Wednesday, April 01, 2009

MindRaider

On the recommendation of FreewareGenius I took a look at MindRaider, because I'm always look for tools that can improve my knowledge management. My bases of comparison right now are Freemind and Evernote (since the announcement that Google Notebook is going away). From my perspective, although the author focuses a lot of his discussion around the semantic web, I have to treat it as another outliner. Adding the mindmapping and tagcloud features are very nice, it looks a bit like a combination of Wikidpad and Freemind. Some of its capabilities, such as the number of ways you can edit a node, are quite nice. 

What keeps me from wanting to use it as a regular note-taking tool:
  • I find the inability to treat top level outlines, or even nodes with children, as leaf nodes, i.e., cut and paste and move around as necessary, to be a pretty big annoyance relative to how I work.
  •  I can't look at multiple outlines at the same time.
  • You can't refactor across outlines.
  • Can't import outlines as subtree of existing outline.
  • Attachments are only launchable. I can't just cut and paste a URL or file name.