Essays

What FreeMind has to do with Pirsig's Lila

You can only understand the following, if you have read Robert Pirsig's book Lila. If that is the case, do you remeber the description of the way how Phaedrus writes things down? There's a lot of talk about random access and about tray slips. And now, I seem to see quite clearly that FreeMind offers you all that what Pirsig's tray slips offer - relatively small chunks, being reorganized, rewritten, moved to attic and retrieved from attic again, moved between different groups, together with a special slip or folder for program, everything accessed directly without need to go sequentially through that what you have already written. Of course, you are the one who chooses how big the chunks are in FreeMind. Are not users of FreeMind way too analytical? Some people argue that the approach FreeMind brings is too analytical. I have to reply at this place that if you want to build a quality software, heal an ill man, find cure to disease or provide people with food, just grooving on things, though maybe pleasant and necessary, will not be sufficient. Try to sit under a tree in the lotus position and get someone healed that way. You simply don't do it. It's not that there is something wrong with the lotus position. But you have to work with underlying, analytical and organized form of things too.

In the search of a tree tool

by Daniel Polansky

What can you learn from this essay? At least that there are many ways of doing things like subtasking, which I have already tried and which can in no way compete with FreeMind. This is not to say that there are no ways which could compete with FreeMind.

In the winter of 2001 it was three months since I entered a new company. In the dynamic environment of the company I had to be very proactive, that is, to know what I want to do, where I am going, what I have already done in which direction and what people I am waiting for in order to complete different small task. I was quite obsessed with the idea that I can solve a task that seems difficult by splitting it into smalled subtasks.

It's not only that I was obsessed with the idea, the idea also worked, of course. However, I have created relatively many subtasks and I needed to keep track of them. My attitude toward improvement of existing software was - I am not going to do any superfluous investment in doing some programming myself. I am going to try to use existing software for that purpose.

I knew that I needed something which could provide the notions of tree and folding. I knew that both ideas were relatively well spread in the user interface around and that I should be able to find something that already does the job.

One of the first ideas that came to mind was using filesystem - file represents leaf node and folder represents node with children. One could browse the tree and fold / unfold using internet explorer. I tried that and found out that it was very slow and inconvenient. For instance, adding a child to a leaf was quite an expensive operation. The searching was also quite slow, the complete operation was simply slow. Also, the sequence of items was not kept, they were automatically sorted alphabetically. This is no surprise as file systems do no keep track of the order of files in folders.

Then I came to the idea of using Emacs folding mode. I have always used this mode when programming and I just loved it. I tried to use it for the purpose, but I found it was too much overhead. I had to keep the depth of the node myself with the number of leading spaces, I had to insert fold marks and so on. I ended up with the feeling that this really was not the thing.

Then I realised that MS Outlook had something like tasks and tried to use its task system. However, I had to keep the tree structure myself. Even more, I only obtained folding by classifying the tasks into categories, that is I got no hierarchical folding. For some time I was running the system. It was nice that I could add colors, for instance. Also, I was using task to represent task, which felt good. But after a short use, I realized that I absolutely need hierarchical folding. Also, moving the folders of tasks around was quite tedious.

I started to search for hierarchical task tool using Google and I really found one - Tamot. I tried to use it, but it was buggy and provided no colors, at least not at the time.

Then I remembered that a friend of mine showed me some kind of tree tool which he was quite exited about - Mind Manager. I downloaded the tool and converted my Outlook tasks to the tool. After having done that, I knew with certainty that that was it - I had the right tool. Moving things around was so easy and intuitive, as well as adding color or folding. The thing was also easy to overview.

There was only one problem - it was not free. Something told me that there must be some free tool for that because there are free tools for everything today. And I found and downloaded FreeMind. At first I was a little bit disappointed. It seemed that there was no way how to move things around, but accidentally I came accross copy and paste. Even though the thing did not look that good as Mind Manager, I felt it would do the very core job I wanted to get done: having tree with folding and relatively easy way to move things around - cut and paste.

When I started to use FreeMind, I was quite happy with it and I started to collect things that irritated me about it; FreeMind was actually very well suited for collecting of such a list of problems. Some of them were just inconveniencies, but some were quite severe drawbacks - like changed order of children of folded node after loading map anew. I promised myself I was by no means going to do any coding myself. But one day I convinced myself to do just a small improvement, which would enable both to follow link and fold node with double click. Once I started with this small improvement, I was lost and ended up with a series of developments to fit FreeMind into my needs and fix many, many small, but annoying errors. I started to add new features that I needed and got lost myself in the development.

Do not underestimate conventional technology like MS Outlook when using FreeMind

For many purposes, MS Outlook or similar software is just fine. Sometimes it just does not make sense to paste mails into mind map, sometimes, you do not even have to organize your mails in folders, because you can use Outlooks' search functionality, which can also cross folders when necessary. Additionally, you can edit the messages from Outlook after they arrive, boldifying what is important for you, adding comments etc. I have made bad experience with copy-mails-from-outlook-to-freemind pattern. The overhead is too big and the advantages too low. Most imporantly for MS Outlook: 1) Use advanced search to search more folders, 2) Edit arrived messages to cut them, boldify what is important for you and add your own comments to messages.

When authoring information, FreeMind is pretty good, but sometimes I just pasted things from Outlook messages and not for much benefit. It may be that Outlook would even be O.K. for database of recipes or I don't know what. I am not going to use Outlook for that, just trying to show you how using FreeMind changes the way you use other applications so that you get what you want without FreeMind.

Conclusion: FreeMind is pretty good general purpose tool, but don't use it for everything.