Wow! Where before I had many huge projects floating around in my mind, now (at least for the projects that I mapped out) I have a calm and in-control feeling. That makes mindmapping something worth doing to me.
I tried first www.mindmeister.com which I liked a lot.
Pluses
- online
- AWESOME openid login (I highly recommend everyone use openid. It saves so much time and energy with managing logins)
- easy to use
- Google Gears offline support
- looks nice
- responsive interface
- imports from freemind and others
- exports to rtf (even with the free account!!!)
- You have to use it if you want to save more than 6 mind maps (after the first 30 days)
I noticed freemind, which a coworker had been using and recommended. Freemind was great too and seemed to have everything I needed except for the online part.
So, here is what I worked out.
- use mindmeister when I need a mind map that is instantly available (I'm tempted to put my GTD lists into a mind map and online would be really nice)
- use freemind for project mindmaps that don't need to be accessible from multiple places
- put my freemind mindmaps into my amazon s3 storage account using www.s3browse.com (excellent free online interface to the awesome and cheap amazon s3 online storage service)
- whenever I need to export a mindmap from mindmeister, I'll export it to rtf, open it in openoffice, and then save it as a text file. Then, I'll use vim or python to change all initial spaces to tabs and then open the file back up in openoffice. Now, a quick copy and paste from openoffice to freemind recreates my mindmap no matter how intricate it is!
1 comments:
There are import and export options for freemind here.
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