I use Free Mind, an Open Source app.

I used to use [E Mind Maps], a package which I think has been cancelled, replaced by various Mind Manager products. http://www.mindjet.com/products/compare.htm

I typically prefer Mind Mapping to Out Lining (at least up until writing a bunch of body text) because the visual arrangement of nodes allows quick shifting of perspectives while keeping what's "similar" in a given a perspective close together. Now in English... one second I might be thinking just about the top-level nodes; in a MindMap they're all pretty close together, clustered around a shared parent. But then as I mentally "zoom" into a particular node, all of its children are close by. To make the same mental jump while Out Lining I have to keep expanding and collapsing, which I find mentally disruptive.

[Will Reed] has a whole newsletter about Mind Mapping strategies.

A couple ideas, parallel to Wiki And Outlining

Provide a Mind Mapping GUI for a Thinking Space, so that I can quickly create and organize nodes, then fill them in while still being able to drop back to a MindMap view. This would be like an extension of The Brain. For a read-only view of relations among WiKi nodes, a great example is the Visual Tour feature at the original Wiki Wiki Web: http://www.c2.com/cgi/tour?WikiWikiWeb

• also see Touch Graph for viewing network, though it doesn't allow creation/edit of nodes (I believe)

• WikiWikiWeb:WikiMindMap

• [Daniel Poynter] wants something similar

  • Phil Jones prefers an explicit sub-map granularity.

Provide a MindMap of the top few levels of a single WiKi page: see Wiki Page As Mind Map.

[PicoMap] software (for PDA) was developed at a university program for students (based on the idea that a PDA is cheaper than a PC).

[Thought Stream] (http://thoughtstream.org/) is also a Palm package, with a Windows version in the possible future...

or you might want to work on a White Board :)

Pocket Mindmap ([PMM]) http://www.pocketmindmap.com/ is available for the Pocket PC PDA platform (Pocket PC, Pocket PC 2000, and Win [CE] 2000). Very mature and usable. Open XML file format allows custom reports with XSLT. Have never used the (Windows) Desktop viewer as it seems to be overly focused on integration with Mindmanager/Mindjet (something that I do not use). 4/5 stars.

I'm looking for an open-source [Concept Mapping] software tool. The one I'm a fan of is from Robert Abrams - originally done in [Super Card]. http://www.RobertAbrams.Net It only works on a mac and might be a bit dated. Some maps are at http://CLOH.Org (my hobby site).

• http://users.edte.utwente.nl/lanzing/cm_home.htm

• http://chd.gse.gmu.edu/immersion/knowledgebase/strategies/cognitivism/conceptmap.htm

• Concept Map about [Concept Mapping]

• [IHMC] [CMap] [Concept Mapping] server http://cmap.ihmc.us

  • mapping app http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/

• use in Educating Kids

Open source mind mapping tool written in Java --2003/08/08 08:16 [GMT]
Check out Free Mind at http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ - [Sub Munition] likes it and notes it uses a clean XML format.

Ooh, GimIni is based on Wx Python. Looks like it hasn't been touched in over a year, though...

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