Brainstorm Program
Mind mapping is a great way to brainstorm, make a plan, or turn ideas into the steps needed to make it real. Thankfully, there are great tools out there to help you build mind maps, organize them, and save them for later. Here's a look at five of the best, based on your nominations.
Earlier this week, we asked you which mind mapping tools you thought were the best. We tallied up your nominations, and now we're back to highlight the top five.
The best way to learn how to use Brainstorm, like any other academic software, is to benefit from local experts. However, you may be the first one in your institution to consider using Brainstorm for your research. We are happy to provide comprehensive online tutorials and support through our forum but.
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The poll is closed and the votes are counted! To see which of these five great mind mapping tools took the top spot, head over to our Hive Five Followup post! There you can read about and discuss the winner!
- Sep 25, 2013. LucidChart is a powerful diagramming application that helps you quickly capture and organize ideas during a brainstorming session into a single useful mind map. It features a suite of tools including real-time collaboration, built-in Google image search, custom themes and social sharing. The auto-spacing.
- Apr 21, 2013. Mindjet is more than just mind mapping software—it's a total suite of applications and tools designed to help you and the people you work with brainstorm, stay on top of projects, collaborate on tasks, and stay organized together. It's more like a complete project management and collaboration suite.
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Mindjet (Windows/Mac/iOS)
Mindjet is more than just mind mapping software—it's a total suite of applications and tools designed to help you and the people you work with brainstorm, stay on top of projects, collaborate on tasks, and stay organized together. It's more like a complete project management and collaboration suite. It has an extremely powerful mindmapping and brainstorming tool however, designed from the ground up to help you organize your projects, assign different arms of your projects to different people, flesh out all of the individual to-dos and jobs required to make the whole project a success, and it works just as well if you're working with a hundred people, a dozen people, or just organizing your own to-dos. Plus, it integrates with web services and tools you already use, like Microsoft Office, Box,net, and more. Anyone familiar with the old tool MindManager will be happy to learn it's been rolled into Mindjet's individual apps. Most of Mindjet's users are companies willing to pay for it though: It's $15/mo per user for the individual plan, and $30/mo per user for the enterprise plan.
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XMind (Windows/Mac/Linux)
XMind has been around for a good long time, and it even made the roundup the last time we looked at mind mapping apps. It hasn't lost its power though; it's still extremely flexible, works great on any desktop OS, and makes it easy to organize your ideas and thoughts in a variety of different styles, diagrams, and designs. You can use simple mind maps if you choose, or 'fishbone' style flowcharts if you prefer. You can even add images and icons to differentiate parts of a project or specific ideas, add links and multimedia to each item, and more. If you're a project manager, you can even use XMind's built-in Gantt view to manage tasks in a way your colleagues may be familiar with. Best of all, XMind is completely free and open source. If you have some cash to spend, XMind Plus and XMind Pro offer some additional import/export and presentation features, along with some featured targeted at project managers and businesses who want to use XMind on the enterprise level. Plus will set you back $79 one-time, Pro is $99 one-time, and a subscription to Pro and all of its updates is $79/yr.
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Brainstorm Program Windows
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Coggle (Webapp)
Coggle is a completely free, simple to use mind mapping tool that's easy to get started with. Sign in with a Google account of your choice and you're off and away. Double-click on any item to edit it, and click the plus signs on either side to add branches to your mind map. Click and hold to drag them around the canvas to design your mind map any way you like. Coggle will automatically assign different colors to your branches, but clicking on a branch will bring up a color wheel so you can personalize it yourself. When you've finished a map, you can download it as a PDF or PNG, share it with others who can just view it or, if you allow it, edit your mind map. You even get auto-saving and revision history, so if you want to see what your mind map looked like before someone you invited started working with it, you can. Best of all? Coggle is completely and totally free.
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Freemind (Windows/Mac/Linux)
Freemind is a free, GNU General Public Licensed mind mapping app built in Java, so it runs on just about anything you throw it at. It was the winner of our last poll, partially because of its flexibility, and because its features and performance are pretty consistent regardless of the operating system you use with it. It's a pretty powerful mind mapping tool too, offering complex diagrams and tons of branches, graphics and icons to differentiate notes and connect them, and the option to embed links and multimedia in your mind maps for quick reference. Freemind can export your map as HTML/XHTML, PDF, OpenDocument, SVG, or PNG. Compared to a lot of the newer tools it may look a little dated, but it's still powerful and useful, especially if it's function you're looking for, not form.
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MindNode (Mac/iOS)
MindNode is an elegant mind mapping and brainstorming app for OS X and iOS. The iOS version is designed to work well on touch devices, specifically the iPad, and makes it easy to drag branches around, add new nodes, connect nodes, share documents with others, and more. The Mac app is similar, and supports sharing your mind map with others and exporting as PDF and as a Freemind project. MindNode can automatically hide branches that have nothing to do with the items you're working on, embed images and screenshots onto nodes, create links on nodes, and even automatically organize your branches for you if they get messy. It can also support linked mind maps. The UI is relatively clean and hides a lot of its features in order to keep things clean, but that doesn't mean it's not powerful. Many of you who nominated it pointed out it's one of the first mind mapping apps you've seen that really does things right on a tablet. MindNode is $20 for the Mac app, and $10 for the iPhone/iPad app.
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Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to put them to an all out vote to determine the community favorite.
