Freemind's Underrated/Underreported New Feature for Non-Followers

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 14, 2012 at 10:25 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>TheBrain has had that ability for a long time. Whether you want to call TheBrain a mind mapper or not, is another
>question.

I wouldn’t actually. Its paradigm is much more open (connect anything to anything, and any “node” can be used as the home). Dynamic animation aside, structurally it is a concept mapping tool, especially in its recent incarnations where the connectors have their own properties.

Mind mappers are little more than visually enhanced hierarchical outlining tools. As such, they suffer from the “everything is miscellaneous” weakness of outlines, i.e. they can’t include the same item under different branches. Clones offer a solution to this issue but, again, though quite easily found in outliners, I have not seen them in ‘standard’ mind mapping applications.