Yet another new discovery for Mac

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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 29, 2014 at 09:53 PM

Okay, I’ve found a Scapple clone that’s even more powerful than Scapple: Junkyard

Like Scapple, it makes it very easy to create rich-text boxes that can be joined by arrows (kind of like a mind mapper). Unlike Scapple, each document can consist of multiple tabs (sheets), each with a mind map on it. There’s a very nice ‘inspector’ feature (format panel), plus a superb search function that generates a simple list of excerpts from all sheets in the document – when you click and excerpt, it whisks you over to the relevant text box on the relevant sheet and highlights the text box (not the search term, unfortunately, but hey, you can’t have everything!)

Also unlike Scapple, it allows you to insert images. It doesn’t have the range of formatting options for the text boxes that Scapple has (e.g. shadows, varying degrees of translucency etc.) – although the rich-text support inside text boxes is very good – but it has a rather nice feature that allows you to select a given box plus all its ‘descendants’. You can then copy them in a single operation and paste them elsewhere (the entire structure, including arrows/colours etc., is preserved).

You can drag and drop text and graphics onto sheets, too, and drag and drop sheets to rearrange them. It has a very nice ‘tips’ page that can be accessed from the welcome screen (which appears on startup).

It also has a great feature whereby you can generate an outline from all the sheets in a document. Depending on the dependencies within the document, it will repeat text boxes if they’ve been referenced by multiple ‘parents’, or allow you to switch off this repetition if you don’t want it. The outline can be exported as an RTF document, or printed (on a Mac, as a PDF, too). Or you can export the sheets in full graphic mode in various image formats (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, JP2) or as a PDF (albeit only as a graphic – text is not preserved). There are a bunch of nice colour schemes for these exports.

If there’s one weakness, it lies in the penultimate point above – that PDF output (of the actual sheets, as opposed to the implicit outline) does not preserve the text. This can be overcome by saving the outline (represented by the sheets), but obviously you then lose the nice mind map layout.

However – overall, this is a very impressive app. If you’re interested in mind mapping with a textual bias, this is very much for you.

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