These are the clues which will lead you back to this note in the future. It is worth the time and effort to add a relevant metadata to a note as you create it whilst it is still fresh in your mind. If you have a large corpus of notes without any metadata then they might as well be written in a foreign language for all the good they will be to you. So how can you locate an item of information? It is all in the metadata, the information about information. The art of a good note taking program is providing facilities for the user to be able to locate an item within their notes even though they have forgotten almost everything about it. Things like references (links), indexes (tags) and categories have been used in computer programs to ease the location of information. Over the years librarians have come up with many tools for dealing with this problem and many of these tools have been adapted for the digital era. This is a problem which has existed for as long as there have been collections of documents. You can also have several mind maps open simultaneously.Īlpha version in active development by very committed community led by truly devoted, democratic developer.If you have a large collection of notes then there will be times when you cannot find the note which you want to find even though you know that it exists somewhere within the collection of documents. Many flexible export options for printing in other formats, like outline. Very responsive, flexible, customizable pleasant to use. Can handle a huge amount of data, organized either while entering or afterwards. I’ve been using it for a year or so, tried many other solutions to the problem of GTD / journal / logging, and it just plain wins. It forced me to understand better how I think because it is so flexible. The biggest problem I had was trusting that I could find what I entered, and learning the groundrules of this approach to hierarchical organization. So much easier to reorganize the data hierarchy. Beats the pants of wikis because everything’s on one page, neatly hidden till you want to see it. I prefer it hands-down to FreeMind, which I used previously, and the prettier-skinned options like XMind. With Freeplane, both challenges are made a bit easier. Charting the mind can be a difficult task, just like trying to keep track of the seemingly chaotic running of your thoughts. For some this may be a problem, but for those who want total control over the creation of their mind maps without having to pay anything Freeplane is a fantastic tool. Take time to experiment with the F-keys to learn more about how they can make building mind maps easier and more thorough as you get more familiar with the program.įreeplane does not have the snappy graphics that some of its competitors do. They allow you to manipulate not only nodes but the content held within the nodes. To be able to get a handle on the program you also need to become familiar with the various functions made possible by the quick keys listed along the top of the program. You can similarly create sibling nodes at the same depth as a highlighted node by clicking Enter. If you do not like the position of the child node simply click and drag it to somewhere more convenient. By pushing the insert key while a node is highlighted you force a branch from it and will automatically be given them option to name it. This allows you to begin constructing branches from your core concept and really start making a mind map that helps you and others follow your thoughts. The most important of these is the insert function, which allows you to create new nodes from a parent. In attempting to build your mind map you will want to start by learning a few simple ways of manipulating the information on the screen to create a series of nodes that helps you map out your thoughts. Doing so illustrates how thoughts can topics can be linked together through the mind map layout and what sort of results you can expect once you finish constructing your project. As such, opening the tab titled User Manual and exploring a mind map that has already been created can be a good first step, even if you do not care to read the manual’s contents. Freeplane has a lot of different buttons, and sorting through them in the beginning can be rather difficult. The first thing that will likely strike you as you look upon the program’s interface is how complicated it appears at a glance. Installation is a breeze, and Freeplane should automatically launch once you have worked through a few quick setup pages. Freeplane is a larger download than most, sitting at a bit over 16MB, although you still should not have any problems fitting it on your system unless you are already approaching critical mass. To try it, simply follow this link to the program’s download page.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |