Well, that was an interesting rabbit-hole to go down on a Sunday night....

Starting with a Reddit thread in which someone asked about recommended books on mind mapping

https://www.reddit.com/r/mindmapping/comments/8zxp0b/book_recommendations_on_mind_mapping/

someone linked to a wiki

https://www.informationtamers.com/WikIT/index.php?title=Introduction_to_WikIT

whose main page offers some nice links

https://www.informationtamers.com/

and which somehow let me to yet another site that was new to me

https://www.mind-mapping.org/Visual-Thinking-Center.html

I find mind maps pretty useless for my way of thinking.

If I am trying to write my ideas into a mind map, I immediately get stuck trying to think of their hierarchy or organization.

Formore, the ideas that could be organized as mother and child system (hierarchy) are pretty minimal.



The concept maps, on the other hand, pretty useful; and can do what the mind maps can.

I use scapple as concept mapping tool much more than all the fancy mind mapping software I tried.

Interesting. Thank you. Looks like informationtamers.com and mind-mapping.org are both registered by the same "Roy Grubb", and topicscape.com and a few others he discusses are also registered by him.

Busy guy.

My favorite "concept mapping" software was Inspiration -- a cleaner look than Scapple and a nice iOS app. But the Mac app is dying. The developer told me they will not update it to 64-bit.

Inspiration? That brings back memories if it's the same app from the ... late 80s? If so, I didn't even know it was still around.

For quickly banging out ideas without regard to hierarchy I'll use Mindnode, but less sprawling than most, with the main node(s) on the left with everything else branching out to the right. Mindnode's tendrils are a little too whimsical and colorful for my liking though. I also own iThoughtsX, which makes better-looking (to me) maps, but it doesn't get out of the way as well as Mindnode.

For close to a decade electronic musian Mark Mosher has used and shared MindMeister maps, which MindMeister hosts (part of its app/service) as a public service. His maps could have been made as outlines but with images applied and colored groupings/background they are more usable and comprehensible overall, like here:

https://www.mindmeister.com/310663045/elektron-octatrack-video-tutorial-index

I also like the 'slideshow' option on the MindMeister site, which zooms in and out of sub node sections.

But even Mosher's mindmaps show off some of the dottier aspects of the form - like the ridiculous amount of scrolling needed to get up to 'command-line tools' in this map:

https://www.mindmeister.com/213699337/audio

satis wrote:

Inspiration? That brings back memories if it's the same app from the ...
late 80s? If so, I didn't even know it was still around.

I had a licence for it when I used Windows. I liked it. In fact I used it to think through and plan a very large bid and start-up project in UK television. At that time it seemed to be one of very few mind-mapping apps available. Once I'd moved to Macs I owned an Inspiration Mac licence. But then Inspiration's developers decided to address the education market, and they neglected - at least to some extent - the development of functionality that would have been useful in business or writing environments. As far as I was concerned they had gone off-piste, and I sought other mind-mapping software. I see from its website that it's still plugging its advantages for educational use.

Inspiration had two winning features that appealed to me:

1. It was much more than a mind map. It did diagramming in many modes. In fact, I think "mind map" was a style of diagram they added late in the game.

2. It was also a very capable outliner, and you could switch between outline and diagram views.

Sadly, my experience with Inspiration pretty much mirrors yours, Hugh.

Steve

Hugh wrote:

I had a licence for it when I used Windows. I liked it. In fact I used
it to think through and plan a very large bid and start-up project in UK
television. At that time it seemed to be one of very few mind-mapping
apps available. Once I'd moved to Macs I owned an Inspiration Mac
licence. But then Inspiration's developers decided to address the
education market, and they neglected - at least to some extent - the
development of functionality that would have been useful in business or
writing environments. As far as I was concerned they had gone off-piste,
and I sought other mind-mapping software. I see from its website that
it's still plugging its advantages for educational use.