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Honorable mentions this week go out to Scapple and MindMeister, both of which just missed the top five by one or two votes each. Those of you who nominated them praised them for their ease of use. We recently praised Scapple for bringing dead simple mind mapping to the Mac, and we've loved for MindMeister for years. It made the top five the last time we asked you, so it's still a great tool. Also, props go out to Pen and Paper (or whiteboards, if you prefer), which many of you said were your brainstorming tool of choice.
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Still, the nominations were so close this time, we're willing to bet you have a favorite that may have been left out! If so, let's hear what it is and why you love it in the discussions below. Include a screenshot or a photo of the app in use if you can, just so we can see what's so great about it!
Have something to say about one of the contenders? Want to make the case for your personal favorite, even if it wasn't included in the list? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Don't just complain about the top five, let us know what your preferred alternative is—and make your case for it—in the discussions below.
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The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it's not because we hate it—it's because it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!
Title photo by Marco Antonio Torres.
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A mind map is a diagram that allows you to visually outline information, helping you organize, solve problems, and make decisions. Start with a single idea in the center of the diagram and add associated ideas, words, and concepts connected radially around the central idea.
We’ve collected links to websites and software that can help you create mind maps, and collaborate on and share your maps with others. The programs and websites listed here are all either free or have a free option.
FreeMind
FreeMind is a free mind-mapping program written in Java. It supports folding and unfolding with one click and the ability to follow HTML links stored in the nodes to websites or local files. You can drag and drop nodes to copy one or more nodes and to copy text or a list of files from outside the program.
FreeMind also provides a search function that shows the results one by one as you “find next,” unfolding only the nodes for the items found.
Mind maps created in FreeMind can also be exported to HTML with the folding capability converted to links.
XMind
XMind is a free, open source mind mapping program for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X that allows you to plan, capture, organize, and act on your ideas. XMind’s Mind Toolbox allows you to setup relationships between topics, boundaries around topics, summaries of selected topics, labels to categorize and annotate topics, and markers used to express specific meanings, such as priority or progress.
XMind can also be used to create organization charts, tree charts, logic charts, and more, even within one map. You can share your mind maps on the web.
XMind also has Plus ($79) and Pro ($99) versions that offer additional features. You can also sign up for a subscription to XMind for $79 per year.
For more information about XMind, see our article that describes using the Linux version of the program.
iMindMap
iMindMap Basic is a free mind mapping program for Windows and Mac OS X useful for brainstorming, taking notes, planning and organizing, and managing tasks. You can even use it to deliver 3D presentations.
Some of the useful features in iMindMap are the Icon Library, the notes feature that allows you to add a variety of content into your maps, and the ability to export your mind maps as .jpeg or .png images.
There is also a Home and Student version available for £49 and an Ultimate version for £149.
Blumind
Blumind is a simple, but powerful, free mind mapping program for Windows that supports multiple chart layouts, such as organization charts, tree diagrams, logic diagrams, and more. The program supports themes and contains a lot of built-in themes you can customize. You can also add notes, icons, progress bars and other widgets to your maps.
Mind maps created in Blumind can also be exported to multiple formats, including JPG, PNG, SVG, and TXT.
Blumind is also available in portable format.
NOTE: If you’re using Windows XP or earlier, you need to install the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or later (4.0 standalone installer or 4.0 web installer).
TheBrain
TheBrain is a mind mapping program for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X that allows you to capture and organize all the ideas and thoughts in your head and digital information, such as webpages, documents, images, and notes, and more.
The free version of TheBrain allows you to create an unlimited number of Thoughts and links and add rich formatting to your notes and webpages to Thoughts. You can perform a full content search of your notes and generate basic reports.
When you download TheBrain, you can try all the features of the Pro version ($219) for 30 days. After that time, if you want to keep using the advanced features available in the Pro version, you need to pay for the upgrade. However, if you don’t upgrade, you can continue to use TheBrain Free Edition to add new Thoughts and notes, without losing any of your work.
Compendium
Compendium is a free software tool that allows you to manage your information and ideas and the connections among them.
Use Compendium to manage your personal digital information resources. You can drag and drop any document, website, email, image, etc. into the program and organize them visually and connect ideas, arguments, and decisions related to these items. Compendium can help you collect and make sense of disparate material normally stored in different software programs. You can also assign your own keywords, or “tags,” to the items and create your own icons that have special meaning to you.
WiseMapping
Brainstorm Program Free Download
WiseMapping is a free, online mind mapping editor for both individuals and businesses that doesn’t require you to install anything on your computer. It allows you to easily share your maps with others by embedding it into any webpage without using plugins. You can also import maps from and export maps to FreeMind, mentioned earlier in this article.
Mind42
Mind42 is another free, simple, online mind map editor with easy navigation for large mind maps, using zoom and “birdview.” You can also attach notes and images to branches and link branches to websites and see a preview of a site when you rollover a link. They also provide an online user guide to help get you started.
Freeplane
Freeplane is a free, open source mind mapping program that allows you to organize and share your thoughts and information. You can use the program to take freestyle, unconnected notes (like post-its) or to order ideas into a hierarchy using lines. Nodes can be connected with links, connectors, and labels, grouped using visual containers, and classified with metadata, or attributes.
You can also create tasks from your maps with calendars and reminders. Your entire map or individual nodes in your map can be password protected with DES encryption.
Freeplane functionality can be extended with add-ons and custom scripts. Download free pc games cd key generator.
These programs and websites should give you a start on organizing your thoughts and ideas. If you’ve discovered other useful brainstorming or mind-mapping programs or websites, let us know.
Brainstorming Programs For Free
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