Mind versus tree navigation; html versus rtf editing

Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 18, 2007 at 05:58 PM

I think a distinction needs to be made between mind maps (as I know them, which, as Cassius said, could be expressed in a tree-like linear form); and non-tree-like navigation/outliner systems, such as Personal Brain.

An item in a tree can have one parent, and multiple children. That’s the basis and at the same time the limitation. After that, most tree-like outliners have to think of (mostly awkward) ways of creating internal links between branches, such as creating virtual copies of the files or having text wiki links.

What a tool like Personal Brain allows (or should allow) is links from any item to any item, regardless of its place in any hierarchy, so you get a web rather than a tree. By choosing your topic you see all the topics linked to it, regardless of where they might be if the items were tree-based.

I see this as being a graphical version of a web or wiki page - it’s a network. Some people like that sort of thing. Others like the tree structure, which is inherently neat and understandable. I use tree-based outliners, but hate the way most handle internal linking, and wondered whether graphical interfaces would help.

By the way, I’ve seen the current Personal Brain 4 beta and it seems to me to still be all over the place, so I think there’s a way to go yet ....

Graham