March 08^th, 2005

It's a great read. Even if you just want to get a lesson in reframing and misuse of medical studies in the highly disputed case. Read Lindsay Beyerstein's analysis.

On saturday, I had breakfast with an old friend of mine, a top-notch consultant. It works like this: every few months when we both can find the time, we meet for breakfast and bounce ideas off each other. This usually leaves me feeling quite exhausted.

This time, he told me about Mind Manager. A software he uses religiously to create mind maps of his projects, already during meetings, to catalog tasks and ideas. The software even lets you export to Powerpoint and Word, so it makes it easy to create the minutes and even manage the project by assigning deadlines. Until now, I used JOE for this. I find outlines more intuitive for my uses, but I'm lost as soon as I try to present it to my customers.

So now I'm looking at Mind Manager and I like what I see. MindJet LLC. really transferred the rapid editing capabilities of an Outliner to the graphical representation of a mind map. The only problem seems to be able to quickly add longer text. In an outline that is just another subnode that I subsequently hide while I'm editing the rest of the document, in Mind Manager it seems that I'm not able to do that. I may be wrong, I've been playing with this software for 10 minutes now :-).

However, I already solved one problem: the OPML export. Using a XSL/T stylesheet by Gregor J. Rothfuss, I can convert Mind Manager's native XML format to OPML. So now, I just have to find a macro or something to help with importing OPML, then I'm all set.

Updates follow...