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#1
11-11-2012, 05:24 PM
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#2
11-15-2012, 11:03 AM
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I
Yes, quant, there's a real, and double problem here. I am aware that it must appear really lame (all the more so coming from me) when I say (above), make it complementary, so allow for my trying to distinguish problems. a) It seems to me that organizational use of a "mind-map" does interfere with its "idea-triggering" use, i.e. you use it as a file / item launcher, and in your mind, this function shadows your wanting the map to trigger new ideas. But I also think problem b) is at least partly responsible for this, and I think, even with problem b) not being resolved, just SOME external linking maps ("external" viewed from those maps, i.e. not including links to detailed "children" / "siblings" maps within your maps collection) in the map might be acceptable, let's say 30 or 40 items in your map, with 3 or 4 items as links. That being said, I suppose that even with problem b) solved, big attention must be paid to not multiply links then. b) As stated in my first post here, some synching would be more than welcome, AND it would be need to be both-ways: 1. (partial = a particular sub-tree) tree export from UR (or another outliner) to MM (or another "mind-mapping applic) - but with UR and MM, this is possible, so let's stay with these for the moment -, in order to freely think about those things. This is possible, and then you re-arrange, and add, perhaps partially delete, perhaps do some move into siblings maps (!)... All these changes must then be synched manually, which is strictly impossible. It's a hellova hell of work, and it'll produce lotsa mistakes, be it yourself or being a your possible secretary who's supposed to to this. The only way to do it with not TOO many error-producing is to not work work within MM but to work on MM print-outs, then your sec doing the sync work not between MM and UR but within UR, from the MM print-outs. The problem is, synching back from MM to UR will overwrite the original UR items with another tree, since there is no functionality whatsoever to identify the unique identifiers of the UR items (which are there!), to dock them onto the according MM items, and then, by re-import, to identify these, and new ones, in order to re-arrange and complement the UR tree, all this together with the respective contents, for one... 2. But we must be aware that the problem arises even if we leave contents out! Which means, in order to simplify things a little bit, the developers of both coupled programs could decide to not have exported, then re-imported the notes for the nodes (in any case or better, by option), but simply to process the tree. This will shuffle around much less text and other content, but the programming difficulty will be exactly as it will be in alternative 1. 3. You begin your work within MM, then export "down" to UR. This is perfectly possible, but rather useless, since, as said for 1. and 2., any reasonable way to go back to the "musing stage" will be impossible, so at which point would be the point in your workflow where you deliberately interdict yourself further "musing within the map" but make the decision, "from further on, I'll limit myself to only think about it within UR". Or, of course, you say to yourself, "from this point on, I'll try to synch back manually then (to UR, after exporting the tree "up" to MM), since now, changes / additions / etc. will be rather sparse". Technically, that's possible and even maybe viable, but then, think a sec: Your attention that not much new will come your way, and your knowing what a fuss it will be to re-arrange the UR tree then, after any such deletion, rename, move and add-on, all by hand, will seriously hamper any further idea-finding within the MM map, so at at this time, have it complementary, as lame as this advice my appear. And, if I dare say this, since quant convenes with my experience, be sure my advice here is good advice. II Which implies, there SHOULD be a technical solution, from UR or such and MM or such, where two developer together create a USP for BOTH of them! (Or, as with CT, an in-built graphical representation of your data within your IMS, but I don't think that would be really the best solution: Too much work for UR or any other, and yet not enough functionality within the "mind-map" part of the program. On the other hand, there's cost. At this time, the price of UR is about 100 