14 DAY TRIAL // KDissert is an application designed for students. Because the average student is generally a busy person and because time is a very valuable resource, Thomas Nagy decided when he was a student to create an application that will be helpful in this respect. KDissert is a mindmapping application that helps at developing ideas and, based on that, allows generating documents. This way a lot of time can be saved and quality results can be obtained. If you are not a student and you feel this software might not be for you it's a big possibility you might be wrong because I can see uses for it in a lot of environments. Actually, I think it can be successfully used as project management software, as a tool for creating well structured documentation, websites where organized information is the important thing or, why not, as complex post-it software.
This is not a very mature software application but, considering that development was started in 2003, the features are excellent. The idea is not new, mindmapping software was done before, but KDissert is very good at exporting the projects in several types of formats including HTML, LaTeX, OpenOffice and plain text. Considering that it is able to automatically generate presentations and documents you can just imagine how easy it is to make some adjustments and then use the time you have left for enjoying a job well done. The files exported as OpenOffice documents can be opened with the KOffice suite as well.
But how does KDissert help me?
When you begin you have an empty canvas in the main window. Double clicking here creates an item. This item is associated with an idea. The empty item can now be edited and you can add a title, some text, a picture and hyperlinks. Ideas can be added separately or can be associated into a tree. Adding more ramifications make your idea grow more and using this software allows you to keep your ideas in order and in a place so you will not forget them.
For each item you can associate a color and several flags. In the case of very complex projects, the flags will really come in handy. Colors are great for any purpose. They really make ideas and branches stick out.
If you are not a very organized person you can use Smart Reorganization. It is a feature used by this software that can do amazing results with your canvas. The software warns you that on large mindmaps it can take a lot of time and give bad results, but on the ones I created the results were excellent. A quick reorganization is also available and this one is nice too. It creates a more compact display but I find the smart one better in case of small mindmaps. Anyway, the cluttered quick reorganization can be also uncluttered.
If the tree gets too big you might want to use the tree view. It's a tab that's located in the left part of the application. This view handles the tree in a very familiar and easy to use mode and it's good mainly because of the included search box. A leaf in a very large tree would be very hard to locate without this search feature. Unfortunately, the search doesn't look in the text field of each item. It just looks in the title.
For each item you can select a font and the text you put in that item can be written with bold, italic and underline. This is useful when you consider exporting in several formats but usually I prefer to do further editing in OpenOffice.
Maybe I'm pushing the line a little here but if KDissert would be able to export as an SQL database this software would really be excellent for a lot more users. It would be a wonderful tool for integrating with dynamic websites and perhaps even more. As far as I'm concerned this is very hard to implement and in fact I don't know something similar that is able to do this.
The Good
This software's ability to keep things nicely organized in a tree and then to export them in several popular formats is awesome.
The Bad
The interface is not very well optimized and also doesn't look very good. When KDE4 will be available the interface will probably "suffer" several improvements.
The Truth
The truth is that this software needs some more features and a better interface but it will definitely improve the productivity in most cases if it is used wisely. I'm sure this is a very useful piece of software but I know it can be great. It really got me enthusiastic and I'll keep it in my list with favorite applications. I have a lot of faith in it.
Check out some screenshots below:
