Free: grant freedom to; free from confinement;
Free: dislodge: remove or force out from a position; "The dentist dislodged the piece of food that had been stuck under my gums";
Free: able to act at will; not hampered; not under compulsion or restraint;
Free: complimentary: costing nothing; "complimentary tickets"; "free admission"

I wanted to mention a tool that makes my list of top ten productivity enhancements and tools that make you wonder what you did before them.  This one is called FreeMind. 

FreeMind

Mind mapping software is something I have read about but not really gotten excited about until now.  I had, in the past, produced mind map diagrams on paper and whiteboard with success.  However, I thought software would be cumbersome and inefficient at the task.  Not so! 

MindJet Mind Manager is absolutely fantastic.  My boss turned me onto it and we used it to generate our initial website semantics.  We were using it for various other purposes and ready to purchase additional licenses.  Since the expenditure was going to get a little ugly (though we valued to the tool enough to accept the cost), competitive analysis was in order.  I found FreeMind while looking for a way to export MindJet MindManager files.  I will point out to anyone doing the same thing that the MindJet files are nothing more than zip files with a mmap extension.  The underlying data is in xml.  I wasted a lot of time looking for documentation for how to use the com api and VBScript to access the same data.  However, along the way, I discovered an open source product that works just as well for my purposes.

FreeMind allows you to work very quickly through ideation.  If you are struggling with a complex task, fire up FreeMind and start a new doc.  Write > tab > write > Enter > tab > Write > Enter > Write > Enter.  This will bring you to an hierarchically structured relationship diagram that takes what is on our mind into a simple drawing. 

I used it just now to decide on a Controller naming convention for my MVC meets CMS web application where a duplicative navigation structure may be collapsed into a single controller.  Once I had the map, the name presented itself. 

Here’s an example of what  mind map might look like. 

Try it!  Its free, you can run it if you have the JVM (which you do), and it is a simple install.  I’m running he mac version while my peers have the Windows flavor flav…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Blogging, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.