Tag: mindmap

Mapping thoughts in xml

since the new mindmanager release sports an xml file format, i decided to buy it. i hope to link in external xml sources, and use mindmanager as a visual RDF editor eventually. the necessary developer information is not yet available, but apparently xslt will go a long way. some of the immediately usable features are:

Google search tool: Click on this map part, and a search form appears. Type in your search term, and MindManager X5 Pro grabs the top 10 search results from Google for your search term and displays them in a new topic. These 10 sub-topics contain URL link and notes icons. If you click on the URL icon, you can navigate directly to that web page. If you click on the notes icon, the program opens the notes pane and displays the text that Google displayed for that site in its search results. You can also annotate these results, making this map part a useful research tool.

you can also link in rss feeds.

the xml format does not look as nice as it could have, and one wonders why mindjet did not go with XTM (extending it with their own namespace to capture formatting information). here is a sample:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<ap:Map Dirty="0000000000000001" OId="F2io9NtNRUepjliURM596Q==" Gen="0000000000000000" xmlns:ap="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003" xmlns:cor="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003" xmlns:pri="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Primitive/2003" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Delta/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Delta/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Primitive/2003 http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Primitive/2003">
<ap:OneTopic Dirty="0000000000000000">
<ap:Topic Dirty="0000000000000000" OId="F0V9qynjdkiLsQieUwCCww==" Gen="0000000000000000">
<ap:TopicViewGroup Dirty="0000000000000000" ViewIndex="0"/>
</ap:Topic>
</ap:OneTopic>
<ap:StyleGroup Dirty="0000000000000000">
<ap:RootTopicDefaultsGroup Dirty="0000000000000000">
<ap:DefaultColor Dirty="0000000000000000" FillColor="fffee49e" LineColor="ff000000"/>
<ap:DefaultText TextAlignment="urn:mindjet:Center" TextCapitalization="urn:mindjet:None" VerticalTextAlignment="urn:mindjet:Top" Dirty="0000000000000000" PlainText="Central Topic">
<ap:Font Color="ff373737" Size="14." Name="Trebuchet MS" Bold="true" Italic="false" Underline="false" Strikethrough="false"/>

pretty nasty if you ask me. make no mistake though, i think mindjet have leaped forward a lot, and i can’t wait to see interesting xsl transformations being applied. i will play around with it in the next couple days.

fixing opml, or bootstrapping?

danny ayers asks what i think of oml, an attempt to fix opml.
i would agree that opml is not the best format ever, but its what we have to work with imo. i have seen many attempts to fix opml, but i’m personally more interested in leveraging formats than creating new ones. if you have to extend opml, i would personally go for namespaces, and not just add arbitrary elements. kinda the rss 2.0 approach.

danny is working on ideagraph, a mindmap meets outliner meets semantic web application. it supports weblogs, rdf, foaf and a couple other niceties. very cool. danny should definitely attend oscom 3.

Removing bottlenecks

RSVP is a well-known method of reading. It allows for very fast reading. Using RSVP some people can read 2000 words per minute, compared with most people’s reading rate that averages 300 words per minute.

i totally need that. absorbing information is my main bottleneck these days. any increase would have enormous consequences. if i could speed up my reading 5 times.. jeez!

the wall street journal is picking up on one of my favorite programs, mindmanager. i still hope that someone like microsoft picks up on that and finally gives us tools to think, not just dumb office suites to process finished concepts.