Keys Corner

I’ve mentioned before, that we both use mind maps – they are a great way of sorting out ideas for a presentation or sorting out what work needs to be done in a project, before you get as far as producing a project plan.

Recently I have been looking for a tool which would allow quite large mind maps to be produced and used, without becoming unwieldy.

I came up with what I think will be an excellent tool. It’s more than a simple mind mapping tool, it also allows you to see how different ideas are related to each other. It produces a network, a bit like a crazy spider’s web, where the different threads connect the items or ideas at the nodes of the threads. One nice feature is that the node you are working on always moves to the center of the screen, and the rest of the network is displayed around it, blending out completely the farthest nodes to avoid too much clutter on the screen.

It is allows you to work in much the same way as with a mind map, organising ideas along the branches and twigs of a treelike structure, but with the bonus of being able to link ideas on completely different branches with each other. The tool is called Personal Brain; so called, because the developers claim that it links ideas together in the same way as your brain.

Most important, as I have burnt my fingers in the past using software which is either proprietary (you can’t import the data into a different program) or only runs on one operating system (you can’t take the application or its data with you to a new platform), it is cross-platform, available for Windows, Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and Mac OS X. And using import filters, you can import existing mind maps produced in the most popular mind map programs. Unfortunately, like many products, it is not so generous with export filters! But, given that it is cross platform, I can live with that. It allows you to attach documents to ideas, the documents may be for any application that is installed on your computer (e.g. links to internet sites, MS-Office, PDFs, OpenOffice), and can open the attachments in the native applications.

Personal Brain is available in 3 different versions – a free version which you can download from their web site, or the “Core” and “Pro” versions for $150 or $250 respectively. The free version allows you to use all the Pro features for the first 30 days, which is what I am experimenting with at the moment. Not a bad idea from the vendor’s point of view, as I shall probably discover I need some of the features from the paid-for version when the grace-period is over!

Incidentally, if you just need a simple-to-use, free mind mapping program for Mac OS X, take a look at MindNode – it is the first program I have found which is as easy to use as pencil and paper!