07.26.07
MindMapper
Since I am a visual learner, it helpes me to have a map of my thoughts or of stuff I’m supposed to learn. One tool I knew from my Windows time was Freemind which is also available for Mac OS. I used it for some important exams and it helped a lot. The capabilities of this application are limited. I appreciate it a lot because it helped me to get into this kind of usage of a computer. It’s just not the solution for me. So I reached out into the unlimitted space of the web and found some other tools. All of them have their limits. I go threw some of them, but this is not a review. Just some random thoughts.
Novamind
Wow! All these colors… how horrible! But ok, it can be changed… I’m not against color, not at all, but just if it makes sense. Not just to be somehow exceptional. The quick creation of topics with the keyboard works to some extent. But what is that, the topics overlap each other in some cases?!? Not the way to go. The set of features is pretty good, but I can’t live with these issues.
OmniGraffle
This is not really a mindmapper, but it has a mindmap mode. So I tried it. For about five minutes. You have to create a sister-topic first and then press tab to make it a child. Can’t tell more because I stoped trying it at this point.
MyMind
Costs as much as Freemind which is good. The view is nice and pretty configurable. Just the handling doesn’t fit for me. I’ll keep it on my harddrive, just in case.
Tinderbox
Tinderbox is not a classical mindmapper. It’s hard to explain. There are notes which can be linked to other notes. The links have attributes themselves. You can make prototypes of notes to create categories of similar notes. Agents can gather notes depending on their attributes. The hierarchival structure is not visible in the map view, it works with layers. Andorments provide an additional possibility to gather notes on the same layer. It looks really interesting, but I didn’t manage to figure out how to use it in a productive way. And it’s expensive. I’ll keep it in my mind.
Graphviz
Not really a mindmap program and not meant to be. But on my research I found this and it helped me for A crappy map for VoodooPad.
Incubator
Nice. The look is very clean. The handling works very well, you can quickly create a map with just the keyboard. This also works with some other tools, but this one act just like I expect it. I didn’t find a way to make links between topics outside the hierarchical structure. I often want to make something like:
a has property b and c also but a and c are on different positions in the tree. Know what I mean? The kind of structure you could easily represent in a table. Sometimes I use color to support this, but it’s not a very well solution. Maybe concept maps would work better for me, but all the tools I looked at were kind of crappy (just kind of!). My favourite feature: Create links to a new page! Just rightclick any subtopic and make a new page with this subtopic as main idea. Then you can click on the arrow next to the subtopic in the main view to get to its own page. Kind of an infinite workspace. Infinite is goood! I really like that. The feature set may not be so huge but it does what I want it to do. It’s the tool of my choice. One downside is, it’s not applescriptable. Sad.
A crappy map for VoodooPad
There’s this Application called VoodooPad. It’s a personal Wiki where I write down just everything.
I am a visual learner and would love to have a map view of the pages. I guess there are too many feature requests and not enought time. So I looked around for an external solution and found Graphviz. This is an open source tool for representing structural information. I tried to write a little AppleScript which exports the information into a .dot file which will be opened by Graphviz.
It works, but not very well. It just takes a list of all pages and searches in the contents for these strings for pagenames. Then writes it to the .dot file which is located at home:scriptfiles:dot: and tells the Finder to open the file using Graphviz which must be locted in the applications folder.
Some bugs are:
- it shows just small letters
- if there is a for example a page called “funny”, the string “fun” refers to it
- no links to files are recognized
- to be continued…
Other problems are:
- it’s quite mazily if there are too many pages
- it takes some time to process if the document is more than just a few pages
- it’s not interactive, you can’t move the page representations nor navigate
- you would have to run the script every time you change something
- not linked pages are not displayed
- to be continued… this list is probably endless
There are some settings in Graphviz which could make it a bit more acceptable. I use the “Energy Minimized” Layout and tell it to not overlap. These settings can be saved as default.
Even with these deficiencies I use it and hope that the idea has some potential. I really need the map view… it helps me to get an idea of that information I have.
Here is the script for the case, someone is interested. Please forgive me for this crap. I’m obviously not a developer.
Code:
on run
set ignorelist to {"index", "post im forum", "vp to graph", "vp to graph mit ignorelist"}
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
set homepath to path to home folder as text
set dotfile to homepath & "scriptfiles:voodoodot2.dot"
tell application "Finder"
try
make new folder at ((home as text) & "scriptfiles:") with properties {name:"dot"}
end try
end tell
tell application "VoodooPad"
set number_of_pages to the number of pages of document 1
set pagelist to {}
set dotfile_refn to open for access file ¬
dotfile with write permission
write "digraph untitled {" & return to dotfile_refn
repeat with i from number_of_pages to 1 by -1
set the beginning of pagelist to name of page i of document 1 as text
end repeat
repeat with x from number_of_pages to 1 by -1
set pagecontent to (text of page (item x of pagelist as text) of document 1) as string
repeat with y from number_of_pages to 1 by -1
if pagecontent contains item y of pagelist and x is not y and ignorelist does not contain item x of pagelist and ignorelist does not contain item y of pagelist then
write "\"" & item x of pagelist & "\"->\"" & item y of pagelist & "\";" & return to dotfile_refn
end if
end repeat
end repeat
write "}" & return to dotfile_refn
close access dotfile_refn
tell application "Finder"
open document file dotfile using application file "Graphviz.app" of folder "Applications" of startup disk
end tell
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return
end tell
end run
Here is a picture.
It’s just a simple example. Most likely it does’t look so nice in a real world scenario. Oh, there’s also an ignore-list. Pages in this list will not be displayed.
Thanks a lot!
Lazra
