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Mind versus tree navigation; html versus rtf editing
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Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 12, 2007 at 08:43 PM
Graham Rhind wrote:
>Two threads in one ....
>
>I was playing around with I-Navigation today (http://www.exswap.com/ - looks
>good on the site but was a disappointment to me when I tried it), when it
>struck me that the outliners with all the power (ADM, Whizfolders, Surfulator,
>Zoot) and many others all have tree based navigation systems. Programs with
>sophisticated mind-like interfaces have weak data storage and management
>capabilities.
A strong and interesting claim embedded in this message, if I’m reading correctly, is that mind-map navigation is more sophisticated than tree-based navigation. Which is to say, I suppose, that tree-based navigation is archaic. Perhaps Personal Brain 4 will tell.
Personal Brain, which I have not yet tried, aside—I think if I wanted to build a pim with mind navigation, I would look to Mind Manager, plus investigate the applicable third-party add-ons, based on which a veritable Mind Mgr subculture seems to be developing.
Tree-based and mind-based navigation isn’t an exhaustive catalog. Don’t forget liner, time-based navigation, i.e. Evernote. If your purpose is to locate notes, Evernote’s insight is significant. You should look to cues in episodic rather than semantic memory, because your acts of labeling and classifying are after all acts and will be stored as such. If you’re like me, you’ve avoided Evernote mostly out of habit and inertia.
Posted by Tom S.
Mar 13, 2007 at 08:36 AM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>Personal
>Brain, which I have not yet tried, aside—I think if I wanted to build a pim with mind
>navigation, I would look to Mind Manager, plus investigate the applicable
>third-party add-ons, based on which a veritable Mind Mgr subculture seems to be
>developing.
This is true but Mind Manager is quite a bit more expensive.
I was very enthusiastic about Personal Brain. But I soon started to butt heads with a flaw. You end up connecting an item to quite a number of different characteristics (context, start date, due date, project, personnel, etc…) When you think about it we link data with an awful lot of characteristics. Before you know it there a a lot of them and keeping track of them with all of those connecting lines can be a pain.
Tom S.
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 16, 2007 at 11:04 PM
Tom S. wrote:
>I was very enthusiastic about Personal
>Brain. But I soon started to butt heads with a flaw. You end up connecting an item to
>quite a number of different characteristics (context, start date, due date,
>project, personnel, etc…) When you think about it we link data with an awful lot of
>characteristics. Before you know it there a a lot of them and keeping track of them with
>all of those connecting lines can be a pain.
I’ve downloaded and even installed it, but I haven’t tried it. I feel a lot of inertia about trying global solutions. Maybe I should just decide to kind of rule them out a priori. That’s what I’ve tentatively done about Idea Mason. It just seems too unlikely that one product could approach a well-tailored and personalized collection. This is particularly true when it costs only $79.
As regards this particular deficiency in Personal Brain, isn’t the situation you describe the same as an outline where you have an excess of items at a level. The conventional solution is to introduce intervening levels, and then hoist when they get very plentiful. I understand Personal Brain has a sophisticated self-centering hoist, which I think may be an option in the upcoming version of Mind Manager also. Is there a reason why the problem you mention can’t be solved by the traditional tactics?
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Mar 17, 2007 at 03:55 AM
Is there something about the complexity of creating mind map programs that leads to them being so epensive?
A few years ago I bought VisualMind 7—it was the worst software investment I ever made.
Nice program, when it wasn’t crashing.
And it was always crashing.
So when I do mind mapping I use FreeMind, which is certainly more stable than the over-priced VisualMind.
Unfortunantely it is not able to to create the same variety of map formats.
I wonder if there is a reasonably priced mind map program that offers the variety of a VisualMind or MindManager without the excessive cost?
Daly
Tom S. wrote:
>
>
>Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>
>>Personal
>>Brain, which I have not yet tried,
>aside—I think if I wanted to build a pim with mind
>>navigation, I would look to Mind
>Manager, plus investigate the applicable
>>third-party add-ons, based on which a
>veritable Mind Mgr subculture seems to be
>>developing.
>
>This is true but Mind
>Manager is quite a bit more expensive.
>
>I was very enthusiastic about Personal
>Brain. But I soon started to butt heads with a flaw. You end up connecting an item to
>quite a number of different characteristics (context, start date, due date,
>project, personnel, etc…) When you think about it we link data with an awful lot of
>characteristics. Before you know it there a a lot of them and keeping track of them with
>all of those connecting lines can be a pain.
>
>Tom S.
Posted by Tom S.
Mar 17, 2007 at 12:20 PM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>As regards this
>particular deficiency in Personal Brain, isn’t the situation you describe the same
>as an outline where you have an excess of items at a level. The conventional solution is
>to introduce intervening levels, and then hoist when they get very plentiful. I
>understand Personal Brain has a sophisticated self-centering hoist, which I think
>may be an option in the upcoming version of Mind Manager also. Is there a reason why the
>problem you mention can’t be solved by the traditional tactics?
I’ll say up front that I haven’t tried PB4 which may be better with these issues. But IMO the problem with using the previous version for this was that it was really just a bare skeleton for organizaing items.
Think of it this way. Say you create a task in a typical outlining PIM as it exists today. Chances are it will have a backend which will automatically organize the data by due date. Either that or it will sync with something like Outlook where such things are taken care of. It will do the same thing for start date, contact, etc… True, still you end up placing the item in multiple places in the outline but its nothing like it would be without these standard orgaizational tools.
With PB, I wasn’t just connecting to different projects and such. I was connecting to everything. Dates, contacts, any standard item that is associated with a task or appointment. One thing that made it better was the ability to embed links in the item. This helped a great deal because you could link an item into the Yahoo web PIM tools. But it ws clumsy and not ideal.
Probably the best mindmapping PIM solution on the market is Mind Manager, which appears to integrate pretty well with Outlook. But, as Daly implied in his response, the price is prohibitive. Very prohibitive. Good grief.
By the way you mentioned the self-centering hiost that PB has. I hated it at first. I thought it was just fancy graphics that were there to dazzle me. Boy was I wrong. Great idea. Focusing on one particular item would have been very difficult without it.
Tom S.