Zengobi's Blog: Sighting: Best Mind Mapper

Sighting: Best Mind Mapper

Saturday, March 28, 2009

I just received an email regarding a recent LifeHacker post where they are discussing the best mind mapping application. I was happy to see that Curio is mentioned a view times in the comments.

If you want to give a shout-out for our little app then we'd certainly appreciate it! To vote for Curio your comment entry on LifeHacker must be "VOTE: Zengobi Curio".

Admittedly some of Curio's mind mapping functionality pales in comparison to some of the über feature-rich mind mappers out there. However, I think one concept that makes Curio unique is the ability to have multiple mind maps, plus outlines, plus notes and image collages, all on the same idea space. It's that freeform whiteboard environment that makes Curio pretty amazing, IMHO. And, of course, we do have some new cool mind mapping features planned for upcoming releases. :-)

7 Comments:

When ARE those releases?

By Chris, at 8:15 AM
Curio is NOT an mindmapping program.

It fails to produce anything meaningful as output. All the mindmaps can give is images, no outlines, no nothing.

As of now, Curio is a conglomerate of wannabe features. There is much development needed to make it into anything useful. Currently, anyone who wants idea organization/mindmapping is advised to save his/her money and time and get something else than Curio! It´s just hype with no real substance.

By Beru, at 9:02 AM
The saying is 'style with no substance'.

Either way there is substance there. It might not have all the features a dedicated mind mapper such as myself wants, but offers a lot more than mind mapping software does under its development paradigm. My suspicion is that it is akin to a developing photograph, the pieces are all there and functional, but will take a few more releases to fully develop.

I think it is a very promising beginning .

By Chris, at 9:35 AM
Beru: I certainly appreciate your honest feedback!

Don't forget that you can click on the mind map and export it as OPML, a plain text outline, or a rich text outline. So you don't just get an image.

(OPML is a standard supported by many other mind mappers, outliners, and project managers.)

We're trying to tackle what 80% of users need in mind mapping. If you need fancier tricks then definitely go to a dedicated mind mapper. (Of course, we have lots of cool ideas for future releases....)

We have many people that start a mind map in Curio and bring it into MindMeister or FreeMind (as discussed in the Curio User Manual) to do more full-featured mind mapping.

Again, I appreciate the feedback everybody...

By George, at 11:07 AM
well, after really struggling with it for 2 days, I now am ably to use it almost for what I wanted to use it for - just that I have to do it in a totally different way than I had imagined ;)

By Beru, at 5:34 AM
I'm one of the people who suggested Curio on the linked post - still trying to get my workflow arranged in my head, but loving Curio so far!

By Lawrence, at 6:33 PM
In my opinion, mind mapping is only a tool used during the infant stages of development. Essentially, a mind map is nothing more than a glorified tree structure. After the infant stages, you'll likely want to move onto more concrete and useful organizational structures, each customized for various "nodes" of your mind map tree. This is where Curio really shines. It is the freedom to use tons of different organizational structures, all in the same idea space, or spread out over multiple idea spaces. And this says nothing about the multiple types of media that are directly embeddable in a Curio layout. I've demoed many mind-mapping programs, but Curio stands out as the most promising and flexible.

By Alfred J. Fazio, at 3:25 PM