Daily Iteration

Following up on my recent post reviewing a number of freely available, cross-platform GTD applications, I now present short reviews for a few mind-mapping tools. Again, the criteria were:

• 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.