Mind Mapping dilemmas

Friday, October 13, 2006

I've been playing around with Mind Mapping software for some time now, especially with MindJet MindManager on Windows. However, that software was provided for me by a previous employer, and now I if I want to continue with this I need to buy my own solution. There seem to be quite a lot of options on the market, even for the Mac, which is unusual. And now that MindJet 6 has been released for OS X, choice gets even more complex. There is no doubt that MindJet is expensive. Very expensive, in fact, as many reviews have pointed out. There is also a highly regarded alternative, Novamind, which is cheaper, has many more features, and has won awards. And there is the venerable Inspiration, although that is a little different, more diagramming than mind mapping. But MindManager for Mac really has a certain style and flair which makes it tempting to ignore the huge price tag.

Mind Manager 6 (here actually the free viewer, as my trial has expired)

At one point I decided to buy it...but then I actually found that this is extremely difficult. I am living in Switzerland, in the Italian speaking region. Mindjet's online store forces me to use the German website, and will not allow me to buy anything other than the frigging German version. I don't want the German version! I'm sick of umlauts! An email to customer service was not a lot of use - rather than try to help me give them money, I was fobbed off to an obscure Mac vendor in Oberschwarzwaldenzeeuntofikonberg, or wherever. They didn't even mention than I could buy the English boxed version from Valcenter, who at least I know and trust. But anyway, I don't want a box. I want a license. So very expensive, difficult to buy, unhelpful customer service...and yet. But anyway, I decided to be sensible for once, and investigate Novamind. The trouble with most mind mapping applications is that they are clock-stoppingly, terrifyingly ugly. Lurid interfaces, dreadful clipart, total creativity killers. Inspiration, or Concept Draw, are top contenders for the so-ugly-even-their-mothers-hate-it award. Novamind is not exactly beautiful, but it isn't as bad as some. Their icon is really nice! But one thing Novamind is not, to be in any case, is intuitive. It is really, really opaque. Right-clicking brings up bizarre pop-out icon trays (can't think of anything else to call them) which appear to want me to set options. I just want to add a branch, but I can't figure out how. Dragging branches around is another that just doesn't seem to work consistently, even after reading the instructions. Finally I had to resort to the outline view, but by that point I'd forgotten what I wanted to do.

Novamind and its strange pop-outs

So Novamind, to me so far just kills off the flow of ideas, which is the last thing you want. Nevertheless, it has some great features. The screenwriter output is really good for creating scenarios as design inputs. And it is well under half the price of Mind Manager. But Mind Manager is intuitive, gorgeous, inspiring and stylish. But to be honest, the feature comparision with the Windows version is pretty unimpressive, even if I wouldn't want most of it. Export to Visio ? Yuck. So I don't know what to do yet. I guess I'll try a few Novamind tutorials and see if it all clicks, but my feeling is if you have to read the manual to use this type of product, then it isn't working properly. Of course, if I was famous, I'd get a free copy of Mind Manager. But I'm not. A weird thing about Mind Manager is that it was recently reviewed my MacWorld (USA), who gave it a very high score - which MindJet marketing are all over. It was also reviewed at the same time by MacWorld UK, who usually carry pretty much the same reviews - and they absolutely buried it. Unfortunately their reviews are not freely accessible on the web, but the general gist was "pretty but hopeless overpriced, under-featured and buggy". Seemed a touch unfair to me.

Share your OPML

Friday, June 09, 2006

The latest craze promoted by Dave Winer is Share Your OPML. Nothing wrong with, in fact it's a good idea, and I've finally got around to participating. However, I do wonder if the tireless Mr Winer wasn't in just a bit too much of a hurry in building the site: Look at the text, then the check box. The text says "It (sharing) defaults to on". The check box label, which actually doesn't say anything about turning anything off or on, but can be assumed to do so, defaults to unchecked, indicting that sharing is off. The text also says that sharing might be undesirable (true), so it should indeed default to "off". But it also says that one should "give thought before turning it on". My core reaction to this is "huh ?"

