Mind Manager from Mindjet

One of the most valuable tools I have in my techwriting arsenal is Mind Manager offered by http://www.mindjet.com/.

I am able to pump out and order my ideas in a matter of minutes instead of using Visio and labouring over getting things lined up. There are icons and markers readily available to annotate sub-topics and text notes that can be used to reference ideas and to expand on those ideas if necessary.

This tool takes the hard work out of producing ideas on paper compared to using a tool like Visio where the user can become bogged by managing the placement of shapes and linking them. 

There is only one downside to Mind Manager and that is its multiple outputs. I have found that when you:

• - output to Visio – it changes the layout of your mind map completely,
• - output to PowerPoint – it chops off any sub-topics that don’t fit on the slide while export to Excel is just flaky to say the least…
• - output to PDF – unless you have the latest patch, it triggers an error message: ”Could not print to PDF.. “

http://www.mindjet.com/ 

It also comes with a free reader (personal use only) so that everyone can view your document once you have published it in its native format. Unfortunately, the reader is not freely available for commercial use and must be purchased. I feel this is a somewhat short-sighted move by the company as it stops the proliferation of their product. If they were to make the reader available to all and sundry, once the product gains significant market share, then, perhaps it would be wise to ’sell’ the reader.

That said: Check it out, it is a tool worth having…

Web 2.0 – Author-Reader Roles Merge

Web 2.0 brings with it a merging of print culture roles: author and reader to become writer-reader.

“Like Lanham and Landow, Bolter and Poster also see the technologies of electronic writing as reconfiguring the authorial self” (Grusin 1996 p.42).

Grusin, Richard, “What is an Electronic Author? Theory and the Technological Fallacy” in Virtual Realities and their Discontents, ed. Robert Markely (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 39-54)