bucks, the price of MM, VM and such is 250 or 300 bucks or more, so the cost of the "add-on" (= some hundreds of items within your maps, tens of thousand of items within your IMS) and your main system is far from being within equilibrium; UR in its current state isn't worth 300 bucks or more, etc., etc., etc. Which all means UR should go corporate, have commercial functionality in order replace 1-5 seat commercial sw, and should go to be optimized within this range of use, THEN (only) apply a price of some 250, 300 bucks per seat, and of course do a student version for 100 bucks (remember, all this is NOT identical to my once speaking of 1,000 bucks sw). I'm NOT aggressing current UR users here, by asking for tripling the price of the current sw, but within UR's and its competitors' current price range (cf. TheBrain for a start...), NOBODY will EVER get you that splendid sw we're finally asking for, AND that finally we'd be willing to pay for, as soon as our demands are met. Hence this "slow death" of UR we're all complaining about, and which must not necessarily happen. As for askSam, yes, the price was 300 bucks, AND it was a tremendous good thing for tasks like qualitative anaylisis, etc., BUT: Serious "little businesses" was impossible with AS, since it was buggy like hell, incl. data loss, which is not the case with UR, so most little businesses were afraid to use it for this simple reason yet, AND AS hadn't any functionality in order to be used for tax-compliant main use of your things going out (not speaking of things coming in), so its only possible use was as additional sw besides your main doc processing sw - unfortunately, this is the same with current UR, and in SPITE of UR's much better mail handling than AS' mail handling - and then, UR's outgoing mail handling isn't that sophisticated if I dare say. So, I'm speaking of elaborate functionality, but also of another business model. I think that in the threads I've been writing in lately here, I succeede in explaining a little why NOT ONE of these applics succeed in finding a viable business model by offering just IM only - they are simply not of much enough use for any little business, all the less so since all of these must look elsewhere for their main needs - for their "just IM", then, they use all sorts of offerings, incl., for some of them, some of those dozens of outliners that altogether share that tiny market - and, let's put it bluntly, for most of them, UR might not be their most natural choice since the "first ten minutes accessibility" of the UR approach is rather sub-par. There's some interest in the observation of TheBrain since their main business - above the overpriced offering for indiduals - is said to be corporate use (with sophisticated sw that is not identical at all to the crippled sw for individuals), while NOT offering document processing if I'm well informed. So it seems there might be an IM market for rather big corporations, that is not identical with their "everyday-for-everybody" sw needs, but where perhaps, in a corporate of 1,000, some 30 people within the strategy department get a 50,000 bucks sw with 30 seats, in order to do what we do with UR, be it TB or something else. But it's clear as day that current outliners today will remain exotic - or even die, for lack of cloud functionality -, or become really useful for some-seats-businesses. And NONE of them IS, at this time. But then, kinook is one of the strongest offerings, and one of the strongest developers, so they could do much better than they do now, as soon as they got the motivation to do so. Or anybody else might step in and do it from scratch... Or from what they are doing now - again, I mention CRM and case management / lawyers' sw here. Up to now, they are all just addressing their respective traditional markets, they did not yet see that broad tiny-biz market yet. But if ever something comes that we can be pleased with, it'll be such tiny-biz sw, from UR or from anywhere else. The lack of developmentt in traditional outliners and such is heartbreaking, all the more so since, from my own, rather complete, programming experience back how MUCH kinook COULD have done these last year to make their sw outstanding in every respect, when in fact there is almost "nothing" - implementing new features into existing sw does NOT asks for "man years", or the other way round, with just ONE "man year" of kinook quality, ALL COULD HAVE BEEN ALREADY THERE. I refrain from saying, "shame on you, kinook", but I dare to say that it's an incredible pity as it is today.
