UR and mind map software

[quant]

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/

[schferk]

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).

[schferk]

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.

[schferk]

(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.)

[Jon Polish]

I'm pretty sure that Freemind implemented clones a few betas ago. They are currently on Beta 8 (Sept 2012).

Jon

[schferk]

Jon, thank you a lot, by googling, this info doesn't become evident (EDIT: I meant by "mind map cloned item" and such, "freemind clone" will find it immediately! Introduced in May, 2012). If that's working, it'd turn the mm world upside down: A(n even last year) rather primitive freeware has the key function missing from any known commercial sw. Will report back.

EDIT : The user guide is for v. 0.8.0, and the info I found about cloning in FM:

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki...e_New_Features

seems to indicate that cloning is possible within the same map only (I've become a cynic and think that they would tout it if was otherwise, AND overall functionality last time I trialled FM was so bad that I come to the same conclusion from this pov. And there is, "This should work after saving and loading later on, too.", which seems to indicate even cloning within a given map is stable. AND you get what you pay for (e.g. DNS Legal: 949 euro, about 1250 bucks), so re sourceforge... I said I'm a cynic.). And yes, I've ceased to download all sort of crap just for trialling, I'm not believing in Santa Claus anymore. (Cf. GiveAwayOfTheDay with all that crap, crippled versions and so on. Most sw out there is only time-consuming rubbish.)

In a positive mood: The above-mentioned FM wish list is a good point of departure if you like to construct perfect mm sw (i.e. sometimes, collaboration is very helpful).

[schferk]

More details

I - Visio

I fear I mixed up my real experience with retroactive wishful thinking. In fact, within the organigramme template only, there is a rectangle stencil / symbol that can indeed be cloned, but I think now that's only possible within the same drawing. Anyway, both ways for the technical implementation of multi-map symbol cloning are valid and could be realized by whomever willing to do it.

II - Another advantage of mm

In an IMS like UR, you'd have multiple items, each with a (rather short) title and then real content OR rather short details, explanations, etc. So, in analysis / projecting / planning / etc., you'd have lots of items, with their titles BEING displayed, and with lots of minor details, perhaps some words, perhaps 3 lines within the content / editor pane, and which would NOT be visible.

Now here comes, perhaps, the idea to get a 1-pane outliner, in order to have these short details visible, which in UR and such are invisible. That's perfectly possible, of course, but remember, a 1-pane outliner will not solve your problem of too-much-compactness of your "musing data".

Hence the interest of a mm prog: Here, you'd have a central topic (level 0 - bear this in mind, please, and if you consider the source item being level 1, add 1 to any number that follows), the name of the map in question, then, around this, some specific topics (level 1), and then, each of these have their respective sub-tree, with the specific subjects / ideas / etc. (level 2), and then, further down, they often have some details (level 3).

If you don't do lots of single maps, but only one very-big-map or just several rather-big-maps, you could be here at level 4 or level 5, instead of level 3, and that's as well as the system I detail here, given the fact that most mm progs (= don't buy any other / any crippled, "Personal" = not-"Business" version that can't do it) allow for switching from "big picture" to "display this branch only", and back again. Anyway, let's consider the level 3 as the "put descriptive details here" level and go back to our example.

In the following, then, you might look after levels 6 and 7, when I mention levels 2 and 3, no problem. The important is, I want to speak of those 2 levels where (in my case) 2 in UR would be single items titles, and the next level (in my case 3) would be the content of that same item.

So, again, we have level 1 containing what in UR would be headings (= not individual item titles, but the titles of "items" that in fact are parents to a group / subgroup".

And we have level 2, the UR item title. Now for level 3, i.e. the content of that same item.

It goes without saying that whenever you've got real detail here, a mm is NOT the right place to put that in, and you should perhaps put it into the NOTE field of that mm item, but perhaps not, since those note fields they are often bad, often worse, from their capabilities, and especially since they would constitue a FORTH separate entity for your things: You'll have the file system, the mm maps, UR or another IMS, so things in a forth body would not be a good idea imo, in most cases (there might be special cases where all SPECIFIC data go into a mm map system, and the notes there, and nothing else contained elsewhere - that would seem to be ok with me).

So, if there is real content, preferably do a link (from the mm item on level 2) to a UR item, or anything along those lines; anyway, such "real content" backgrounds of planning items should rather be the exception: In most cases, you'll get nothing, just two words, or perhaps even 2 or 3 lines of text.

Now, what to do with that "mini content"? Very simply, it'll become your mm level 3, and if it's too long for being visually ok within one level 3 item "under" the corresponding level 2 item, just split it up into 2 or 3 or 4 different such level 3 siblings - this cutting up will also force you to bring a max. of order / neatness into these bits. In exceptional cases, you could also split this level 3 then further up into level 4 bits, but my thinking is that whenever you must do this, you'd be far better off by thinking about it again and doing more level 2 items instead, with their details then in level 3 siblings.

This way, "EVERYTHING IS VISIBLE" (AND DE-COMPACTED, which isn't possible in 1-pane outliners), and that's a hefty advantage of mm over other techniques whenever you do planning or analysing work.

And, mm is a perfect means to "teach you" my motto (I have mentioned elsewhere): Make it hierarchical, yes, in order to get a first and main systematic framework for your material, BUT HOLD THAT HIERARCHY AS FLAT AS POSSIBLE:

And when I say, mm maps are perfect teachers for that motto to be adhered to, it's totally simple: When your mm map looks convoluted, you did NOT adhere to my motto, and when you re-arrange things as long as it gets to become a much better-looking map, heureka, it will be one considerably flattened-out!

Hence, mm maps are a PROOF for the validity of my "hold it flat" tenet, hence the multiplication of maps OR big maps, that in their big-map version necessarily convoluted, but that will - if you follow my maxim "more siblings, less grand-grand-grand-children" on the deepest levels - be as neat as the multiple maps, once you go down to the sub-branches that would constitute separate maps within the first model (= items level 0 in multiple maps, so items 1 in a big-map, here levels 1, 2, 3, 4 becoming levels 2, 3, 4, 5), and trigger "display current branch only".

III - Power Markers 1, 2, 3

I've been too late. In fact, there has been a work-around for clones, not over several maps - "of course" not, given the fact that nobody out there's willing to get into real coding troube but then present overwhelming results -, but over one map at least, which is the reason for my detailing the acceptability of the big-map paradigm above in Part II.

In fact, if you analyse a very big project, you would not split it up into many connected separate maps, but you would do a big map for that project, but work only on these level 1-entities (= which are equivalent to the level 0-source-items in multiple maps), by doing bookmarks or such for these level-1 items, go to them by shortkeys or mouse clicks in a list (as you would do with multiple maps in order to display them), and then, after triggering (best: by macro = 1 step: "show "virtual map 4 within a 20-map "big-map" AND ONLY show that "map 4" there"), and then work on that virtual sub-map, as you'd work onto map 4 of 20 different maps.

But now comes Power Marker (Poma, PM is Project Management, let's not create chaos) - ok, we're in Poma, und thus, MM country here. Even without Poma, you can put various "markers" onto your items, and then, you can "filter" for such markers, and even for combinations of them, but this will give weird graphical presentations. So back to Poma: It creates a second outline view (the main outline view being implemented in native MM), but here, the tree is by the marker(s) of your choice.

You got it, Poma for MM creates alternative trees, on-the-fly (cf. askSam)!

Now you wouldn't expect to have this even in the graphics, but then, you don't have clones, so you'll assign categories to items, with markers, and then, you'll get that tree showing these "marked" items only. That's far from perfect, but it's far more than you'll get anywhere else, except perhaps for clones in FM maps whenever they might be debugged.

Now, Poma 1 was 40 bucks (I suppose), Poma 2 was 40 bucks. Should have known about it then.

Well, then Mindjet get aware that Poma was a feature MM should have got by native implementation - and they are perfectly right about that. Now, what they did, is this: They bought Poma (hence non-availabilty from both sources for Poma 2 from then on), and they quickly brought out Poma version 3, with (if I dare trust the web, some Mindjet blablah about Poma, and minor debugging) - and they sold it for 2 times the price, which made that 80 bucks.

Should have bought then, anyway. (but wasn't aware of it of course)

Now, MM 2012, with integrated Poma! And the same is also integrated into version 11 (again, attention please, "11" comes AFTER "2012" - you cannot repeat this enough since at this very moment, the web is saturated with offers like "MM 2012, ONLY 430 euro / 600 bucks" - well, not even the current version 11 is even more expensive than that).

So, in my case, I'm stuck with a free version 8.2, without the chance to get Poma for that, and the total unwillingness to buy version 11, with Poma integrated, but at a price of more than 400 euro.

But then, I got an old trial version of Poma on my hdd (downloaded when I hadn't got MM yet, then forgot about it), so I'll can at least trial now (14 days only, I fear).

SO, I'm looking forward to buying, from someone having bought / updated to MM 2012 or MM 11, his unused Poma 2 (version 1 seems to have been buggy) or 3. (Look out for it in the web, on ebay worldwide or such: nada.)

Fact is: MM 11 is expensive and not outstanding, but it has got very good and highly needed features, so as for the competition.

Sideline: There are some PM offerings for MM that rely on synching back and forth with MS Outlook, i.e. relying heavily on Outlook's corresponding features in order to make them available for MM. I got both progs, but I'm not a fan of that integration. The MM-inherent graphic capabilities should be enhanced, not some info features from elsewhere brought within MM maps instead: That's good in its own way, but it's not a good replacement for all that's missing.

I'm looking forward to reconstitute my c: image every 30, 28, 21...14 (OMG!) days in the future, before being able to afford MM 12 or 13, at last.

Which shows that even third-rate solutions get much addiction (if not love), when first-rate solutions ain't available at any price.