Topics covered include:

• Tinderbox for the Mac
• How to create mind maps for complex topics or issues
• Best sources for map templates on the web
• Using mind maps on a smartphone
• When should you use MindManager vs. PersonalBrain?

Please be sure to send me your questions for the January coaching call. You can use the contact form on this blog to submit them or send them to me via Twitter.

Starting in January, these coaching calls will become part of the Mind Mapping Insider membership program. In other words, they will only be available to members. Click here to learn more and join the Mind Mapping Insiders program.

Topics covered include:

• Uses of PersonalBrain vs. traditional mind mapping programs
• Publishing visual maps to a web page that can be viewed without Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Which mind mapping programs enable you to attach multiple objects per topic?
• What is the best way to share maps and collaborate with people who don’t do mind mapping?
• What do you know about SmartDraw? How does it compare to mind mapping software?
• Recommended Android apps

Please be sure to send me your questions for the November mind mapping coaching call. You can use the contact form on this blog to submit them.

At the end of this year, the coaching calls will become part of the Mind Mapping Insider membership program. In other words, the contents of coaching calls starting in January 2011 will only be available to members. Click here to learn more and join the Mind Mapping Insiders program.

Also of great interest in PersonalBrain 6 is its tighter integration with the developer’s online map sharing service, WebBrain.com. In the past, to publish a brain to this online community, you had to first “zip” your file, then manually upload it. With version 6, the process has been simplified; all you have to do is use the “synchronize with WebBrain” command in the program’s file menu to send your map to this online repository. By default, all of the files you sync to WebBrain.com are private. This gives you the freedom to play around and get comfortable with these tools before sharing your maps with the world.

In addition to private, you can designate uploaded brain files as unlisted (only visible to people you specify) or public (accessible by anyone). In addition, You can configure Personal Brain 6 to automatically synchronize your maps to WebBrain.com – which makes it act like an online backup system for your brains. You can also use this capability to synchronize your brains between several computers, especially useful if you utilize Personal Brain at work and want to be able to access your maps from your home PC.

Signing up for an account at WebBrain.com was simple and straightforward. I created a brain to document the new features of PersonalBrain 6 and uploaded it, which is accomplished via a “synchronize with WebBrain” command in the file menu. My brain was quickly uploaded; when the process finished, a message popped up momentarily on screen, informing me that all of the thoughts in my brain synced successfully. Good attention to usability! When I looked at my WebBrain account, my brain was there, with a thumbnail image displayed side by side with some usage statistics. When I viewed it, it looked exactly like the desktop version, right down to the slowly rotating shape at the center of the “plex” (PersonalBrain’s name for the program’s workspace).

Later that day, from a different PC, I logged in to WebBrain.com, opened this brain and added several more topics to it. The interface of WebBrain is simple and straightforward. It does one thing and does it very well.WebBrain.com has also been enhanced to easily share your maps with others. You can e-mail or tweet links to your brains from within this browser-based application; it gives you the option of sharing an entire map or creating a link to a specific thought within a map. In addition, you can easily generate code to embed your brains within any web page, in much the same way that you can embed a YouTube video in your website.

Under the hood, Personal Brain 6 has a new database back end, which is faster and more reliable than previous versions, especially for large maps (more than 10,000 thoughts). According to the developer, Personal Brain 6 is twice as fast as version 5.5. This new “engine” will be most appreciated by businesses that are using PersonalBrain to create knowledge bases with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of topics. In this new version, brains can now be unlimited in size.

User interface improvements

The tabbed area at the bottom of the screen – where you can view notes, attachments, tags and other topic embellishments – has been improved in PersonalBrain 6 to make better use of space and reduce visual clutter. The calendar has also been updated so you can view more events. In addition, the PersonalBrain calendar now syncs with Google Calendar. The enables you to “push” calendar items to your Google Calendar account and vice versa.

One of the truly unique new features of PersonalBrain 6 is something the developer calls “transparent mode,” which makes your brain translucent and enables you to access and use any applications that are running below it, while at the same time utilizing the full functionality of PersonalBrain. Clever? Undoubtedly. Useful? Yes. Unless you have a large flat screen that enables you to display programs side by side or are one of those rare people who only have one or two programs open at a time, windows are almost always stacked on top of each other. Transparent mode eliminates the need to toggle back and forth between PersonalBrain and your other applications.

Transparent mode can also help you to streamline your productivity when doing online research. You can be viewing information on a web page, and making notes about your findings in your brain. Once your map is in transparent mode, you can switch it to something called mini-mode, which displays only the active topic. If you click on the name of that topic, a search bar pops up and you can easily search for content within your brain, without having to open it up on your desktop. These are some innovative user interface developments, to be sure. I’m just not certain how often I would employ them in day-to-day use of the program.

