Edwin’s Mind Mapping Blog

Dan Woods, CTO and editor of Evolved Technologist, recently wrote an article (link at bottom) on Forbes.com, and explained very well why mind mapping works for long writing projects, especially when you  have to work on multiple projects at the same time.

Dan first stated two problems of the traditional, linear way:

1. First, writing is a series of creative activities, it’s not a work that you start from the beginning all along to the end, it’s rather a non-linear way like Dan explained:”We brainstorm, interview someone, or review a transcript and want to add a note to another part of the outline. We page up or down, find the right spot, and then add the note“,and the problem is that

   “It doesn’t take long for paging up and down to become frustrating and exhausting, like running up and down flights of stairs to do your work.“

2. The second problem happens when you return to a writing project from other work or another writing project -when the information is stored in an outline and notes, you have to slog through pages of material to refresh the context and recapture your thoughts, and actually most of the case the context you captured isn’t quite complete.

Dan then explained how mind mapping solves the above two problems:

• The two-dimensional space of mind maps allows you to navigate around quickly with mouse, and put an idea in the right place in the hierarchy, expanding and folding the level of detail as needed. Because this is quick and easy,  engages capturing more ideas and reorganize them faster.
• When you return to a mind map of the writing, the context of the latest thinking is quickly restored, nothing is missing or lost, because you can see the big picture of the writing project and the relation between different parts.

Other benefits of min mapping for writings:

1. Capturing ideas from an interview. I think this is because with mind maps you don’t have to write long sentence, you mind will not be interrupted so that you can follow the interviewee.
2. Taking notes when  reviewing a transcript or other material.

BTW, I’m excited that some features of the upcoming professional version of MindVisualizer mind mapping software will make the long writing projects easier

Click here for Dan Woods’ great article about mind mapping for wring.

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The author of the mind mapping software blog Chuck Frey has just added a post to invite his readers to share their thoughts about creative problem solving.  According to the mind mapping related discussions taken place in Chuck’s blog, I can imagine that this will be another hot topic, as a mind mapping software developer I can’t wait to see the insightful comments that are supposed to be upcomming!Join the discussion now 

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Google has just now introduced a long-awaited feature for Google Apps (formerly known as gmail for your domain) – contact picker, and it’s really what I expected!

Now the “To: “, “CC:” and “BCC:” next to the recipient list box is clickable, as following:

And you click on it the “contact picker” window will pop up:

In the “contact picker” window:

1. On the top is the search (filter) box, as you are typing the search string the contacts will be filtered instantly, so that you can locate a specified contact easier. Nice! This is a filter-as-you-type feature, like what we implemented in our mmind mapping software MindVisualizer   . Note: You can only search for contact names but cannot search for the domain part of the contact’s email addresss.
2. Under the filter box is the contact group, and there are 3 built-in groups: “my contacts”, “most contacted” and “suggest contacts”. And you can even define your own groups, see below.
3. The contact list is below the contact group, which you can click to select.
4. The selected contacts are displayed in the bottom area, and once you click Done the selected contacts will be added to TO, CC or BCC box in the email composing window, depends which which link you clicked to call up this “contact picker” window.

To conclude, it’s a great feature which many google apps  users (and gmail users? Sure!) have been hoping for a long time, tough I think the “filter as you type” search box should support filtering against the whole email addresses. And I believe this great function will be supported in gmail very soon!

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You know what? I use MindVisualizer to design MindVisualizer nowadays

I recently talked with Bob Walsh about using mind mapping in one’s MicroIsv business and here is the brief  descriptions of my usages:

1. Running   SWOT analysises :
   1. List all competitor products I can find on the Internet;
   2. List all advantages and disadvantages for each of them;
   3. Use colors, icons and fonts to identify important parts I need to pay more attentions.

   By seeing the big picture, it’s a really a better experience than doing SWOT with tables or other non-visual approaches.

2. Making up my pricing strategy:
   1. List all my competitor products;
   2. List all available editions for each of them;
   3. List the unit prices and discount strategies for each.
   4. Compare and get your pricing strategy out.
3. Planning new features:
   1. Brainstorm all ideas;
   2. Identify features by its importance, with icons, colors, whatsoever;
   3. Identify whether a feature should be in the standard edition or professional edition;
   4. Like work breakdown in Project Management, I can breakdown features into functions;
   5. I can even turn the listed features/functions into tasks by assigning a scheduled date, expected duration, etc.

As you can see there are a lof of things for MindVisualizer to do with task scheduling part, in fact that is what we are working on – a project called ProjectVisualizer

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