Simple Flow Designer

It’s incredibly easy and quite reliable to develop the plan for your future projects on a computer. This practice is usually performed through diagrams, or mind-mapping applications, which let you place objects of different attributes and link them together. This is exactly the purpose of applications like Simple Flow Designer.

One of the first things you notice is that it doesn’t take you through a setup process to enable functionality, so you can carry it on a thumb drive in case you want to develop your projects on other computers. However, you need to make sure that the computer you decide to use it on is fitted with .NET Framework.

You’re placed in a blank canvas, where you find only start and end points for your projects. These can’t be removed, but you are free to place them wherever you see fit. Unfortunately, the entire canvas comes under a rather limited size specification, and it’s not possible to have it resized, forcing you to work in a small environment.

The application offers several types of objects to place on the canvas. These come under different geometrical shapes, representing process nodes, input and output nodes, decision, predefined processes, and connectors. All can be fitted with custom text tags for easy identification of purpose, while some can even be resized or set to depend on other nodes.

As mentioned, there’s also a link tool. However, it creates more frustration, because it only comes on a horizontal alignment. More than that, objects aren’t created with transparent backgrounds, so you risk overlapping them when creating a custom arrangement.

Bottom line is that Simple Flow Designer comes with good intentions, but the set of tools it offers leaves much to be desired. Objects overlap while being placed on the canvas, while the space you work in is incredibly small for large-scale mind-mapping projects.