Don’t get me wrong, I love mind mapping on my Mac and iPad with native apps. iThoughts, iThoughtsX, MindNode and Curio are all things I get excited about. However, I’ve been spending a ton of time in MindMeister (a web app) lately.
I pay a subscription fee for it. I have a separate Fluid instance for it. Every time one of my maps changes on MindMeister, a Markdown version of it is synced to nvALT for local indexing.
But I’ve said most of this before. In that MindMeister-to-nvALT post, I mentioned the slideshow functionality. You kind of have to see it to understand why I’m enamored with it. MindManager has similar tools, but they’re absolutely rubbish next to MindMeister’s.
I haven’t used this for a presentation of any kind yet, but it looks stunning on a 27” display. I imagine it would look pretty good on a projector, too. And considering how easy MindMeister has made it to turn Markdown outlines into MindMaps, it tickles me to think of what I could pull off.
Anyway, here’s a brief taste of a small map turned into a slideshow. I used the auto-creator for this one, but you can jump around the map and highlight any topic, branch or group at any time (and fade the others). There are even several transitions to choose from. I digress.
I should quickly explain how this is done. You add “slides,” or boxes around the topics you want to highlight. They create squares at the bottom of the screen that you can reorder. You can create the boxes by highlighting them and clicking a “+” button, or you can just shift drag around a few nodes or branches and it will generate a box that fits automatically. Once you have everything in order, you pick a transition and go! I flipped through this one quickly just to show the animations, but every slide pauses for click and you can add as much explanation as your audience might need.
No, I’m not getting paid to gush about MindMeister. This referral link is the closest I’ll get.
And yes, I am actually working on a couple of pieces about mind mapping on the Mac and the process in general. Gotta keep plugging away at that tagging book, too…
