Sunday, October 06, 2002

I have my instant outliner going again. Radio users can subscribe using the OPML coffee mug on DHRB. The new thing is that notification happens via instant messaging, not polling. And there's something really new in there. A remote procedure invocation protocol. They are not remote procedure calls because they don't return values and are asynchronous. But you can pass parameters, complex ones, using the encoding of XML-RPC. It's the loop-close on the work we did in Keystone with the Jabber folk last August. Works with AIM too. We're bootstrapping on the Radio-Dev mail list. [Scripting News] [Dave Winer: Radio UserLand] 8:10:38 AM    comment []

Tinderbox, Mind Map Pro, and Inspiration 7 overview (v0.1). ❑ Features ❑ Interface ❑ Ease of entry ❑ Mind Map Pro has a 'brainstorming mode" but it's really terrible. It consists of an outline data-entry system (which works fine enough) that seems to generate a text file which THEN can be imported into a diagram. It could be possible to make this a more convoluted process, but it would take some design skill. ❑ Tinderbox is also a little frustrating here (but unlike MMP, only a little.) It takes one too many keystrokes to add a new node (option-k) in map view, and when you do, the resulting node isn't connected to anything. But in Outline view, it's nearly as spiffy as OmniOutliner. But there are some BIG problems with using outline-mode generated nodes for mind-mapping diagrams. I'll get to those "shortcomings" in "shortcomings". ❑ Inspiration wins hands down. It takes at most one carriage return to add a node. You can almost start typing immediately once you put it in "rapid fire" mode (which you subsequently never need to take it out of.) ❑ Diagramming ❑ General Presentation ❑ "smart" arranging ❑ Mind Map Pro has a few options. Basic radial, and biased outline based arrangements. It's not terribly powerful, but it will balance your diagram if you add a bunch of nodes and make a mess. Of all three applications, Mind Map Pro produces the closest thing to traditional "mind map" diagrams that I've found. Oh yeah, there's no overlap problem with MMP. Big plus. ❑ Inspiration 7 is also pretty good. It offers a number of options for automatically arranging the map in radial clusters or outline-style layouts. It almost does a reasonable job of avoiding crossovers and overlap, but not quite, especially when you have a complex diagram with large text nodes. Because the connectors are straight lines, the result can be a diagram that makes it tough to find the center (especially if all your nodes are the same color, as is the case by default.) Also, if you have a deep, but sparse graph it won't do a very good job at filling space, yso you'll end up with a rather gangly looking thing. It's a legitimate spacial representation so I can't take too much off for it. however, it's virtually impossible to view on one screen (even a 23" LCD with 1900x1200). ❑ Tinderbox's auto-arrange feature needs some work. But since it's not designed around the mind-mapping concept it doesn't take into account the hierarchical relationship between nodes implicit in that kind of diagram. It doesn't produce the clustered radial diagrams that are fairly central to the concept. You've really got to organize the diagram yourself with Tinderbox. This is especially difficult if you've entered a bunch of nodes in the Outline view. See the "shortcomings" section for more information about all that. ❑ Icons/Graphics ❑ Mind Map pro truly litters the interface with bad icons and graphics. Seeing as you don't need to use them if you don't want to, I can't reasonably take points off for it, even though I'm inclined to. ❑ Inspiration has a few basic symbols, and perhaps more are available. The most notable thing to say about it is that the connecting lines are straight, they're not bezier curves. Seems trivial, but it makes a difference when you're trying to view your diagram as a whole. ❑ Tinderbox doesn't "waste" much time with this. The icons in the Map view (there are several types of views in Tinderbox) are rectangular, which is a little rough on the eyes. It allows you to change their color, but there aren't pages of cute little icons. Personally I think this is a virtue. I'd like the option of having auto-sizing ovals though. But, because people just might want silly sunglass graphics or lightbulb icons, I can't reasonably give them points for their spartan approach, as much as I'm inclined to. ❑ Open Architecture ❑ Scripting ❑ Neither Mind Map Pro nor Inspiration seem to have any scripting capabilities ❑ Tinderbox does present an AppleScript Dictionary, but frankly I don't know enough about AppleScript to know if that's anything other than a token gesture. It also has a fairly advanced (if somewhat obfuscated) "Agent" system that's supposed to be rather powerful. But I haven't had the patience to track it down and try it out. ❑ Export ❑ Inspiration allows you to export a diagram as either a graphics file or as html. The html export suffers the same delusion as the one in Mind Map Pro: It generates a graphic file and some boilerplate html to go around it. There are, however, several greyed out options in Inspiration's export menu. Damn shame their trial is so crippled. ❑ Mind Map Pro allows you to export to PDF, HTML, a graphic diagram OR a text