Mind Mapping: Inspiration
by The Editor
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Inspiration is a cross platform mind mapping application for Mac OS X and Windows, especially aimed at the educational environment.
From the Inspiration website:
Inspiration® is the essential tool students rely on to plan, research and complete projects successfully. With the integrated Diagram and Outline Views, they create graphic organizers and expand topics into writing. This powerful combination encourages learning in multiple modes. As a result, students gain and retain a better understanding of concepts and demonstrate knowledge, improving their performance across the curriculum.
Kirk Says
There are a lot of mind- and concept-mapping software products, out there, but none with the longevity of Inspiration. I have used this product since the early 90’s, and it is the fastest way to brainstorm a disparate set of thoughts into a cohesive relationship. Mind mapping software is limited to a set of hierarchies, while concept mapping allows relationships to be all over the diagram.
The 2 great things about Inspiration is 1) the ability to jump from a live diagram to a live outline and back, with all the changes instantly reflected in both views, and 2) the click and type - no dragging and dropping of a graphical element required. This second feature is the productivity boost that allows Inspiration to keep up with rapid discussions, collecting all the data. You just click in the diagram area and type - the default graphic shows up, populated with the typed text. Viseo and other drawing tools require that you pick your graphic first, place it, and then type - really laborious and in the way of most discussion dialogs.
Another neat feature is the drag and drop of any graphic into the drawing area, creates an object with handles, link points, and annotation blocks, automatically - very kewl. Add to your library, and you have a new set of custom graphics for reuse.
Auto-arrangements are really nice as well - quick tools to get things in presentable format.
Inspiration does not produce the prettiest of graphic output, but content is far more important that pretty.
You can create and type of process layout, and templates are provided for things like fishbone diagrams, and many others.
I wish that Inspiration attached connection links to the middle of a graphic, instead of the edge - rubber banding would look so much better than the manual clean up work required to make things most presentable, but this is a small nit. Also they market this to the K6 community, and not to business - a real shame, as this is a killer product for business reasons.
Jul 20th, 2006 at 3:32 am