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Repost of what I posted to plus.google:
Been trying out mindmaps as a personal organizational tool. So far it looks pretty promising, replacing various post-it notes and lists with a centralized system is a nice way to go.
I started initially with FreeMind which works pretty well and (as the name might suggest) is free. The interface fairly intuitive and I've had no complaints with its behavior save for I wish it supported cross-linking.
Stacey and I talked on Friday about using it as a shared application for projects for our house. Freemind does support publishing but editing would be asynchronous at best. So Stacey searched for some alternatives for us and settled on MindMeister.
So far, I like it. Already familiar with FreeMind's toolset, it was easy to switch over. The interface is a little more opaque at first but overall cleaner once you get the hang of it. It supports real-time synchronous update and it has those cross-links I always wanted.
The only negative I can find about it is the pricing structure. Free for up to 3 maps will work fine for us, we should have only the one shared map but the recurrent monthly cost to upgrade to the full version isn't worth it for our applications. It's a shame they don't have some intermediate pricing that would better suit small groups of casual users.
On a side note, I think it would be a really excellent development tool if a mindmap could be dropped over a issue tracking system like Jira or Pivotal. Perhaps automatically selecting font size for projects based on number of story points, etc. It'd make a fantastic graphical interface that one could at-a-glance figure out what an entire organization was doing as well as create a trivial way for users to add task lists and breakdowns to an item (something that currently seems quite cumbersome in existing models)
Been trying out mindmaps as a personal organizational tool. So far it looks pretty promising, replacing various post-it notes and lists with a centralized system is a nice way to go.
I started initially with FreeMind which works pretty well and (as the name might suggest) is free. The interface fairly intuitive and I've had no complaints with its behavior save for I wish it supported cross-linking.
Stacey and I talked on Friday about using it as a shared application for projects for our house. Freemind does support publishing but editing would be asynchronous at best. So Stacey searched for some alternatives for us and settled on MindMeister.
So far, I like it. Already familiar with FreeMind's toolset, it was easy to switch over. The interface is a little more opaque at first but overall cleaner once you get the hang of it. It supports real-time synchronous update and it has those cross-links I always wanted.
The only negative I can find about it is the pricing structure. Free for up to 3 maps will work fine for us, we should have only the one shared map but the recurrent monthly cost to upgrade to the full version isn't worth it for our applications. It's a shame they don't have some intermediate pricing that would better suit small groups of casual users.
On a side note, I think it would be a really excellent development tool if a mindmap could be dropped over a issue tracking system like Jira or Pivotal. Perhaps automatically selecting font size for projects based on number of story points, etc. It'd make a fantastic graphical interface that one could at-a-glance figure out what an entire organization was doing as well as create a trivial way for users to add task lists and breakdowns to an item (something that currently seems quite cumbersome in existing models)
