Comapping is one of the better online mind mapping tools, and I first heard of it while researching for the first series of mind mapping tool reviews here at Daily Iteration. The newly added features were really important things that were missing, turning Comapping into (on my opinion) the best online mind mapping tool out there.

Now you can import and export files in Freemind format, meaning you can now work on your maps in a full-fledged desktop application and upload them to Comapping to have them available online and edit them together with your remote friends and colleagues. This alone makes this a noteworthy upgrade. You can also exchange files between Comapping and MindManager, a popular commercial mind mapping tool.

Another nice feature, specially for you blogger types, is the ability to embed maps in web pages, just like you currently do with videos. Below you can see a simple map I’ve put together to showcase this option. It is still a little fidgety, as I had to copy and paste the code twice to get it working – but it looks beatuiful once you get it right! and in fact the map I had embedded here no longer works, so I removed it – this might be because I only have a test account, so my maps are not saved permanently, and my embedded map could be pointing to an inexisting file. but after being contacted by Michael (Comapping’s R&D Director) who explained to me the correct procedure, things worked out.

I’m not sure if this is a new feature, or if I missed it when I first looked at Comapping, but there is a “Presentation” feature that allows you to create slideshows from your maps. Leave the map at the state you want it to appear, click on “Add snapshot as slide”. Expand or contract a few nodes, then take another snapshot. Arrange the slides in the ordr you want, and presto, a very nice presentation, with the map changing from one state to the other at the click of your mouse – very nifty! The video below shows this feature at work.

A word about video on this blog: I am still testing things, and for this post I thought I’d try Revver’s Quicktime embedding, as it gives better video quality. If you have problems viewing this, or if you prefer me to post Flash video + the original avi, please let me know in the comments.

A couple of smaller updates were also introduced. Now you can add notes to nodes – not breathtaking, but it can be useful. Also, the “Share” menu was improved, and you can send the invitations to look at your map by e-mail. You don’t have to be a registered user to look at the map, but if you want to edit it you have to pay

And here we get to Comapping’s biggest problem: it is the best online mind mapping tool, but there is no free account available. If you want to edit maps beyond a 30-day trial, you have to pay. On the other hand, they charge a very reasonable US$11.99 for six months, for a full account – no limits on usage.

Overall, if you use mind maps often, need to edit them colaboratively, and are willing to cough up a small amount for the finest online tool there is, it’s worth it.

• The tools have to be free (at least as in beer), and
• The tools have to be cross-platform, either web-based or run in Windows and Linux.

I’d love to be able to test also on a Mac, but unless some kind soul decides to give me one, I’m limited to these two platforms for the moment. After some quite extensive searches, I arrived at the following list of tools to test:

• Web-based:
  • Mindmeister
  • bubbl.us
• Desktop
  • Freemind
  • Labyrinth
  • Compendium

One very interesting tool which was left out was Web of Web. This allows you to run a collaboration/mind-mapping application on your own web server, as a J2EE web application. I can see beautiful applications for this in corporate intranet environments, but that is outside of our scope for now…

Mind mapping, or conceptual mapping, for those not yet familiar with it, is a kind of diagram created to help people visualize ideas, tasks, or any other kind of linked information. Contrary to what people might think, the existence of mind maps is a very old thing – Wikipedia says the concept has been around since the 3rd century. A mind map consists, basically, of a diagram of linked elements, or nodes, depicting ideas, tasks or words. Different tools add different capabilities, such as collapsing elements, adding images, or creating sophisticated libraries of elements.

So with our introductions out of the way, on with the tests:

• Freemind

Freemind is an open-source software (i.e., free software as in freedom), so it immediately gets bonus points in my review. It is written in Java, therefore fully cross-platform. It is a lightweight, yet flexible tool, which allows you to create nice looking, practical maps with minimal effort. There is also the option of exporting files to images. Where it lacks is in the collaboration features – it is designed to be a stand-alone application sitting on a single machine. Whether this is a limitation or not will depend on your intended use. The only problem I had with Freemind is something that seems to be a general problem with Java apps running together with Linux’s Compiz window-manager: this time, I could not maximize the window, or rather, I could maximize the window, but the size of the editing area remained the same, so all I got was a lot of blank space on my screen. A similar situation happened with Thinking Rock in my previous review, so this really seems to be a problem in Compiz. However, turning it off gets everything working again.

