I basically didn’t like it at all, and that seems to be the same opinion over at FriendFeedWatch.  I guess we’ll just have to wait until the rumoured Air client get released.  Its future website still shows a “Under construction” page.

[UPDATE]: Less than twelve hours after my post, there is a new version out.  In this new version, I found three different themes, which I must say I did not see in the original version, so I’m not sure if they were already there or not.  And now, we can get rid if the bee!  With a different theme, the app becomes much more usable, the only important thing still missing is minimize to tray.  Take a look at the grey theme in the screenshot.  And François, thanks for your attention

Those who have been following my series of reviews will be aware that I specified some criteria for eligibility: there had to be at least one free usable license and/or account for the software or service, and I had to be able to use it from my two main desktops, Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. Concept Draw Mindmap is neither available for free, nor does it run on Linux (though you can get it for Mac). So why am I reviewing it? First, because it would be a nice comparison test to my previously selected champion, Freemind. Testing Mind Map will allow us to see how well Freemind stands up to a commercial competitor. And secondly, because Igor from Concept Draw asked me very nicely, so what’s the point in not returning the kindness?

So on with the review…

Concept Draw offers many products related to diagramming and technical drawing, and the first impression that you get is thatMind Map has kept true to its roots – there are more drawing tools thanwith other mind mapping tools, and the diagrams you can generate are really good looking. This guy has plenty of features, and even though it takes a little while to navigate through the interface (there’s a lot of buttons there), nothing is too hard to reach.

One of the most interesting features offered is a brainstorm mode. This is a different screen, with a little timer at the top right, which you can set up to count down as many minutes as you think are necessary to your particular session. Set a title for you brainstorm, click go, and the timer starts counting down as you enter all the ideas that come up in a very simple manner. Below you can see a video of this feature at work.

This is the first attempt at embedding video in the blog, and the video quality isn’t what I’d like – even though Jumpcut has the best quality Flash video I could find. You cen get the original .avi from the link below, while I try to find a better solution to stream high quality screencasts in the blog.

Another very nice feature of Mind Map is the large amount of formats you can export your maps to. All sorts of image formats (PNG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, etc…), PDF, MS Word outline files, Powerpoint slide, and, best of all for all the project-heads out there (like me!), you can export your maps to MS Project XML format, so you can start transforming all those bright ideas you had during your brainstoming session into an actual project schedule right away. One that left me intrigued was the ability to export to Concept Draw’s own Project tool – this on I would very much like to take a look at (Igor, are you reading this )

Another point where Mind Map shows its heritage as a drawing tool is in the excellent quality clip art provided, which is actually usable without completely ruining the quality of your presentation. The only sugestion I would make here is to have it all as SVG files, so they would be scalable.

The screenshot to the right shows another interesting feature. You can open a topic structure to the left of the screen, while keeping the rest of the window areas visible to the right. While it does get cramped, it is a very useful way to get around larger maps, editing each topic without loosing all visual reference to the actual diagram.

Overall, Concept Draw Mind Map has proved to be a really nice tool, with some very nice features such as exporting to MS Project files, timed brainstorming sessions, nice display of topic structure, among others. A very positive aspect that I have not mentioned yet is that it generates beautiful diagrams – and lets you create personalized styles which you can save as templates and apply across all your diagrams. So if you need to create great looking maps for presentations, or could benefit from the timed brainstorming sessions and MS Project export, Mind Map would be a good choice for you. Bear in minf though, that at US$ 199 for the Professional version (the website does not make it very clear what the difference is between this and the Personal license, at US$119), this product is more suited to those of us who use this kind of diagram professionally (ar at least intensively). If you do, however, Concept Draw Mind Map is a fantastic tool for you.

• It looks great

The user interface is sleek, nice and simple, and basically feels very nice to use.  That being said, there are a few inconveniences.  For instance, double-clicking on the tab bar does not create a new tab as you might expect – you have to right-click on it and select “Create a new tab”.  There is no option to have all links open on a new tab, forcing you to use either Ctrl+click or use the right mouse button and select from the menu – both of these are bad, they require you to do more than you should to just open a link where you want it.  While I hope these might be fixed in the final version, Safari does have some nice features, such as the option to “Merge all windows”, so that if some page does open a new window you can bring it back as a tab in your previous one (does Firefox do this?).  Ah, not to mention OS integration.  What is that anyway?  How I miss my Gnome+GTK days in this respect…

• Pages render beautifully

Yes, the pages look gorgeous in Safari!   Probably related to Apple’s font rendering mechanism discussed over at Joel on Software yesterday. Apparently people’s opinion on this varies, but to my eyes this alone is Safari’s biggest plus – my blogs all looked awesome So now I envy all you Mac people for living in a much prettier internet than I do…

• It’s stable (for me, anyway)

I used it for an entire day with not a single crash.  This is not what some people reported, but in my experience it was pretty stable.  It ran and started up pretty fast right from the start on my Core Solo notebook with 1GB RAM, also against what other folks experienced.

• It’s not usable everywhere

Some sites complained.  Others displayed drop-down menus in odd ways.  Overall it was not bad, but there were some glitches.  However, Apple has included a handy “report a bug” button that sends the source code and a screenshot of the site you’re visiting to Apple – Mozilla folks should look at this, very nice touch.

Overall, Safari impressed me, and I had a much easier day than I thought I would have.  Things just look great in Safari, and if you are, like me, a sucker for pretty things on your screen (I stare at it all day long, might as well make it look good), you might enjoy Safari.  That being said, it’s still not usable as your only browser, as some sites don’t collaborate with it too well.  Feels like the early days of using Firefox .  For the power-users out there, going without all your Firefox extensions will be a problem – it certainly was for me.  It is a nice browser though, and Apple should see the number of users increase.  If they iron out a few details and perhaps make it extensible like Firefox is (not even OpenSearch plugins, Apple?), who knows, it might work…

Before I forget, here is mine:

Perhaps I should say something about it: Ubuntu Linux 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), running Gnome + Compiz with a desktop from Deviant Art and the Human Icon set. That desktop is the first dog desktop I have ever seen that doesn’t look cheesy, so congratulations to the author. I try to keep things at least looking tidy, so instead of dumping stuff on the desktop I have a folder called “misc” which is my computer’s rug – all the dirt gets swept under there.