outline. (we like the text outline!) ❑ Tinderbox has a real strength in it's export feature. It's far too powerful for me to take apart and catalog here. There's a sophisticated templating system for generating data-based representations of the Tinderbox information. The ramp-up does seem a little high. One point off for it's apparent inability to just spit out a graphic file of a diagram. ❑ Import ❑ Tinderbox doesn't seem to have an import feature, which I find pretty strange, all things considered ❑ Inspiration 7 has no import functionality I could find aside from a fairly obscure mention in the help file of importing an AlphaSmart outline. Never heard of AlphaSmart, but I'll go track it down for overview v0.2 ❑ Mind Map Pro surprised me a bit here. I was all set to just point at it an laugh until, on a lark, I tried to import a text-based outline. It did a pretty good job with a straight tab-indented outline file. This is really a nontrivial feature and caused me to go back and take a more serious look at this software. Now if it would import OmniOutline files directly I'd have a serious quandry between MMP & Inspiration. ❑ Storage format ❑ Inspiration and Mind Map Pro both use an opaque, proprietary file format. ❑ Tinderbox uses a thin XML dialect to store it's data. The possibilities are endless. ❑ Advanced Features ❑ Mind Map Pro and Inspiration are fairly similar in this regard. They are both basic mind-mapping packages. The number of real bells & whistles are few. ❑ Tinderbox starts far beyond where the other two packages leave off. ❑ Between scripting multidimentional relationships between nodes, prototyping, open-ended user-defined attributes, Agents, templating, and a host of other things, Tinderbox has a feature set I'm not likely to exhaust in the next several years. ❑ Shortcomings ❑ This is misleading. Mindmaps are fundamentally outlines. Child nodes are spawned from parent nodes in a very simple N-way graph that is very well represented as either an outline or a radial cluster. Tinderbox doesn't really see things that way. If you go to outline mode and create an outline of nodes, those nodes are considered to have a containment relationship with each other. This means that if you then switch to a "map" view, that you'll have your top level nodes, but no children until you "zoom" down into them. So you can never have your whole diagram on the screen at once. This is my fundamental beef with Tinderbox, and why I keep saying it's "not real mind mapping software". It's frustrating because all the functionality is clearly present, it's just not wired together in that permutation. ❑ Prices ❑ By some strange synchronicity, all 3 packages price at almost exactly $150 ❑ Overall ❑ Of course, it all comes down to what you're looking for. I could (and have) gone on for pages reviewing and cataloging features in these three apps. ❑ If you're interested in "true" mind mapping software in a box and aren't particularly concerned with interoperability, aren't using it to generate source code, and want to print and distribute pretty diagrams, I'd say go with Inspiration. But definitely check out Mind Map Pro as well. It really may just come down to flavor. The feature sets of the two applications don't seem to differ appreciably. While Mind Map pro clutters the screen with garbage, it also is capable of producing the most spartan diagrams of the three packages. Check them both out. ❑ However! If you're looking for a truly powerful piece of software, but aren't necessarily interested in "according to Hoyle" mind maps, Tinderbox exists in a vacuum, void of competition (that I'm aware of anyway.) It does have it's quirks and usability one-offs that can make it a pain in the arse to use until you're used to it (which I am not yet.) For me that is a trivial price to pay for something I can use to visualize the contents of my A.D.D. head, generate ER diagrams (and database DDL), C++ source code, LaTeX documents, html, and any other damn thing I can imagine, either from within the application itself, or through crafty use of any xslt engine available. The learning curve is steep, but if you're up for the climb, it's well worth it. I would even go so far as to say that within a couple major versions, if they get the interface right, it could belong on the same shelf as emacs. ❑ This all being said, there exactly two pieces of information that matter here: ❑ If I had the background I would have done this overview in Tinderbox and just generated the html. ❑ I do NOT have that background, so I did it in Inspiration 7, but had to manually re-enter everything into OmniOutliner and export it from there (I have my head set on maintaining the overall structure of the "document".) Eventually I will transfer it to Tinderbox and generate the LaTeX & Html, just to prove some stuff to myself about living documents. But not today [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] 8:04:48 AM    comment []

Michael Wilson reviews outlining tools:  Inspiration, Mind Map Pro, and Tinderbox. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 7:51:54 AM    comment []

Thinkblank. Javascript code that links in posts made in your weblog with the similar links in other weblogs. It uses MIT's blogdex as a means of aggregation. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 7:47:59 AM    comment []