MindOnTrack Portable

Made as the portable counterpart of MindOnTrack, this is a mind-mapping utility you can use to create and customize diagrams with your ideas.

MindOnTrack Portable is useful for brainstorming sessions, whether you're looking for a think-outside-the-box solution at work, or trying to figure out your personal life goals.

The downloaded package has all the required components for running MindOnTrack Portable, including Java and Eclipse, in addition to the Linux and Mac versions. You can save the files anywhere on the disk or a USB flash drive to run the tool on any PC directly. It shouldn't change any settings in the Windows registry.

The main application window of MindOnTrack Portable supports tabs for toggling multiple mind maps. It has a professional-looking structure and a wide range of options displayed. A sample task is loaded at startup to give you some basic usage instructions.

Several samples are available, unless you want to create new mind maps from ground up: project plan, project status report, projects dashboard, organizational chart, short meeting, meeting management, SWOT analysis, "cause and effect", timeline, make a decision", or weekly plan. You can create new ones and save them as XMind template files.

As you may have noticed, there are a few large buttons on the left side of the window, and the default selected one is "Projects". This area holds information about topics, subtopics, sheets, attachments, tags, relationships, boundaries, summaries, notes, labels, and hyperlinks.

For example, new tasks can be created by specifying the due date, recurrence, structure (e.g. auto follow the parent's structure), text, shape, and line displayed in the diagram. This data can be easier modified by switching to "Mind Mapping" mode to view the diagram and double-click any object to edit its properties.

MindOnTrack Portable features a spellchecker and basic search-and-replace function, in addition to multiple preset diagram styles for topics, boundaries, relationships, and sheets. New tags can be added to the existing ones (Contact, At home, At work, Errands, Online, Read), as well as organized into different groups (e.g. Priority, Task Complete, Flags, Stars).

Keyboard shortcuts are supported for all commands and they can be remapped, while projects can be saved as new revisions or exported to HTML, image, text, tag package, FreeMind, or XMind 2008 Workbook format.

It used low CPU and moderate RAM in our tests, carried out various tasks rapidly, and didn't hang or prompt error messages. It crashed a couple of times out of the blue, though.

Taking into account its rich options and customization settings, as well as the fact that it's free to use, MindOnTrack Portable proves to be an excellent tool for creating and managing mind maps.