I’m looking at mindmap products and wanted to share my discoveries with the group as I think they may be of interest to some people. I’m a complete mindmap newbie, but I’ve really enjoyed mindmapping so far. It’s a great tool for outlining for me especially, because I tend to have ideas bubble up in all sorts of places. Trying to generate and capture ideas in a heirarchical outline is effective but somewhat constraining for me. So far I’m using mindmapping primarily for outlining in a less structured/linear manner.
I downloaded trials for the following products:
- MyThoughts - $49
- MindNode Pro - $20 (has a free edition too!)
- NovaMind Pro - $149 (express: $49, platinum: $249)
First thing I did was check out the UIs. They all behave a bit differently and have their quirks. I’m not going to go into that, they’re all competent mindmap tools and you should try them for yourself.
I’d like to share my experience with DT integration. I use DTPO, but I don’t think I’ve used any special features in my tests so it should be applicable to all versions. I mentioned that I’m using mindmaps for brainstorming and initial outlining for my projects. I want to feed my mindmaps into DTPO to initiate writing projects and have an ongoing visual aid for the structure, as well as general note-taking for deeper understanding. None of the products were natively searchable by DT, meaning that if I imported a document into DT and did a search on the content, I got back no hits. I had suspected this might be the case so my fallback plan was to print as PDF into DT. Here’s how they stack up:
MyThoughts
- Displayable by DT
- Printed PDF is not searchable
The central idea text does get indexed by DT, but none of the child nodes do. Pretty useless for my purposes then. It’s possible that via a different print config the text does become searchable, but I wasn’t able to figure it out.
MindNode
- Displayable by DT
- Printed PDF is searchable (all nodes)
NovaMind
- Not displayable by DT
- Printed PDF is searchable (all nodes)
- By default printed across multiple pages that made no sense in DT. Print dialog has option to scale to fit to one page which made it render nicely
Two other products I’ve considered but haven’t evaluated yet are MindManager and Inspiration. MindManager required me to register to download the demo, and since I already had three demos on my machine I didn’t feel like it The Inspiration demo said I didn’t have permission to run it. I’m waiting on a response from support before I can try it out.
At this point MindNode is in the lead for me. Its documents are natively displayable by DT, and the printed PDF is fully searchable. It’s good news for me because with the exception of its hotkeys (which may be configurable, I’m not sure yet) I found it the most intuitive. It’s also the least expensive package I evaluated, another plus.
I’m still interested in trying out Inspiration because of some of its other features. But if you’re looking for a straightforward mindmapping tool with decent DEVONthink integration, MindNode seems to be the one to get.
I would love to hear any feedback others have, regarding things I may have missed with these tools or other programs I should check out. Also if someone could tell me how Inspiration integrates with DT I would really appreciate it And I’ll do my best to answer any questions you might have.