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#3
11-17-2012, 08:22 AM
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I
Here, where it belongs, a bit from another thread: "Which reminds me of a problem mentioned in the other, the "mind-map", thread: Using two instances or multiple maps, for deep-linking / launching OR for "thinking", i.e. separating those functions from each other, even using the same graphic program, should be perfectly possible, without the mental interference problems described there." Then, the English term that would apply best to what a "mind-map" does, would perhaps be "DE-COMPACTING", in the sense that in an outline, these different items are too "near" together, and too "rectiligned" together - AND in another sense, also: Of course, within a "mind-map", as within an outline, you work top-down and bottom-up, simultaneously: You add new maps for (sub-) subjects where you expect some details to be added, and you add details in the (partial) map or into the branch where they belong. Now what's highly interesting here, and what's NOT available in an outline, is the limitation of screen and of paper. Yes, you COULD print-out a monster-map into 12, 16 or dozens of sheets of paper, but you'll be very well advised to NOT try to do such a thing. On the contrary, whenever your screen map (with perhaps 40 or so details, all minor details included) gets too complicated, = whenever the "adjust map to screen" command will get you too tiny font sizes, and / or the white space isn't really there anymore, you'll know that you'll need to BREAK UP your map into two or more maps, and perhaps again, and again, for some subjects. This is, one, a very natural way of working, and two, it seems to be one of the BIG advantages of "mind-maps" for planning, strategy, etc.: These "not too complicated" PARTIAL maps, for partial, sub-problems, and every one of these strictly observing the "not too complicated, just some dozens of items, not more, and whenever it becomes convoluted, separate it", seem indeed be PERFECT for thinking about. So it's not only the "how many items can your mind process simultaneously", but also, "introduce a certain limitation character to what you think about" which will enable your mind to better think about what you're staring at. So this is in CONTRADICTION to what "idea-maps", TheBrain, 3D-representations, etc. try to accomplish, since they try to INCLUDE "anything else", but in the end, it's not the theoretical conception of what might trigger better thinking, it's the actual results that should lead your choice of such sw, and that sw of choice seems indeed and for most people to be the (technically "primitive", in comparison, and "flat") "mind-map", if used in a smart way. II "Mind Manager 11" is the successor of "Mind Manager 2012" (!), and I just saw an ad, "from 349 dollar p.a." - this is outrageous. It should be possible to buy a COMBINATION of IMS like (an optimized) UR and a professional "mind-map" sw that integrates with the former, for a total of 500 dollar, one-time payment, and then regular combined updates should perhaps be 200 dollar every 18 months or so. By "professional" I mean, - good, NEAT graphics (important for presentation means, AND for your own eyes staring hours and hours at the screen) - bug-free (no problem whatsoever with UR or with MM, whilst with VM, I can make crash the prog anytime by just re-arranging some little branches within the same map) - lotsa shortkeys for re-arranging branches, etc. (as im MM, whilst in VM, there are only a few; if freely assignable or not (in MM they are not, but the point is that there ARE shortkeys, and then you re-assign them by AHK or such)) - this also means, the respective commands must be there, in order to re-arrange lotsa things, so that these commands can be addressed by shortcuts then (MM is really good in this respect) - ribbon or (preferably) not, but if a ribbon there is, no need to display it in order to trigger commands (have a shortkey for every command, and hide the ribbon) - etc., etc. We're almost 2013, which makes 30 years of pc, and nobody offers such a system yet. It would be time to do it. (And no, it's NOT possible to replace your IMS by outliner, by an IMS by "mind-map": No such program does seem robust enough in order to manager real big stuff - people who tried tell it'll get too slow, too cumbersome. And then, "mind-map" is not a GUI for managing 100 k of items of more to begin with. Hence the interest of a combi. EDIT : Oh yes, I forgot: Integration could be done in 3 different quality levels: - to begin with, acceptable, but not satisfying long-term: export-import both ways - as before, but with a command, available in both applications, to synch instantly; that would also mean (see below), if that "part" is not currently open in the other program, that applic would (open, in case, and then) open and display that part, too - as before, but an option, too, that would synch both-ways anytime you do any change within one of the programs, provided that both programs are open and the part of the tree / the file ( in the "mind-map" program, or if, in UR, you got several files, not just one big file) you're working on, is currently open within the other program Last edited by schferk; 11-17-2012 at 08:33 AM.
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#4
11-17-2012, 11:12 AM
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I suppose all that's needed is to incorporate some chart/map representation as an alternative to Data explorer pane in UR, should not be that difficult, there must be many companies offering ready made visual representation of charts/maps/ etc, for example
http://www.thebrain.com/products/brainsdk/
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#5
11-17-2012, 04:51 PM
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Right!
