Gyronix, the developer of GyroQ, a marvelous tool for capturing ideas and automating the process of adding them to your MindManager maps, has just released an even more powerful version 2, which offers MindManager 8 and Mindjet Connect compatibility, and adds several new tagging and map building enhancements.
GyroQ 2 is now MindManager 8 and Mindjet Connect compatible, which means you can easily send your tasks and ideas to any map, whether it’s stored locally on your computer or within a Mindjet Connect workspace. It’s nice to see a developer supporting this extended mapping environment!
New “send to project” tagging: The first version of GyroQ could be made to send ideas directly to a specific branch on a specific project map, but not without some really complex scripting. This capability is now built into GyroQ version 2. You can enable this by way of a right-click command in MindManager, which opens a dialog box where you can name the tag and give it a 2-3 letter shortcut. When you tag a topic in this way, a little yellow “tag” icon appears next to the designated topic. From then on, whenever you assign that tag to an idea, it will be added to the topic within the map that you have specified.
The other big new feature of GyroQ 2 is a Map Builder Wizard. Simply put, if you have a process where you need to capture a specific set of information, the Map Builder Wizard can automate that for you, providing a pop-up window that asks you the questions, one at a time, captures the answers, and inserts them into your map (see screen capture, above right). The Wizard is accessed via a right-click command.
The magic behind the scenes happens in a separate map that is used to formulate the questions and the order in which they will be asked. GyroQ 2 reads this map and generates a script based on it that populates the pop-up window to ask the questions in your main map. For example, any topic that you tag with a question mark icon becomes a question in your Map Builder script. A question topic with 3 sub-topics becomes a drop-down box with 3 choices. Notes are used to store the question text. It all sounds a little complicated in writing, but is clearly explained in a video demonstration by Nik Tipler from Gyronix. What’s important is that you don’t need to be a programmer to set up a Wizard, because you create it using MindManager tools that are very familiar.
GyroQ 2 also includes several other enhancements, including the ability to archive up to 5 past queue files, so you don’t lose your ideas if GyroQ crashes. Also, in the program’s settings, you can choose a Mindjet Connect map as your default map.
GyroQ 2 is available for $49.95 from a special page within the Gyronix web store; however, if you watch Nik’s video, you’ll learn about a special promotion code that will reduce this price to $24.97. You can also download a 15-day trial version from this page. This looks like a worthwhile upload to what I consider to be one of the most valuable MindManager add-ins.
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