Andres Aguiar's Weblog

Just My Code

MindManager, Requirements and Wikis

The MindManager people are working on a cool tool for VSTS.

I think it's a good idea, but when I was trying it I felt that I was doing something similar to what I do when I start writing ideas on our internal Wiki in the sense that I have a tree of related documents, that can be represented as a set of Wiki pages, and in each leaf there's probably a document describing the feature. In their tool they have a text editor to create it, but it would be much better if it was a Wiki page.

On the other hand, is much easier to edit and visualize the mind map than a set of Wiki Pages.

It would be great if we can mix both worlds and have an editor for wiki pages lets you visualize them and edit them as a Mind Map. If someone knows of such a tool, let me know!

 
Posted: May 05 2006, 02:45 AM by aaguiar | with 4 comment(s)

Comments

Russ Garner said:

You can sort of get this functionality today if you use external hyperlinks. Not sure if the MindManager stuff has it, but FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) certainly does.

It does, however, require that you manage the links between the mind map and the external wiki yourself. Probably better to think of the mind map then as an external index to your wiki pages.

Just out of interest, what do you use for your Wiki? I've used OpenWiki (classic ASP-based) and was wondering if there was a .NET equivalent.
# May 8, 2006 7:01 AM

Andres Aguiar said:

We started using OpenWiki, now we are using one that we wrote [http://gxwiki.genexus.com].

I could find the external hyperlink in FreeMind, I'll keep trying ;).
# May 8, 2006 12:34 PM

Russ Garner said:

In freemind, just right click any node and go to the "insert" menu. There are shortcuts for what you want, CTRL-K is the shortcut for any http-based hyperlink.

Once you're done with FreeMind, you can publish the mindmapped index using a Java applet. This works really, really well for consolidating many hyperlinked external resources.
# May 9, 2006 1:55 PM

Jason Haley said:

# May 22, 2006 10:26 AM