can be accomplished, namely a highly conceptual subject. Since we on outliners.com tend to be as interested in pims as pure outliners (or rather, you all do; me less so), it seems the work to which these products are put is highly data driven. For such work mindmapping seems to me hard to apply, maybe inapplicable.

For reorganizing fairly pure concepts—as in areas I have an interest, professional in law and avocational in philosophy—graphical outlining may be the way to go, provided you can minimize all the picturing and different shapes that mind mapping people love. The reason is simply the efficient use of the page that puts everything in front of you and makes drag and drop reorganizing a breeze.(Also, drag and drop operations are easier, because you are dragging to a larger target.)

For that reason, I like VisiMap, for its minimization of aesthetics, for its ugliness, if you will. (I finally did download it.) I think I would have bought it almost immediately, were it not for one major disappointment: VisiMap does NOT allow multiple selection of branches! Well there goes out the window almost the whole advantage of a graphical approach.

One main thing I don’t like about Free Mind is the same thing I dislike in MindManager: the process of adding a branch requires an additional keystroke. Selecting a branch involves going to the branch, and not just typing but hitting enter first. I’m probably spoiled, but I find it distracting and irritating.

Stephen R. Diamond

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