I can’t believe how crowded the market for mind mapping software is becoming. Between desktop and web-based tools, it seems there is something new introduced almost every month. The latest entrant in this horse race is Cayra, which is currently at release 0.8.2. It’s built around the Microsoft .NET framework, and claims to combine mind mapping, concept mapping and topic mapping. The screenshot (above right) looks quite colorful and elegant.
Features announced at this time are these:
- Automatic and manual positioning of topics
- The ability to export maps to web page and image formats
- The ability to import MindManager and FreeMind maps (with plans to export to these popular formats in the works)
- Support for keyboard shortcuts
- Notes can be added to topics
- A window displays a linear list of map "nodes" (topics) – which may be useful for finding a specific topic in a map that is larger than the workspace
- Support for "clouds" (I assume this means you can assign text tags to specific topics in your map, to add context to them and as an aid for searching and filtering your map’s contents)
- At appears, based on looking at the screenshots on the Cayra website, that you’re not limited to one central topic, which means you can express more complex relationships between topics
I just found out about Cayra this morning, so I haven’t had a chance to download it and play with it. It looks interesting, but still appears to be in the early stages of development. The developer is aggressively seeking feedback from beta testers; you can download Cayra here.
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