Mindjet, the maker of MindManager 8, has recently launched a mindmapping application for the iPhone.
I’ve recently purchased it and I can tell you from first hand experience it’s wonderful. Here are some of the key features:
- Attach notes to topics – with hyperlinks to phone numbers, websites, e-mail addresses and other Mindjet maps
- Wirelessly upload/download maps from your Mac or Windows computer using your favorite web browser
- Auto align and arrange topics relative to each other
- Zoom and scroll in either landscape or portrait mode
- Cut, copy, paste, move and merge topics
- Insert icons and colored topics
- Choose from multiple topic shapes
- Expand and collapse topics
There has been a lot of talk on blogs about the program being identical to iThoughts (another iPhone mindmapping program). Yes, it is true, as I have iThoughts as well.
But there are some differences. For example, the icons in the Mindjet program are identical to the icons found in the desktop version of MindManager 8. So, your iPhone mindmaps have the same look and feel as your desktop mindmaps.
As for overall functionality, following iThoughts wasn’t such a bad idea. They clearly had the best mindmapping interface for the iPhone (or one of the best, depending own your preference). Now, you can have that same functionality, but with MindManager icons. Fantastic!
For more information on Mindjet’s iPhone application, click here.
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I think it depends on how you define “best interface”. There’s a lot more to a good interface than cramming in as many features as possible. It’s important to stop and consider fitness for purpose and likely usage patterns for mobile productivity applications, rather than simply aiming to reproduce all of the features and functionality of a desktop application (in fact Apple specifically recommend against this – and for a very good reason).
We’ve deliberately opted to take a different approach with iBlueSky and have focussed on aesthetic integrity, ease of use and focussing on the features which are most appropriate for mobile use. So we allow text entry within the main mindmap screen to eliminate distracting screen transitions while capturing ideas, we minimise the number of button presses to access the most frequently used features, branch colours are picked directly from a palette, we ensure the app behaves as you’d expect an iPhone app to behave and make sure all features and buttons are large enough to press on the first attempt every time.
Adding features via the simplest programming approach is relatively easy. Getting the user interface right is much, much harder, takes more time and is a lot more subjective.
Feature count is irrelevant if the tool gets in the way of capturing a steady flow of inspired ideas. And that’s how we measure what constitutes “the best user interface”.
Point taken. I updated my blog post. —Chance