There are components even for this (as better editors e.g.), that could be integrated in any software. As long as such a components is not only a graphical representation of data, but allows for manipulating the data from this GUI, such an integrated solution would avoid lotsa potential difficulties that might arise by the otherwise necessary balancing of not necessarily convergent interest of two different developing companies - not speaking of the problems arising for the user by concurrent update needs. Of course, this again shows, as with UR's current editor, that here, the choice of a cheap / free component then produces annoyance for the user, over many years, or, the other way round, prof. sw should incorporate the very best such components. (Formatting within the tree, anyone? = another example of a component (or an original development by kinook?) that's not as good as it should be, at this moment.) But in fact, quant, your idea would avoid lotsa problems, no clash of two sw corporations and their respective policies "needed" at all here. I'm more and more inclined to do a second IMS in some years, with top-notch components and with a good programmer doing the coding, if really no current developer will have taken this path until then. EDIT : Some minutes ago, I deliberately avoided any comment re TheBrain SDK vs. some more traditional "mind-map" component, in view of my preference to the latter (detailed above), but not wanting to artificially divide a consensus on the means to apply. But of course, these divergences must be treated if a developer wants to satisfy his users. So, it occured to me that needs and preferences of different users do vary, of course, hence our traditional asking of delivering in-built functions "both" / multiple ways, i.e. to let the USER decide how he wants to do his work, whenever possible, instead of forcing upon him a precise way of doing things which might not please him at all - the apotheosis of such a system being, of course, SAP which every corporation puts into exactly that use that customer has in mind - it's an extreme case, for the asking price as well as for the needed amount (and hence the high price) of necessary adaptation. So back to components. Let's assume a developer buys a highbrow component for 50 dollar apiece (standard components are rather 300 to 1200 dollar one-time payment), i.e. for every license he sells of his product, he pays 50 dollar to the component vendor (and why not if his price is 250 dollar). Now imagine he'll get TWO such, similar components, one costing him 50 dollar apiece, the other (not necessarily better) one 80 dollar apiece. Why not offer his sw at a price of 200 dollar without any of these components, at 250 dollar with component one and at 280 or 300 dollar with component two, leaving the choice to his customers? The additional (!) "man time" for adjustments to not one, but both components might be a week since most of the functionality is very similar - in extreme cases (and I'm speaking of professional coders here) it might be 2 weeks - perhaps it's 4 weeks to integrate one, but 6 weeks to integrate both. At this price, the developer would make all his users happy, not forcing 50 p.c. of them into a new way of working they only accept for lack of any alternatives; it would propulse his prof. image, it would generate good press coverage, and so on. The same could be done for other add-ons, add-ins, e.g. those "little corporation" features I spoke of lately: tax-compliant archiving incl. scanning / OCR, mail functionality, and so on: prof. software as a construction kit where users chose the components they want or need. Such a paradigm is way beyond "cheaper crippled versions" and a viable business model. Meet people's needs, and you'll have happy customers willing to pay your price (as long as it's not beyond reason). Last edited by schferk; 11-17-2012 at 06:17 PM.
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#6
11-25-2012, 11:28 AM
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Additional problems:
I One of the big advantages in my experience of "mind-map" sw - IN THE FUTURE, I'LL DO "mm" for "mind-map" (rights to "mind-map": Tony Buzan) and "MM" for "Mind Manager" (commercial product by Mindjet) - is the consistent graphical representation of the material, i.e. you add branches, you manually move branches, but apart from that, every time you re-open a map, the branches will be at the same location they were when you last had worked / mused upon your map. TheBrain does NOT seem to have such a consistent graphical representation of branches and their sub-branches, or at least, there is much fiddling with several "views" in order to at least have ALL sub-branches of a given branch / node displayed together, to begin with, and about re-arranging branches as in MM, well, I never got to it, and it seems impossible (must say that my last thorough trials with TB were with the last major version). II See I, and additional prob: I can NOT work with (meaning: all the advantages of mm's I have liste do NOT work for me if I accept) the "original" distribution of branches, in mm's, clockwise, i.e. those progs do the branches 1 h, 3 h, 6 h (here, most progs fill up the right side first, then go "after" 6 h - I'm not speaking of the order, which is always preserved by your doing the sibling for a given item, but the graphical distribution on the screen, order preserved, I'm speaking here), 9 h, with additional sibling branches being put between. So, I in my MM, I manually rearrange my nodes by the system 11 h, 9 h, 7 h, 1 h, then 3 h, 5 h, meaning I go down on the left side, then I go down on the right side, just as if I would fill up two pages, left, right, one after the other, by writing. Now, I didn't search yet for a mm prog where I could do this by option, automatically, but that's not the real prob here, because of the consistency of the graphical representation in MM and in most / all mm's. But as soon as you get to automatic transfer / "traduction" of your data between IMS and mm, or if you get to a mm component within your IMS, this "how the data is automatically distributed on the screen (and on paper)" prob will enter the scene and probably make useless any such automatic "dual data representation" worthless for more than one, either because it does it "the usual way" - I'd be out, then, or because it does it my way, which could mean many traditional user