Practice before Preaching

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Whilst searching around today for some authoratative statements on web typography, I came across Richard Rutter's pages. This seems like it should be interesting. Unfortunately, however, as a web site it does not stand up very well. Flaws spring to the eye immediately. First, the home page seems to think it is a book cover. Cute, but for a start, surely the topic is quite clearly NOT print? And worse, the few links provided are at the bottom of the page, well below the "fold" on VGA screens (yes, people do still use them). Going a bit further, it gets worse. Viewed with IE6sp2, the text column on the Introduction page behaves very strangely. There seems to be a strange mouse over effect which rewraps the last paragraph, and the last line of the previous one, breaking the left margin alignment. In the next section, (Rhythm & Proportion), it gets worse. The formatting of the link list at the top right is clearly broken, and the links themselves are not clear. As for the Introduction section, the main body text suffers from some strange behaviour. Finally, the use of italics in the typography of the title, "The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web" doesn't seem to make much sense. Italics are used to convey emphasis, and here I cannot see what is being emphasised (or de-emphasised). To my mind, "The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web" is one version that would make more sense. Does all this matter? Yes, because I cannot recommend it to developers who havs a problem with text layout, issues, because they will immediately notice the implementation issues and mistrust the message. To me, the arbitrary use of text decoration reduces my confidence in the content. Since I followed a link from a site I have very high confidence in, Douglas Bowman's Stopdesign, overall I still trust the content. But this really illustrates that when the message is about the medium, the medium really is the message.

World Usability Day 2005

Friday, November 04, 2005

Yesterday was the first World Usability Day, conceived and co-ordinated by the UPA. I decided to go along to the event held at the round table event hosted by the Universita della Svizzera italiana, in Lugano. Seeing as Lugano is situated in a small and relatively isolated part of Switzerland, not known for it's IT industry (at least not any more...), I was pleasently surprised by both the number of participants and the quality of the presentations. One bit of useful information which I picked up was finding out about the existence of Roger Pressman's work on software engineering processes. Although I haven't had any time to follow this up yet, it seems that he is one of the few people - or possibly the only one - to have thought about the integration of usability engineering into a full blown iterative software development process. Certainly something worth following up.

Redesign Part 1.

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

After weeks of reading wise words on information architecture, usability, designing with web standards and other esoterica, I have finally started on some practical stuff. It is a lot easier reading about all this stuff than it is putting it into practice. My plan was to follow a strict ground up plan based more or less on the the Elements of User Experience. To some extent I did this, and forcing myself to go through at least part of the exercise was both useful and educational. It is all very well using these theories in a relatively abstract context working as a small part of a large machine, but applying them to my site, where I am the client, the designer, the developer, the content provider, not to mention approximately 98% of the audience. The pressure I felt to just "get on with some real work" was quite high, especially as I knew that the Movable Type part of the site was in a real mess. Also I have very little time available for this, mainly 40 minutes or so of commute time every day. To make best use of this time I tried to find design tools I could use on my Palm. I'll talk about these in a seperate post. I had (and still have) many ambitious plans in my head for both the visual and non visual design, but putting them into practice is another matter. Inspiration which flows freely on the tram or in the shower seems to dry up when I sit down in front of the screen and realise that in fact I have no idea how to do a particular trick in CSS. Practical problems intrude as well: StyleMaster from Westciv is a great tool, but v.4.0 is very buggy which means that time spent learning new features was largely wasted (v4.0.2, now released, seems much better). Finally I decided to attempt a full overhaul of the Movable Type templates, to rationalise and slim down the stylesheets, and to attempt some stopgap cosmetic improvements. I also wanted to make some usability improvements in link styles and navigation. I had about 4 hours to do this. Although it was all done in far less than ideal circumstances, some of the planning I did whilslt commuting helped a lot. For example, analysing my business requirements led me to understanding that a prime objective of this site is self promotion, and there are two aspects to this: Photography and Other Stuff. This led to the further realisation that my so far unintegrated blogs provide two ready made pillars for the site architecture, and that I should seek to take advantage of this. part of a high level site information outline It also occured to me that I might be able to use Movable Type for more than weblog publishing, but also as a CMS (Content Management System). A quick Google revealed that I was far from the first to think of this. I think a full blown MT driven site is beyond my resources for now, especially as I would have to integrate the photo publishing part, but it is tempting. For now I've settled on a quick fix, using mt-rssfeed plugin to add topic titles to the home page, providing some semblance of integration. I think that the experience so far is positive, but there is a way to go yet! [Posted from the scene with hblogger 2.0]