• Labyrinth

Labyrinth is also free software as in freedom. It is developed originally as a Gnome application (for Linux). However, there is a Windows installer available at the website, even though I haven’t tested it. This one is very, very light – too light I would say. It only has the most basic tools: draw boxes, lines, and insert images. I did not find an option to created grouped items, or to create collapsible lists, both of which I would consider very basic. One very good point about it is that it integrates very nicely with your Gnome desktop, so if you are using that Labyrinth becomes a better option. Overall, it is a nice app, which is certainly going in the right direction, but it still has some way to go. Adding collapsible lists, icons and better linking of elements would be the next steps, I would say.

• Compendium

Compendium is a very powerful tool created by the UK’s Open University. It is used by them in something called the OpenLearn program, which I did not really dig into to see what it’s about. The software itself is written in Java, therefore cross-platform. I had no problems at all getting it to run in Ubuntu. It is fully featured, has options to use a central database for sharing projects and resources (you can create a node, for instance, and share that with someone else). The software creates its own users, all of which have in-boxes, so you can send your resources to other people through this. It has different types of node, such as list, question, answer, note, reference, decision… All in all, a fully-featured, extremely powerful piece of software, keeping a nice enough level of user-friendliness.

• Mindmeister

Mindmeister is a very, very cool online app for creating and sharing mind maps. It has all the basic tools for creating the maps, and then allows you to share these maps with other people and edit them together. Even better, you can export them to images, to Rich Text Files for embedding in word processors, and in the format of two of the most popular desktop tools, Freemind (open-source) and MindManager (proprietary). Mindmeister also allows you to publish your maps, so they can be accessed directly by a URL, or you can give them limited access only to people you invite by e-mail. The major downside, for my purposes, is that the free account has a number of limitations, including limiting you to a maximum of 6 maps.

• bubbl.us

Bubbl.us is another web offering, similar to Mindmeister. The first major difference I should mention is that bubbl.us is entirely free – there are no limitations on the standard account. There is an ad showing in the bottom left corner of the screen, but it is not very intrusive, and didn’t bother me at all. The maps generated by the application are very pretty, and the interface is very well thought out. However, the way the nodes (apparently they’re called bubbles here) are drawn makes them a little worse for list-style nodes, and, like in Mindmeister, there is no way to customize individual nodes beyond changing their size and color. Export options are image (png or jpeg), html or xml files – there is no option to export to other mind-mapping software. Collaboration is there, and is easy to use, but there is no way to publish online via a URL like in Mindmeister. All in all, a very good offering, specially considering it is 100% free of charge.

Just one final note: I did not test extensively the collaboration options in any of these offerings, as that is not a priority for me right now.

My choice? In the end, I have decided to go for a combination of Freemind and Mindmeister. I use Freemind on the desktop to get things going, and when I need to share a map I upload it into Mindmeister, which has import and export options for Freemind’s file format. This allows me to avoid having to sign up for a paid account, as I can keep only the files I am currently collaborating on on the web, with the remaining files safely stored in my local machine. Compendium would be a good choice too, but it has some complexity which I don’t need, and would not work together with Mindmeister in this manner.

• Nozbe

Nozbe is an online service specifically designed to work along the gtd methodology. As such, all familiar terms are there: contexts, projects, next action item…. It is very simple to set up and use, and, being a hosted service, you can reach it from any place that has an internet connection. However, it has serious limitations: it will be officially launched on May 14th, and from that date you will be limited to creating five projects and pre-configured contexts on the free accounts. To have unlimited projects and configurable contexts, you have to pay. Even though the basic account, with 30 projects and 10 custom contexts for USD 4.95/month, would serve my needs well enough, that is exactly USD 4.95/month more than I want to pay for my chosen tool…

• Tracks

Tracks is an open-source project written in the infamous Ruby on Rails framework, making it instantly buzzword-compliant. It is a full-fledged web app, meaning that you have the options of installing to your own machine (where you would run one of RoR’s own web servers to access it), installing it in your own server if you have one, or get an account at a hosted service. I have not tried the hosting services, and installing it on my own machine would be a bad idea because I am constantly switching between Windows and Linux which would mean my tool would not be available to me whenever I switch OS. Since I have an account on a web host (yes, where this blog is hosted!), I tried to install Tracks over there. It wasn’t exactly simple, because Rails apps have to run as cgi scripts in shared hosts, but after going through this tutorial, it finally worked. Once I got it going though, it works beautifully – very simple, and, since it is your own installation, completely customizable and with no limitations. One particularly nice feature is that you can access different aspects of your account (completed items, to-do items due in the next seven days, etc) in both RSS and iCal formats, perfect if you already use some kind of desktop calendaring solution or if, like me, you are constantly checking your feeds reader.

