Last week Robert wrote an article about “The Brain”. I absolutely love the concept of mind mapping. It allows me to create documentation the way that my mind actually works. At the point that Robert wrote about the “The Brain” I had never used that product. I have been utilizing a free product called “Free Mind“. So, I am going to take a minute to give you my thoughts about the FreeMind product so you can hopefully compare the products and others to find the one that best fits your mind!
What is FreeMind?
As Robert described in his article, FreeMind is a mind mapping software. It allows you to create documentation in a fashion that is really a visual outline. Here’s is the wikipedia definition of mind mapping. You basically start from a central topic and then document in a radial form about that central topic. This allows you to expand your thoughts from each level of the diagram.
Costs
Currently, FreeMind is an open source SourceForge project. So, it is a free product to use. With this product, as far as I know, there is no premium edition.
What’s Good?
FreeMind is a good mindmapping tool especially for the price! It does a good job of allowing you to build a map and even allows some formatting options. Once you are done with your mindmap and you want to create an outline in your Word document, you can easily copy and paste from FreeMind and paste into Word and it will generate an outline. The product is lightweight and very little learning curve is required.
Weaknesses
I would say that the biggest weakness of FreeMind is the formatting. I have basically accepted how the diagrams look instead of being able to get them to look the way I want them to. The are limited capabilities when it comes to making the diagrams look different than the basic themes.
The other thing that I would like is to have a product that is online so I can access it anywhere. FreeMind is a Java application so it installs on your computer.
Final Grade
If you think that mindmapping is your thing and you find benefit in this type of documentation, I would recommend trying FreeMind. It is a pretty good tool that is available for free. It will provide you with most of the functionality and formatting that you need and maybe some of what you want.
Grade: B+
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