Background

I'm a huge fan of FreeMind. I've got hundreds of MindMaps? and have written a few XSLTs to mold them to my purposes. I use MindMapping? quite a bit for GTD. In fact, I would say that I use MindMapping? more than all of the MS Office tools combined.

At the end of 2006, however, FreeMind's development was moving rather slowly. Also, at the time many GTD enthusiasts were promoting OmniOutliner (a Mac product that has no real Windows equivalent) and TiddlyWiki as great GTD tools, and I thought to myself, there's no reason that I shouldn't be able to create similar visualizations of my MindMap? data, which is essentially a tree (Outline) that also has the ability to link nodes (wiki / object graph). I also wanted to add Attributes as FreeMind had begun to do (although I really don't think their implementation is that usable).

I thought about trying to enhance FreeMind, but decided that I would rather not work in Java, even though I was a Java developer who had only recently switched to .NET. I was interested in learning WinForms?, so I decided that I would take a shot at writing a Windows version for personal use. Plus, I thought to myself that eventually I would like to grow this into a really unique productivity app capable of many different ways of visualizing and interacting with data.

Development History

This got kind of long so I moved it to DevelopmentHistory.

The Goal

A truly usable productivity tool that enables users to quickly enter and manipulate text, data, and media (HTML, images, icons) and visualize that data in many different ways (tree, grid, treemap, HTML, charts, any number of graph layouts, etc).

The inspiration for the overall app is that it eventually harness the best of: FreeMind / MindManager, OmniOutliner, TiddlyWiki, Prefuse, and Tinderbox.

Screen Shots

Skip straight to the MindTreeScreenShots if you like.

Use Cases

  • Brainstorming
  • Presentation
  • GTD
  • Personal Information Management
  • Project Management
  • Research & Note Taking

Features

Naturally, not all of these have been implemented, but this is the dream: This topic is all about UK Essays. In this topic you can see some of tips and guidelines on how to be an effective writer in research paper. If you are interested in this topic just click the link for more details and information or reply to this message.

Core

  • Rich UI - drag/drop, copy/paste, keyboard shortcuts
  • Zoomable UI (ZUI) - easy and intuitive scaling, panning
  • Multiple editors - MindMap?, Outline, Graph visualizations
  • Customization - custom attributes (and perhaps formulas), CSS-like styling, Plugins, Scripting support (Boo, IronPython?, IronRuby?, PowerShell?), custom keyboard shortcuts
  • Compatibility - FreeMind, MindManager, XSLT export

Someday / Maybe

  • Web version - HTML, Flash, SilverLight?
  • Windows Mobile Version
  • iPhone Version
  • Collaboration / Concurrent Editing service