Ang Peregrino Recommends 68: Freemind

Free­Mind
URL: http://​free​mind​.source​forge​.net/​w​i​k​i​/​i​n​d​e​x​.​p​h​p​/​D​o​w​n​l​oad

Free­mind is the best no-cost tool I have found to cre­ate MindMaps.

A mind map is a dia­gram used to rep­re­sent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a cen­tral key word or idea. Mind maps are used to gen­er­ate, visu­al­ize, struc­ture, and clas­sify ideas, and as an aid in study, orga­ni­za­tion, prob­lem solv­ing, deci­sion mak­ing, and writing.

The ele­ments of a given mind map are arranged intu­itively accord­ing to the impor­tance of the con­cepts, and are clas­si­fied into group­ings, branches, or areas, with the goal of rep­re­sent­ing seman­tic or other con­nec­tions between por­tions of infor­ma­tion. Mind maps may also aid recall of exist­ing memories.

By pre­sent­ing ideas in a radial, graph­i­cal, non-linear man­ner, mind maps encour­age a brain­storm­ing approach to plan­ning and orga­ni­za­tional tasks. Though the branches of a mindmap rep­re­sent hier­ar­chi­cal tree struc­tures, their radial arrange­ment dis­rupts the pri­or­i­tiz­ing of con­cepts typ­i­cally asso­ci­ated with hier­ar­chies pre­sented with more lin­ear visual cues. This ori­en­ta­tion towards brain­storm­ing encour­ages users to enu­mer­ate and con­nect con­cepts with­out a ten­dency to begin within a par­tic­u­lar con­cep­tual framework.

Free­Mind is writ­ten in Java, so it will run on almost any sys­tem with a Java run­time envi­ron­ment (for those who can’t under­stand what I’m talk­ing about, it basi­cally means both Win­dows users and Mac users can use Free­Mind.)

If you’re into MindMaps, or your think­ing process is helped if you’re using visu­als, then Free­mind is for you.