For our November “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected Freeplane, an application for Mind Mapping, plus Knowledge and Project Management.
Freeplane is a free and open source software application that is useful for thinking, sharing information and getting things done in a variety of settings. It can be run locally or portably from removable storage like a USB drive, and on any operating system that has a current version of Java installed.
Freeplane supports much more than classic static mind mapping, and comes with several useful functions. Among them are freely-positionable note taking; ordering of ideas into a hierarchy; classifying, connecting and grouping nodes; tasking with calendars and reminders and so much more.
Freeplane was previously elected “Community Choice” Project of the Month in June of 2014 and lead coder Dimitry Polivaev spoke about the project’s latest developments and direction. Recently we caught up him again to find out how the project has been doing since then.
SourceForge (SF): What significant changes have occurred with your project since you were voted Project of the Month in June of 2014?
Dimitry Polivaev (DP): We have rejected interface changes developed for version 1.4.x and came out with Freeplane 1.5.x containing other improvements.
The most significant changes are used in a new mind map template called BigMap.mm where all nodes are centered and all have the same width. I believe this new clean layout opens a new way of mind mapping different from the classical one. When the most graphical distractions are gone, the user’s brain does not need to filter them out. So the map becomes easier to read. Users can understand content better and stay focused longer. This structure is also optimized for nodes containing single words instead of whole sentences. It makes meaning of each node more evident. It becomes harder to overlook important content. All these changes enable freeplane users to capture, analyze and learn ideas and knowledge in a new effective way.
The new version also introduced map background images, cloned nodes, improved OpenStreet Map integration and support for high resolution monitors.
SF: What can we look forward to with Freeplane?
DP: Currently we are working on developing presentations with freeplane and on scalable icons. We also want to add some new graphical options to configuration of nodes and edges.
And we are still hungry to learn any new ideas about knowledge management which could become reality in Freeplane.