Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Mind Mapping with XMind

Originated as the brainchild of Tony Buzan (a famous psychology author and educational consultant), Mind Mapping has been used by many people as a great and interesting method to visualize and organize their thinkings, ideas, decisions, planning, problem solving, etc.

Mind Mapping can also be used for group of people during discussions, brain storming, note taking, etc.



XMind is an easy to learn and easy to use general purpose mind mapping application. Its diagram objects can be easily switched for mind maps, fishbone diagrams, tree diagrams, org-charts, logic charts, and even spreadsheets.

Being developed in Java, it is cross-platform and can be run in Windows, Linux and Mac OS. For Ubuntu and Debian Linux users, XMind is also well packaged as DEB distribution file for easy installation. There is also a portable version which doesn't require installation to use.

XMind has user interface in different languages, including English, Chinese (simplified & traditional), Japanese, German, etc.

Starting from its Version 3, XMind which was once proprietary and selling at US$299 has gone open source since 14 November 2008. This is really a good news for mind mapping fans. This mind mapping application now comes in 2 flavours - the free XMind and subscription based XMind Pro.

Click here to read about how XMind can be used by different people, such as meeting organizers, project managers, teachers, department members, students, team managers, architects, designers, etc.

In order to download XMind or XMind Pro from their website, you are required to create a free user ID in their website. With this user ID, you can collaborate with other XMind users in the community, share your maps with others, etc. There is a huge collection of sample maps available in their website.

3 comments:

  1. You map is beautiful. why don't you upload it to share.xmind.net and embed a viewer into your blog?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi,

    The illustration map is in fact a snapshot of one of the shared map inside the XMind.net repository.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Link to the mind map source:

    http://share.xmind.net/slyfox/brain-rules/

    ReplyDelete