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Featured Freeware: FreeMind

Like all mind maps, FreeMind for Windows and Mac gives you the flexibility to organize thoughts on a page as they connect to each other and to the larger picture. After all, not all minds reason in subheadings and bullet points. You shape, place, and name that master idea--called the root node in FreeMind--then create child or sibling spokes that relate to it.

FreeMind encompasses a fine range of features, including scads of icons and color formatting options to help you visually organize concepts. It also supports hyperlinks, which allow you to link Web sites and even documents to a … Read more

Mind maps: See a different way to think

When you're wedged next to someone at a conference, you can't help noticing their business from the corner of your eye. That's how I saw that my seat mate at last week's BlackBerry Developer Conference was using FreeMind (for Windows and Mac) to take notes on the talk.

I've looked at the freeware application FreeMind before, but had never seen it in the wild. I have to admit, compared with my two pages of linear notes organized primarily by bold text and a lot of paragraph spaces, my neighbor's mind map looked elegant and … Read more

FreeMind: The eye of the brainstorm

When brilliant ideas smash against the banks of your brain and threaten to overflow the narrow borders of a digital sticky note or notepad, mind-mapping software can contain the surge, and more--it can divert thought flows into manageable streams. Part brainstorming notepad and part presentation software, FreeMind's freeware canvas for Mac and Windows provides a visual, quasi-linear outlet for complex ideas.

FreeMind isn't the only software for the job, and it doesn't do everything, but when commercial mind-mapping products such as ConceptDraw Mindmap and Mindjet MindManager cost between $150 and $300, quibbles over FreeMind's minor function limitations seem suddenly petty.… Read more