Freeplane

Ever since the introduction of the personal computer into mainstream markets, the digitization of all of humanity’s facets of life turned from an ambitious goal into a priority for most tech giants with the necessary resources to accomplish such a feat.

One way of organizing one’s thoughts, schedules or study topics is represented by mind mapping, an incredibly useful tree-style overview of data for easily visualizing the connections among its different elements. Freeplane is one particular program capable of successfully transposing the ability of creating mind maps from a sheet of paper into a highly customizable digital template. Its portable counterpart also lets you edit mind maps on the go.

Upon starting up the app for the first time, users will be greeted by an exhaustive list of functions conveniently laid out in the form of a complex mind map, with each of the showcased options providing a link towards a more detailed instruction menu explaining the intricacies of the selected feature.

The application’s title bar contains a wide variety of vital options for creating, editing, visualizing, navigating and customizing the interface, while the toolbar below lists buttons for quickly editing the text inside the mind map elements.

When creating a new mind map, the program allows the user to pick from a handful of predetermined templates, each with a custom theme. By default, the template starts out with a core text bubble nicknamed “node”, to which multiple elements can be added, ranging from child, sibling, parent, floating and summary nodes, to images, links, connections, scripts and password protection.

Nodes can be edited in both layout and HTML Code views, their font can be customized, their hierarchy can be shown or hidden, their text content can be placed inside visual containers in the forms of clouds or other shapes, and their position can be set anywhere on the mind map’s plane.

Arrows can be generated in order to showcase connections between nodes belonging to different sections, and mind maps can be saved in the program’s proprietary format, for easy editing, or various popular extensions such as DOC, PDF, PNG or TXT.

For those in the market for a powerful mind map creator, Freeplane is an excellent program that lets you create, edit and link nodes with text, images and hyperlinks for generating helpful statistics and structures based on your ideas, plans, study notes or product designs.