FreeMind …

You know, there’s times I’m kind of grateful for open source software.

I am.

Because — just occasionally — you find some gems.

Especially for what’s now called mind mapping; what we used to call a spider-graph.

To be frank, it’s not something I’m usually used to doing, or needing.

I must confess, though, I think I’m feeling the need.

I’m planning to do a post, here, about being left handed, and I’m thinking I need to do a bit of planning, note taking, and — quite probably — some mind mapping, so that I can organise what I’d like to say.

A little while back, I did an English GCSE course; something I didn’t manage to finish, as I lost my job at the time, and couldn’t afford the fare’s.

Which is definitely unfortunate, and something I regret.   It would’ve been nice to have that on the CV.

But my point is that Claire — our tutor — suggesting mind-mapping/spider-graphing would be helpful as a jump-off for writing the essays we had to turn in as homework.   Which is when I dug through the piles of unused MacWorld cd’s, to see what I could turn up.

Lo and behold …

One of them included FreeMind, an open source mind mapping app.

Which came in very handy for writing the various essays I needed to do for the course, and that I’m hoping to use for the already mentioned post.

You’ll see, from the screen-grabs I’ve included that, when you open FreeMind, you’ll get something that looks like the first shot.   That’s your first node.   You can then ctrl- or right-click — as shown in the second shot — to call up a contextual menu and and add nodes, which you can make notes in.

Which eventually leads to something like the third shot.

It gives you something to start with, and build on.

I’ll be honest, I’m still mid way through the planning stages of this Leftie post I’m thinking of.   There’s still a few thing’s I’m thinking of adding, and people I’d like to talk to about this.

But at least I know I’ve a handy appl I can work with.