The Great Escape
I love MindMapping!
In 2006 when I bought a Mac, I started learning something new about myself, I processed information visually, I never knew this, the Company I was working for at the time encouraged this way of thinking. I evaluated several Applications for MindMapping and decided in that the Best tool for the Job at that time was NovaMind, it worked very well and uber colours :D, It was very expensive - Another thing that was importnant to me was flexibility, the ease of use to migrate away from any application at any time, and the ability to open my files with another program, there was tools like FreeMind which is OpenSource, but in my honest opinion was and still is lacking some basic features.
In October 2007, Leopard was launched, it was and still is awesome, however, there was one annoying bug, I couldn’t print my MindMaps with NovaMind 3. It was a bug, I contacted the NovaMind support, to inform them.
Here is the response :
“Hi Karl,
Unfortunately NovaMind v3 is not supported on Leopard, only NovaMind v4 is compatible. NovaMind v3 was built on the Tiger technology and we cannot therefore guarantee any stability on Leopard. You may wish to consider upgrading to v4. You can do this in the online store.https://www.nova-mind.com/Store/
Scroll down to the upgrade button, you will need your version 3 key and then select the product you wish to purchase. We don’t recommend Express for previous v3 Owners as it has limited functionality compared to the v3 product, hence the price.”
So now they force me to upgrade at a cost of $60.
I’m feeling, I already made an investement. Now you punish me, by not letting me save my MindMap in the most “primitive data format”, paper.
This reopened my eyes to proprietry software, yet again, the shackeles where cutting deep in my ankles, not making me run, the way I should.
The Curtain lifts : XMind. Comes to the rescue. I have been using XMind probably for 3 Months now and I’m very impressed their Ultimate / Pro version costs $49 a year this includes upgrades. I haved decided to migrate all my Maps from NovaMind to XMind.
So how do you do it ?Simple ;) Export NovaMind Maps to MindManager XML, Download MindManager, Open your Map, Save the File as a mmap file and import it with XMind. It’s takes long, but it’s worth it.
Benefits of XMind.
- Multi Platform
- Open Source
- Free or Subscription Model (Pro)
- Built on Eclipse
- Works on PC-BSD / Mac OSX / Ubuntu
- Cheap in comparison to other Proprietry MindMapping Programs (Pro)
The XMind Normal License : Eclipse Public License v1.0 and GNU Lesser General Public License v3The XMind Pro License Agreement The Pro version isn’t OpenSource, Licensee may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Software.
Consider MindMapping,I use it for Work, my Personal Life, Personal Goal setting, Explaing information to others. Add me as a friend : http://share.xmind.net/kmfischer/
Final Thought : You have the choice of choosing, please consider choosing Freedom.
