XMind on Bits du Jour next week

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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 22, 2008 at 01:59 PM

Hi,

I just noticed that XMind will be on sale through Bits du Jour next Tuesday. Does anyone have some experience with this mind/concept mapper? What do you think of it? Thanks.

Steve Z.

Posted by quant
Jan 22, 2008 at 02:51 PM

I’m very sad when looking at all these mind managers.

They are all some sort of simple tree outliners, with the root item placed in the middle (and the children around it), or on the left, or on the right ... grrrrrrrr

The only one (that I know of) that goes a step further is The Brain, which provides several useful views, the classic one is where you can see all the item’s parents, related items, and linked items, or the expanded where the close items are expanded ...

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 22, 2008 at 03:11 PM

Quant, I saw on the T’scape site, see my last post (actually my first post; ah, the ambiguity of language), you had a conversation with Argey, and he sent you a complex T’scape.

Unfortunately, I could not get it to download.

Did Argey convince you in any way of T’scape’s superiority to the Brain.

The Brain I find crazy making because of stuff moving all over the screen.

I am traditional. I like trees. But I like tagging and columns, and used to like ADM for that reason, but Eric didn’t like ADM enough to do well by it, or us, so ADM is out of the question (sorry to ruminate and live in the past but my contract sas a 59-year old says I am entitled to do that on the third Tuesday of any month beginning with J when customer service someplace already has me pissed off. There are no such clauses in my new contract for when I turn 60, presumably because the powers that be figure I should have out grown—or is that matured sufficiently—not to need them).

Anyhow, as I look across the desk at 3,000 pages (hahrd copy for which I also have CDs) of journal articles, and await a promised 5,000 to 6,000 more pages, I need to make some fast and (for me) permanent decisions about wht product I finally settle with.

I digreess.

Daly

PS And sorry for the silliness. It is that kind of day.

Maybe I should just go back to bed and cancel Tuesday.

Daly

quant wrote:
>I’m very sad when looking at all these mind managers.
> >They are all some sort of simple
>tree outliners, with the root item placed in the middle (and the children around it),
>or on the left, or on the right ... grrrrrrrr
> >The only one (that I know of) that goes a
>step further is The Brain, which provides several useful views, the classic one is
>where you can see all the item’s parents, related items, and linked items, or the
>expanded where the close items are expanded ...
>

Posted by quant
Jan 22, 2008 at 03:53 PM

>Did Argey convince you in
>any way of T’scape’s superiority to the Brain.

not even slightly, but I didn’t want to take it further, ... I think this 3D view and flying over is actually quite limiting, I downloaded it and gave it a short test. The fact the the items are one after another (hard to explain with words) limits the number of shown topics, even when you choose to display all the topics (this would not happen in the classic tree layout).

>
>The Brain I find crazy making because
>of stuff moving all over the screen.

It might be confusing at time, I agree. The main point of the The brain is that every item is on the map only once and the relationship is displayed with links. In the traditional tree that allows items to have more than one parent the item is on the several places in the tree with all the children copied ... If you have several of these, the tree becomes huge and very unclear. With The brain there would be just two or three more links displaying the same data structure.

>I am traditional. I like trees.

Then take any tree outliner, UR, MyInfo, InfoSelect, MyBase ... they all display the same structure that all those $100s mind managers.

> But I like tagging and columns

UR, MyInfo, ...

I like The Brain, and would really like to do some powerful mind mapping ... but the fact that I can have data at one place is more important ... and so I do all my mindmaps directly in UR ... I hoist the item and that’s it ... who cares that this item is not in the middle and its children are not around but below it?

Posted by Cassius
Jan 22, 2008 at 04:43 PM

At one time, I thought that The Brain would make a marvelous organization chart, showing each element of an organization how it interacted with other elements: Each organizational element could place itself in the center of the organization’s universe (diagram) and see how it connected to other parts of the organization.

I suggested to the developer that it add an option for unidirectional and bidirectional links, but it wasn’t interested then. I don’t know about now.

-c

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