A year or so ago a friend on Twitter asked me if I used or had ever tried any mind mapping apps. I had not. He was pretty excited and suggested a couple. I took a look at a couple and thought they might be useful for particular projects. I downloaded iThoughts and gave it a spin. Then I almost never used it. Why not? The short answer is that I think this is the sort of app that is useful for larger, more complicated projects and those happen to be the kind of projects I don’t take on very often.

Most of my work is of a repetitive nature, small one off projects finished in one to three days and most of them come in one at a time so I’m rarely balancing two or three projects at a time. Most of my work is website updates and document designs and layouts. I have no need for mind maps for these things.

In my initial test I came away thinking that mind maps would be great for long writing projects and larger projects that require more steps and ingredients than I usually handle. As it happens I’ve got a potential project coming up that would probably benefit from actually diving in with this kind of app. It’s only a potential project at the moment. It is a volunteer project involving the local library which may involved several people, organizations, and an ongoing and complicated process (compared to my usual).

A few days ago I saw the new version of MindNode was released so I downloaded it for the free 2 week trial. I spent an hour with each app and came away with the impression that iThoughts is a more powerful app in almost every way.

MindNode is better in the area of visual style with a couple of added features. It’s also got newly announced support for second, external USB C monitors which might be nice for some.

But iThoughts seems to be the more capable app. It’s got support for markdown in the notes for nodes, the ability to import a greater variety of objects, and far more export/sharing options. After an hour of using them I felt like I’d gotten a solid handle on how they each work (very similar) but also had the sense that I’d reached the limit of MindNode’s feature set.

With iThoughts there is more to learn and more that I could do. An example, the project I’m mapping, is a collaborative local history project which includes several small non-profits, various resources being digitized, a podcast and a website where the materials will be catalogued. iThoughts has the ability to work with special categories of notes such as tasks with due-dates, resources (people in orgs), cost calculating nodes, and project progress (for nodes that have tasks). Also, I can drag and drop contacts which will add clickable email links for the contact. I can also drag and drop websites and many kinds of files. Some files, such as Pages files, cannot be drag and dropped but can be added via the attach context menu. MindNode does not seem to support any of these features and really, they are the kinds of features I think I’d want to have available for the kind of project I’m likely to use a mind mapping app for.

Back to my case test, as I developed my mind map I wanted to add people to the workflow and add email addresses to those people. Ideally it would give me the option to add a link to the contact vCard but the email is what it attaches and in most cases that’s what I’d want. I’ll also be wanting to add project resources such as forms and documents and as already stated, this is no problem. Also in my case test I added a node for possible project costs. This is a potentially very handy tool! As new child nodes are added a designated parent node calculates the costs listed in each of those children. So, in my case, web hosting has already been added. Any new possible costs can be added as nodes and the parent will keep it tallied.

I’m liking the way this is going and I can see this being a tool I use for future projects of this kind. As this particular project continues, IF this particular project continues, I look forward to continuing with iThoughts.