Links to individual thoughts

With this release, the developers has added a  new capability called “thought URLs” that enables you to reference a specific thought in your brain from anywhere. If you create a thought URL and place it on your desktop, for example, double-clicking on it launches PersonalBrain and takes you directly to that thought in your brain. No other developer of mind mapping software offers this capability.

To test this, I tried it with one of the topics in my PersonalBrain 6 features map. You make a topic active in the plex, then right-click on it and select the “copy thought URL” command. It generates one of the longest and ugliest URLs I’ve ever seen. But that doesn’t matter, because this capability worked flawlessly. The developer says this new feature also enables you to create links between brains; you simply place the thought URL for the map and topic to which you want to link in the notes area of the brain you’re currently working on.

I can see how this capability could be very useful to serious users of PersonalBrain. Why create a large brain containing a lot of data, only to have to open the program and drill down to your topic with multiple clicks – or be forced to conduct a keyword search for it and then sift through the results? This capability enables you to create a shortcut to that exact topic, so you can reach it in a single click (or a double-click from the Windows desktop).

Concluson

PersonalBrain 6 continues to break new ground in power, flexibility and usability. In particular, thought URLs are a welcome addition, because they enable you to access a specific piece of knowledge within a visual map that may contain hundreds or thousands of topics. In large knowledge bases, that’s absolutely essential. I also really like the seamless integration of PersonalBrain and WebBrain.com, because it enables you to access your brains anywhere. Other features, such as transparent and mini-mode, may be useful to you or maybe not, depending upon your work style. Finally, in a world where social networking has quickly become the norm, the ability to share maps via tweets, e-mails and other online sharing services is much appreciated.

PersonalBrain 6 is a complimentary upgrade to registered PersonalBrain 5 users who purchased after February 1, 2010. New Upgrades are $119.95 for other users of PersonalBrain 5. A new license for Personal Brain 6 Pro is $249.95. For $50 more, you can purchase the Pro version plus a one-year WebBrain premium services package. Otherwise, after a 30-day free trial, continued use of the publishing and sharing features of WebBrain costs $6.25 per month.

The Most Improved Mind Mapping Software of 2009 is (drumroll)… MindManager.

The top 5 most improved programs, based on 215 responses, were:

1. MindManager (26.0%)
2. NovaMind (20.9%)
3. iMindMap (11.2%)
4. PersonalBrain (11.2%)
5. XMind (10.7%)

To view the full results as a stacked bar chart, please click on the image above.

It’s no surprise to me that MindManager was ranked number one. It has tremendous name recognition in this niche, and after some incremental improvements and a mediocre attempt at creating a collaboration tool (Mindjet Connect) in 2008, the company finally got it right in 2009 with Catalyst, a polished, full-featured collaboration environment that is really quite good.

This survey also shows us which programs are coming on strong as innovators. Gideon King and his development team at NovaMind have been relentless in pushing the envelope in terms of what’s possible with mind mapping software. It’s really cool to see that you, the readers of this blog, recognize their efforts, by NovaMind the second most improved mind mapping program in 2009 – and, significantly, only 6% behind MindManager!

iMindMap and XMind are fairly new entrants to the field of mind mapping software, making it very impressive that they came in number 3 and number 5. It appears that users and fans of mind mapping software recognize their developers’ commitment to innovation, too!

Finally, the survey results demonstrate that some of the developers of mind mapping software need to do some work in building name recognition. DropMind Desktop (37.7%), MindView (31.2%), VisualMind (30.7%) and MindGenius (27.9%) led the pack in terms of software programs that respondents weren’t aware of. DropMind is fairly new, and MindView was formerly OpenMind (the name change took place in early 2009), so those relatively high numbers are easy to understand. The other two programs have been around for a while, and I’m not sure why respondents aren’t aware of them.

Thanks to all of you who participated in this interesting survey!

Easier, more powerful reports with display filtering: A new reports quick-pick menu enables generating most reports with just two clicks. Powerful custom reports using multiple criteria can now be defined utilizing multiple types, tags, and attachment criteria. In addition, custom reports can be named and saved for future use.

Faster, more flexible visualizations, including improved animation and maintaining a memory of the last view that was in use when the file was closed. In addition, on mouseover of a link, if either one of the links is off-screen, it is displayed on screen while the link is highlighted. Also, the layout stabilizes and reacts faster to input such as repositioning of thoughts or linking and unlinking of thoughts.

