MindNode Pro - Preview

This week, I take a look at a technique that's received a lot of kudos in both education and business and that's mind mapping.

This week's show takes you through the basics of mind mapping on the Mac using an application called MindNode Pro. I take a look at the basic concepts and show you how to use MindNode Pro to create beautiful mind maps.

Many mind mapping tools produce pretty ugly maps but MindNode Pro is very ""Mac like"" in that it allows you to produce very clean and elegant mind maps.

This week I take a look at a technique that's received a lot of kudos in both education and business and that's mind mapping.

You can create a mind map to help you ""generate, visualise, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid to studying and organising information, solving problems, making decisions and writing"" - Wikipedia.

Wow! But what is a mind map?

Basically it's a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. It's not a list but an evolving tree like structure that helps you think about the central theme and allows you to visualise the information in a non linear way. Apparently, it matches how our brains work!

But you're not limited to just using mind maps within MindNode Pro, there's a whole host of export options to export your mind map in PDF, FreeMind, Image, HTML and Text formats.

Most interestingly, you can also export in OPML allowing you to transfer your MindMaps directly into OmniOutliner 3 and onwards into OmniFocus. Use MindNode to brainstorm and tweak your projects, then import into OmniFocus to track them!

Of course, it would be great to transfer or create MindNode Pro mind maps on the iPhone or iPad. Well you can with MindNode Touch. This contains a subset of the features of MindNode Pro but allows you to simply transfer mind maps created on the Mac onto your iOS device or vice versa.

MIndNode Touch also allows you to create new mind maps and amend existing ones on the go.

Finally, I demonstrate an alternative mind mapping application just for the iPad or iPhone - iThoughtsHD.

In detail, the show covers:

• Introduction to Mind mapping
• MindNode Pro Basics
• Creating Nodes
• Folding Branches
• Connection Lines
• Formatting Nodes and Branches
• Smart Layout
• Adding Images, Files and Links
• Exporting
• Importing into OmniOutliner
• Creating an OmniFocus Project
• iPhone and iPad Integration
• Transferring via eMail
• Transferring via WiFi
• iThoughtsHD for the iPad