• Thinking Rock

Thinking Rock is a desktop software written in Java (and as such available for Windows, Linux and Mac) also designed to work along the lines of gtd. A gamma release of 2.0 is available, and that was the one I tried out, without any significant stability glitches or bugs for a very early release. There was one major hiccup: apparently due to some bug in Java, or at least some inconsistency between Java and Compiz, which is Ubuntu’s default composite window manager (of wobbly-windows fame), I get a blank screen when I start the application. To get it going, I have to turn off all the desktop effects, launch Thinking Rock, then I can switch the effects back on. Annoying… Once that is done though, Thinking Rock is an excellent piece of software, enabling you to quickly get going in gtd. As you can see from the screenshot (click on it if you can’t see that much), it leads the new user through the steps required to get going, simplifying enormously the adoption of gtd. Its major flaw, in my evaluation, is that it is a desktop app, and as such is only available when I’m on my own computer and even then, when I’m using the OS I installed it on. I suppose I could install the xml file the application uses to store your data on my external drive so it would always be available, but that would mean extra, unnecessary synchronization issues whenever I use the notebook out of home, for instance. But if you use only one OS, and carry your computer with you, meaning you don’t need to use your chosen tool from other machines via the net, Thinking Rock would be the way to go, in my opinion.

• Stikkit

Stikkit is not, strictly speaking, a GTD app. IT lacks many of the elements of David Allen’s methodology, such as contexts, and while people have suggested many different ways to use it as a fully fledged GTD app, it is not there yet – neither, I believe, is that the creator’s intention. So why is it in this list, meant for GTD apps, and a Top 5 list at that? Because it is such a fantastic, clever little app that it just deserves to be talked about. Stikkiti is based on the concept of stikkits (doh!), which are simple notes that you enter either at the app’s web page or through a little javascript bookmarklet. Very ordinary so far, you might think, but here’s where it gets interesting: Stikkit has the ability to pick out certain “magic words” in your notes, and categorize them accordingly for you, automatically. Say you write a note such as “- get spaghetti for dinner tomorrow night”. Stikkit will recognize this as a to-do item (it starts with a dash, which is fairly common for lists) and will add it to your calendar at the correct date! After you get used to it, things get even better. You would write the previous note as, for instance, “-get spaghetti for dinner tomorrow nigh, remind me, @errands”. Stikkit will recognize “remind me” and send you an e-mail at the right time so you don’t forget to buy the spaghetti and ruin your evening, plus it will tag it (the “@” sign) as an errand. So perhaps when you go walk the dog tomorrow evening, you can check your “errands” tag (or context, in gtd lingo) and you will know that you have to buy pasta. It really is fantastic. The only problem, in my case where I really wanted the full GTD thing, was that it’s hard to get something that structured here. However, if you want to get organized, and are not so keen on any pre-determined methodology, be sure to check out Stikkit.

• Remember the Milk + IMified

The last entry in my list is not really one tool, but rather a combination of two different tools which, taken together, can be a real killer. Remember the Milk is one of the best “simple to-do list” apps out there, and in fact, it is not all that simple, really. It has a lot of features, such as tagging and saved searches, which make it a perfectly fine tool for GTD usage. It is quite easy to set up a number of tags which, together with saved searches, work as GTD contexts.
IMified is a very nice tool which allows you to interact with a variety of services via IM. You add IMified’s bot as a contact, and voilá, after registering which services you want to use with it, you can simply send it messages to create new entries in a variety of different ways. With Remember the Milk, for instance, you can create new lists, or new to-do items, simply by sending them as messages via your IM client. You can also view all your items via IM. This nice little tool can be used with a number of services (you can even post to your blog from it), so it is definitely worth checking out if you spend a lot of your time in IM sessions.

Remember the Milk together with IMIfied can work fine as a GTD system, but it does require a little thinking as to how you structure things. As such, I wouldn’t really recommend this to someone who, like me, is only getting started on the methodology. On ce you get the hang of it though, I guess this would be the fastest, most lightweight manner to manage your lists.

The final winner, in my case, was Tracks. This is because I have enough Linux skills and patience to install it by myself, plus I have a web-host which allows me to run Rails apps. If this was not the case, I would have gone with Thinking Rock. And, if you really need to access your stuff from the net, you might consider chucking away the whole GTD thing and use Stikkit, just because it’s so cool!

This post is my entry in Darren Rowse’s Top 5 Group Writing Project. Check it out, it is a nice way to discover new, interesting blogs. Plus, if I get picked in the draw I get 1k cash!