of mm's will find it unusable, them having always left the graphical representation of their data within their mm on default = clockwise. Hence, the necessity to do some "research" first in order to know HOW mm users do it - it could be that many of them would like to do it as I do, once they will have started to manually re-arrange their branches, but without having done so up to know, and perhaps my assumption is wishful thinking only. So, this uncertainty is another big obstacle to any such implementation (be it interconnection, be it implementing an internal component). III Clones. The more I work with mm's (in MM 8.2, as said), the more I miss clones, i.e. items / branches being on several maps simultaneously, and updated from anywhere - of course, we have got here the same problem as with UR and every other IMS: The updating must affect even clones being situated in NON-OPEN maps or databases, which means that in every (?) current IMS, there isn't but cloning of items / sub-trees within the CURRENT db, at best. Sideline: Why do I need clones in my maps, when otherwise defending use of clones, within the IMS, just for special branches / db's there, i.e. prospects by area, by potential, etc., or (for an author) the personnel of his drama, by themes and by scenes, and such uses? Because I started to get get out all my things related to planning, to todoing, to deciding, etc., from the depths of my IMS and into the mm map system, and of course, within THIS frame of thinking, clones are an absolute necessity. In other words, the traditional problem "car assurance in car or in assurance" isn't a real problem, since a simple link will do here, from the side the car ass. is not, to the side where you put the car ass., so there would probably be car, with a link to ass., and ass, incl. car ass. - the same applies to any such "reference data" prob, and even less so, not even links would be necessary, most of the time, just item "car", then first child "assurance SEE assurance" (as link or not) (and other such), then a divider line, and elsewhere the item "assurance", then first child "incl. car assurance", then a divider line, and the "car assurance" further down anywhere within this block of perhaps dozens of children for various assurances. But as said, within your "planning world", it's totally otherwise: there, multiple cloning is a necessity - but today's mm sw's do NOT offer them, it seems. A citation from MM: https://community.mindjet.com/mindje...parents-1bk5vg "Because the current maps are just hierarchical constructs, it is impossible to represent situations, where a child branch has many parents. Of course we can create additional relations, but this is definitely not the same." = seems to be an official statement from Mindjet. Then the poster goes on with asking for clones, and he gets a "3 people like this idea", for a post 10 months old and tagged "MM 2012". Which means that not even MM does have clones, with a 6- or 7-digit number of users (= in many corporations, and because of cheap university licenses) - this is a disaster. And then, OF COURSE it is perfectly possible to have clones, inter-db-wise, inter-file-wise, as it is possible to have search over multiple db's (UR's missing inter-db-search, anyone?): You just maintain a little db with references, and containing the respective data, and for any opening of such a map, this db is checked for any changes that might have occured within this map = within the cloned branches in this map, in the meanwhile; then, these changes are worked into the map in question, before its being displayed. The alternative solution would be to update any such map with clones being altered within a current map, by the prog opening the other map in the background, without displaying it, and doing the necessary change immediately, then save the other map again; the information which other maps contain which clones of clones within the current map, would be present in any such map containing clones, anyway. Sorry for being rather technical, but currently, there seems to be NOT ONE really perfect IMS, so my "work" of imagining such a system must rely, in big parts, upon just imagination even of the intermediate steps to get to such perfect sw - I'd greatly prefer to have existing sw available that came nearer the desirable "end result", instead of constantly even having to imagine the necessary intermediate solutions - that would greatly enhance the precision of what I could say. Hence my constant begging for realizing at least some intermediate steps to a perfect IMS, for my imagining further enhancements to become more focused. Anyway, my next step will be to have a further look at mm sw and probably get the one that first will come out with clones, even if these clones are only possible in some "grouped maps" environment where all these maps must be opened together, each time. My MM maps just are about 35 kb each, so there would not be any problem to open even 100 such maps at the same time (but I hope that they could be grouped within a tree structure, since having 100 tabs wouldn't be a realistic solution here). As smart readers will have understood, my dual way, MM plus IMS, being just another try to have get to that "super level" that is absent from any existing IMS, in order to work within that "super level", and NOT work within my referential data bulk. This is a problem we ALL have, all the more so my astonishment that so few people see the prob here. There have been some books, from a German woman, who has been defending strict discrimination of "work files" and "reference files", between your physical lever files and so on, some years ago. The problem, of course, being, that much stuff is reference AND working material at the same time, and additional prob is, this intersection is plastic, and moving all the time. In theory, computer power should / MUST finally bring a viable solution to this permanent problem THAT EATS UP, for everyone, for every corporation, lotsa working time and effort that could both be much better deployed on real tasks bringing "revenue" (be it commercial or scientific)), so it's revolting that there is no solution yet. And worse, that there is no developer out there who's available for doing some good work here, in order to leave the pack and become vanguard for a time, then get BIG revenue. The first IMS that will really work, would grasp big markets, very big ones. It's a pity.