Streamlined user interface: Many menus and other user interface elements have been cleaned up and refined. Version 5.5 also offers a new tags user interface that displays tags in multiple columns for more efficient use of dialog box real estate. In addition, default notes styles let you easily modify colors and fonts for all notes within your Brain.

Revamped calendar with recurring events and more: The event creation and editing user interface has been overhauled and the entire events system rewritten to enable additional capabilities, including recurring appointments and additional fields on every event to record the appointment location, description and percent complete. In addition, reminders in version 5.5 are now optional and can be set to occur at a customizable amount of time in advance of the event.

Keyboard shortcuts for virtually every command: Most commands in PersonalBrain 5.5 can be accessed by keyboard commands, which are now user-configurable.

Integrated screen-capture capability: This is a convenient method for grabbing any portion of your screen for use as a Thought icon. From the Thought menu, select Capture Thought Icon. PersonalBrain minimizes and a selection target appears on your desktop, which you can then use to select any area of your screen. I used this feature to select a desktop icon, which was instantly added to the presently selected topic in PersonalBrain.

Thought spellchecking: In the new version of PersonalBrain, when you create a thought, misspelled words are automatically highlighted and can be right-clicked to view. Words can be added to the program’s dictionary, which is also used to spell-check thought topic notes.

Expanded preferences: Expanded preferences allow fine tuning of the user interface, including options for wander speed, size of “distant” thoughts (when this option is turned on, you can view two levels of child thoughts instead of one), spacing between thoughts and much more. PersonalBrain 5.5′s export capabilities are also improved; you can now export thoughts, attachments and notes into a flat or hierarchical set of folders with a single command.

There are many more updates included in PersonalBrain 5.5, which is a free upgrade for users of version 5.0. For more details, please see the PersonalBrain 5.5 updates page.

A new outline view, which creates a visual hierarchy of topics and sub-topics, similar to a text outline (see screen shot at right). This outline can be expanded or collapsed one level at a time or on a case by case basis, which gives you a lot of control over how much or how little information you display in the workspace. Considering the sometimes-confusing nomenclature of PersonalBrain (gates, relationships, pins, etc.), this is a welcome addition to the program.

Tags are now centrally managed, making them easier to use and easier to apply consistently to your maps. In addition, you can easily switch to a map view that displays only tagged topics in both the workspace and any reports you generate from PersonalBrain.

A new Presentation Mode displays your map full screen, without any toolbars or dialog boxes.

New import options: PersonalBrain 5 can now import MindManager and Freemind maps, as well as Word outlines, Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) files, Web Ontology Language (OWL) files (used in semantic web applications) and Internet Explorer and Firefox bookmarks. The ability to pull data from other programs into PersonalBrain maps should definitely be attractive to many users.

User interface enhancements: The menus have been reorganized in PersonalBrain 5 to make key commands more convenient. Also, the “plex” (the program’s map workspace) can now be panned using a keyboard command, rather than just the mouse. In addition, the mouse wheel can be used for both scaling and scrolling of thoughts.

Spotlight integration: The OS X version of PersonalBrain 5 supports Spotlight integration, which means you can now search inside file attachments contained inside your Brain or externally linked.

Outlook support: You can now drag content from Microsoft Outlook into your maps. Considering the amount of ideas and knowledge that get passed around most organizations in the form of e-mail, this is a much-needed addition to PersonalBrain 5!

You can download PersonalBrain 5 beta here, or purchase version 4.5 now and receive a free upgrade to version 5 when it is released.

Enhancements in version 4.5 of PersonalBrain include:

• Advanced search and indexing: PersonalBrain features a powerful search that lets users shift focus to anything that comes to mind in seconds. Live search results appear as users type, prioritized based on usage data. As users’ Brain files become larger and more complex, I’m sure that this enhancement will be appreciated by many people.
• Improved distant thought view: PersonalBrain’s display engine has been enhanced to enable users to view second generation thoughts, which helps to provide them with greater context of their current location and where they can go when navigating large Brain files.
• Merging Brains and copying thoughts: In version 4.5, users can merge the contents of one Brain into another and use sophisticated copying functions to leverage a set of thoughts and relationships in new contexts.
• Excel and Word import and export: Information contained within Word, Excel and other applications can now be imported into PersonalBrain. Exporting your Brain’s contents into Microsoft Word only takes a few steps, and should be a boon to people who need to create complex, multi-faceted documents, such as book writers and executives preparing detailed business plans.
• Multiple levels of undo and re-do editing: Users can now re-consider their actions when adding items to their Brains, even undoing multiple steps in one mouse click.

This program just keeps getting better and better. I can’t wait to play around with version 4.5. I hope to get my hands on a copy soon, and will let you know what I think!