Your choice of mind mapping software

Posted by A.Research
Oct 17, 2006 at 11:45 PM

I think mindmapping in a literal sense should not be restrictive, but Tony Buzan trademarked mindmappers are essentially only radial trees. IMHO this is a clever marketing strategy because it can attract many users with only a few keywords: mindmap, radial thinking, left right brain (non-scientific claim (see Wikipedia/mindmap)). You can of course fill the screen in any graphics program (like Visio or SmartDraw) where you can map processes better.
Another thing I find disturbing in mindmappers are the thick underlines below the text. I learnt in Information Design that text underlines should be used only sparsely, an example of a table was given: Compare the readability of a table having black cell borders with light colored borders. But mindmappers with their radial trees are more or less forced to use underlines to visualize the tree relation. The first thing I would do as mindmap user is to lighten up the branch colors if possible. In conventional trees indents are sufficient. Since those mindmappers are trees (hierarchies), I think comparing their feature list with those of conventional outliners would be appropriate.