I installed a new version of Freemind recently. Freemind is a great program for mind-mapping. I use it for organizing thoughts (papers, project plans, etc.) as well as for keeping notes. One thing I particularly like about Freemind is that you can easily navigate around and author maps using the keyboard – much faster than switching back and forth to the mouse and easier on the wrist.
Mind Manager from Mindjet is also a great piece of software for mind-mapping. It does what it does very well, is intuitive, and doesn’t get in your way. Unfortunately, Mind Manager was a Windows-only program at the time (although they now have a Mac version). When I switched back to Linux and then Mac OSX, I had to find a cross-platform alternative, which is where Freemind comes in.
One thing I noticed with this version (0.9.0 beta9a) of Freemind is that Mac OSX Spotlight is able to find search results in Freemind files. Maybe this isn’t the first version in which this works, but I know I tried it out in a 0.8 release. At any rate, I was glad to see it working because Freemind doesn’t currently have a feature to search across multiple maps – one of the few features of Mind Manager I missed.