Review: MindManager an excellent organization tool

Posted by Don Foy Oct 31, 2006 at 3:44am

I’m organized. Honest, I am! Everything I do is organized—into piles.

In my living room, where I do most of my columns and reviews, there’s a pile of stuff that I’ve reviewed or that I need to review. On my desk, in the den, is a pile of bills and store receipts waiting to be paid or filed. At the office, my desk has piles of cables that I used in a recent hardware upgrade, plus a bunch of the paperwork involved in that upgrade.

As you can see, I’m organized—NOT.

So when I was presented with Mindjet’s MindManager 6 for Mac, I thought to myself, “If I can get organized with this, anyone can.” I also thought, “Who is crazy enough to ask someone like me to review an organization tool?”

Fortunately it’s a mind organization tool, so it’s a small task for me. 

And in reality, MindManager won’t help with that kind of organization. What this program does is represent your ideas on screen. Whether those ideas are a project, or the syllabus for a class or an organizational chart, MindManager was written to help you organize it. And you can organize it in your own way, with a little help from the program. 

I had never heard of Mindjet before, but their web site claims they are the market leader in mind mapping (or concept mapping). They say MindManager is used by a majority of Global 2000 companies. The Windows version of their software was first released in 1994, so it’s been around a long time.

The story of the company and the software is quite inspirational. The first release of the program was written by Mike Jetter as he suffered with myeloid leukemia in a German hospital ward isolation room. The illness and the software and intertwined all through the story. I would encourage readers to check out the story at http://www.cancercode.com. Mike and his wife Bettina have written a book, available at the Web site, about the experience.

But on to the software. This is slick software. I didn’t find any glitches. I was able to double-click the icon and begin using the program immediately. There’s good documentation with MindManager, including a quick-start guide, but if you’ve used a Mac very long, you won’t have to worry about that. Just click and go.

The Good

One of the biggest mistakes many software companies make when they make the jump from PC to Mac is to forget to make their software look like it was meant to run on a Mac. Mindjet didn’t make that mistake. MindManager looks like a Mac program. It works like a Mac program. In fact, I made a note in my MindManager map of this review that MindManager uses the same elements as Keynote and Pages, two programs I use regularly, including being able to edit the toolbar to your own preference.

It’s obvious that, while this program is in its infancy on the Mac, it is a venerable program. Although I only used the program enough to write this review, I did a couple of different things with it, and it was easy to do what I needed to do with it. Never once did I say, “I wish it did this.” It did it. And I have no doubt that folks wanting to do complex things with this program will find that it will easily handle the most complex of tasks.

There are layouts and themes and charts for just about any task you might be charged with organizing. You can add notes to any topic or sub-topic. Same for hyperlinks. You can attach files to a topic or sub-topic. On large charts you can filter what you see, and the program also takes advantage of Apple’s Spotlight technology, so that topics and subtopics are indexed and searchable in Spotlight.

And those are just the highlights. This review is getting too long already.

One final item in the good category — the program forces you to organize your thoughts.

The Bad

It forces you to organize your thoughts. Seriously, I couldn’t find anything wrong with this program. I tried, honest I did.

The Ugly

Move along, nothing to see here.

Conclusion

If you run a business or are in charge of projects at work, this is a must-have program. It’s also something to consider if you’re a PTO volunteer or help with major fundraising projects for non-profit groups. If you can think of it, there’s a way in this program to represent that thought. I used it to organize this review, as well as to organize my thoughts on a couple of upcoming software and hardware upgrades I’m working on at work.

A lot of programs I review, I wipe off the hard drive after writing the review. I’m keeping this one.

MindManager 6 for Mac is Universal Binary, so it will run equally well on a PPC or Intel chip. A free trial of the software is available at the Mindjet Web site, http://www.mindjet.com.

System requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.x (“Tiger”) or better; PPC G3, 733MHz or better; Intel Cord Duo 1.67 GHz or better; 256 MB RAM minimum, 512 MB recommended; at least 70 MB hard disk space; display resolution of 800×600 required, 1024×768 recommended. 

MindManager 6 for Mac costs US$229. A free viewer is also available.

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10. 

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