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#7
11-25-2012, 12:26 PM
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(Edit of the above impossible since > 10k chars.)
EDIT [of the above] : Screaming Idiocy In FreeMind / sourcefourge, there are two discussion on clones, http://sourceforge.net/projects/free.../topic/1051440 and especially http://sourceforge.net/projects/free.../topic/1022954 Both are from 2004 (!!!). In the latter one, the developer wishes to distinguish between natural and adoptive parents (see the other thread here), calling them fathers and unclues, in order to avoid recurson problems (see the other thread here). "Of course", nothing has been done about it in 8 years, but now see this thread: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki...r_enhancements In fact, while FreeMind almost does nothing, re further development, these "Requests_for_enhancements" are virtually endless: That's blatant idiocy, and of course, it reminds me of my own asking for enhancements in sw fori where in fact active development's having come to a standstill, more or less, is the matter, not possible high-brow enhancements. So I'm questioning myself if I'm not as much an idiot as those FM users going into lengths for backing up their FM wishes, when in fact, even many years later, FM is certainly one of the WORST mm sw out there. Sideline: While I criticised the pcworld "reviewer" for the blatant primitiveness in his "reviews" yesterday, please look here, for an example of a virtual perfect intro into a subject many of yours will be interested in (judging by the views of this thread here): http://truongnghiem.wordpress.com/20...-vs-outlining/ EDIT [of this post here] : What I'm asking for is technically possible, and has been realized many ago ago, in another environment. I own Visio 2002, and there, there ARE clones, to other maps, but only within the "organigramme" template (= those kind of Warnier/Orr diagrams, not from left to right, but turned 90 degrees to the right, which makes them floating top-down). Unfortunately, these templates are good for nothing else, and I tried! (Then I searched books about Visio, later version, in order to see if this functionality had been applied to other templates, but it seems it has not. Problem with trialling Visio (which I have avoided) is, as with other MS sw, that once you trialed it once, you will never be able to trial it again, even if you restitute your image which you had made anterior to your MS sw trialling - I have no idea how they succeed at this exploit, but in kicking the user in the you know what, MS has always been very strong. Hence my reliance on books and googling, for the respective current Visio capabilities-or-not.) EDIT 2 : Here - a mostly Mac-site not updated anymore, but being a gold mine for deeply detailed and highly developed info, http://www.atpm.com/10.08/atpo.shtml says (the Mac-only sw) Tinderbox does all what I'd need, technically speaking. But I started this thread in order to explain my need for DE-COMPACTING "working-info", whilst the Tinderbox concept COMPACTS everything in a way that I'd prefer working on paper only if ever they might be left the last working computer sw. Your experience might differ, but then, Tinderbox is presented as the technical non-plus-ultra almost everywhere, when in fact rather few people use it on a daily basis, so I dare say we've got another example here for highest-brow sw where the gui mastering doesn't follow the technical expertise. (Whenever I see a Tinderbox map, the term "sw for blockheads" appears in my field of vision - "blockhead" literally speaking, of course: sw not for simpletons, but for people with square brains - prob is, there ain't any such people, out there.) Last edited by schferk; 11-25-2012 at 02:01 PM.
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Hybrid Mode
