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

Posted by Foolness
Dec 15, 2012 at 02:09 PM

While I can’t say if my understanding of Mindmaps is correct “historically”, my understanding of Mindmaps makes it so that it’s superior to both Outliners and Concept Mapping by virtue of being “above the fray”.

This doesn’t mean Mindmapping programs have correctly implemented the theory but Outliners can’t do ConnectedTexts, Wikis didn’t have a branch until ConnectedText borrowed a type of tree from outliners and Concept mappers missed the whole point about mindmaps and came much later taking advantage of the confusion of mindmaps because of how it was primarily marketed and then using the false impression of the mindmap as a way to lift the concept map “above or equal” to the concept of mapping.

The issue with the confusion lies with the common misconceptions:

>Mindmaps have one level:

No, they don’t. It would be like saying GTD’s in-basket have one level compared to an outline list.

That’s only the initial in-basket. The In-Basket does not make for GTD or else it would be called a Bucket List, not a System.

That was the standard. The marketers and popularizers of mindmaps chose to destroy that standard because it made it easier to sell software when it was still a fad.

I’ve actually often been on the other side of the debate. I’ve always defended concept maps as superior and I didn’t change my opinion. The actual definition of concept maps are much simpler to understand and are hidden in less voo doo when in need of defending it’s standards. It’s just that mindmaps do have a standard and that standard doesn’t have cloning because the initial feature of the mindmap is not text input but data lay-out. It is in that sense, a truer free form (in principle and paradigm) than both a concept mapper and an outliner who encourages the input field of the data to get larger as it is getting filled and reviewed.

The levels of a mindmap are actually found in encouraging two mindmaps of a similar vein no different than a professional digital artist would have more layers than an amateur digital artist. So much so that some of the better programs have in it’s layer toolbox the option to give folders to those layers for each art item which then allows it a superior form of editing that only ConnectedText is scratching for outliners and wikis.

>Wikis are post-input mark-up, mindmappers became an artsy fad because it had a revolutionary pre-production markup in it’s initial form

The software standard to understanding mindmaps is not found in wikis but in hashtags. Programs like Workflowy for example no longer simply make the symbol “#” a dead letter hack but putting it in front gives it authority to be a clickable tag.

TheBrain doesn’t have this. Concept Mappers, as a paradigm, don’t have this.

>The homepage of mindmappers are the mind:

Part of it sounds hoaky because of the marketing but just like doodling, the paper is not the index. The paper is indexing the contours being seen/recalled by the eye that was then interpreted by the brain.

Only concept mappers have that mode that what you are outlining is what you are indexing in it’s paradigm. Not that mindmap users did anything to change the impression but that’s why I hated the fisbone concept. It took one fad by Mindmanager then ripped it and then it became the popular image because it came out first.

Meanwhile majority of the real mindmapping standards went towards digital art tools (by accident because they rely on similar fundamentals) and the rest as they say is forever separated by the vanity of paper mindmaps, artsy mindmaps, slideshow mindmaps, software mindmaps.

Not even innovations like Compendium’s list icon having special a special list field that in the outliner world mostly InfoQube have been innovating or Goalscape’s Pie Map returning some medium of “picture” concept to a mapping software were able to change the trend. As worst comes to worst, the tag concept mapper allows certain software the right to not be the standard but fit the tag like TheBrain but Freemind ate Flying Logic, Goalscape, Compendium, Portable ClusterMap software, PearlTrees, etc. underneath it’s paradigm.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just a categorization error. After all, these software still continue to exist. The concept still leads to releases and updates.

What’s bad is that now the paradigm needs it’s version of a SCRUM to get the software world back to understanding what it isn’t offering even though for a long while, so far as paradigm goes, the waterfall model have been what’s been holding back the standardization of mindmaps much like it held back certain development processes. When that day comes, will mindmaps finally be understood or will it lead to another what makes mindmapping so revolutionary fad? Only time will tell but it’s horrible that sequential design as a paradigm still haunts all areas of life today and it mainly affects those who need rather than want more from software.