I admit, I first thought that "mindmapping" was some kind of esoteric wellness hype for bored dentist's wives - I know this proves me rather ignorant than sceptic. Forunately I am sceptic enough to mistrust my own sceptiscism and sometimes force myself to try out things that appear "esoteric" to me. Such as Freemind, a Java based mindmapping tool, which turned out to be extremely useful, easy to handle and not esoteric at all. En contraire, Freemind is a very logic and systematic tool - it even forces "hackish" natures to think in an effective and even reproduceable way - more: I'm actually even having fun in planning projects or concepts step-by-step, while creating a presentable concept that I can mail to collegues or customers immediately. Any time I did so, they called back the same morning, telling me how interesting my concept seemed and if I just had the time to explain some details - much better than the "canonical" way, annoying them for weeks util they are willing to listen to some endless and hard to understand Geekspeek.
Long talk short end: Freemind is open source, the full package is 8MB small and will run under a recent JRE. Sun's actual JDK will do fine - you might have to start freemind.sh rather from a ksh than from sh or bash.
BTW: The screenshot above shows the layout for a video installation I will run together with two other VJs on Saturday March 11th in a Berlin club.
mindmapping, Freemind
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