Mind Mapping
I have a problem with taking notes at meetings. I am sure whole rain forests have had to be chopped down to supply the paper for the notepads I’ve consumed over the course of my professional career. But their selfless sacrifice has all been in vain.
My notepads usually enjoy one of two possible fates. Most of them get misplaced long before I get to the last page. The poor things end up unfulfilled at the end of short career rotting on some rubbish heap or recycled as toilet paper. Those rare few that I managed to hold on to until the very last page end up on the death row that is my desk drawer. They only exercise they get is when I move desk. Eventually they long for the release granted to them by the shredder. But that only comes when I change jobs.
No matter the of the notepads, the notes themselves never get used again. The problem is that I continually struggle to effectively transfer them to a useful electronic format. The problem is that on paper it is easy to mix diagrams, lists, tables and explanatory text. One set of meeting notes for me can translate to a mix of several spread sheets, network diagrams, class diagrams, block diagrams and text documents that never come together as well as the original notes did on paper.
However, the act of taking the notes was useful in that it reinforced the concepts being discussed in my head and made it easier to prepare the feed those concepts in the project documentation or code that was ultimately being produced.
But that project documentation and code is something that I am producing for somebody else and they are an application of the concepts. I want to be able to capture those notes in some concise electronic format so that I can reference them in future work.
When I start taking notes at a meeting I usually start organising them as a Mind map. So obviously a mind mapping tool would be the way to go. The only problem is I never came across a dedicated mind mapping tool.
Fortunately the subject came up in Episode #222 of The Java Posse broadcast on December 20th. They mentioned two open source mind mapping tools in that episode called FreeMind and XMind. I decided to give them a whirl.
Although the user interface was not as polished as XMind’s I was still initially impressed with FreeMind. The diagrams were nice and compact and the application seem to be very stable. I would have stuck with FreeMind except that the only way I could find to represent tabular data in my diagrams would be to create the image graphically and load that into the diagram.
XMind on the other hand does support the presentation of tabular data. And equally importantly for me it is available as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE.
There is also an professional edition of XMind with additional features that might be useful in corporate and academic environments.
After trying both FreeMind and XMind I have settled on using XMind for my personal and professional projects and might even consider paying for the additional XMind Pro in the future.
Tagged as eclipse, freemind, mind-mapping, xmind + Categorized as Tools