Product Request: OmniThink

[canadianchris]

Mind mapping is in a terrible state right now, but as information work becomes the norm, the market for good mind mapping software grows!

I'm using FreeMind right now, and no disrespect to the developers but it's pretty ugly. Not that I could do better btw, but it's not pleasant to look at. The ones that do look pretty are bloody expensive. Check out MindJet's stuff. Full featured and pretty, but also 200+ bucks.

IMHO it would be great to see a mind mapping product come from OMNI. A simple app with speedy input options (enter for sibling, tab for child, etc.), and simple output options (OPML, OmniOutliner, JPG) would be killer right now. It seems to me there are free apps, the super expensive apps, and MindNode. No fancy themes or outlook plug-ins required. Just make it easy to input throughout he keyboard, arrange via mouse/trackpad, and output to something I can bring into outliner/plan and/or scrivener and the likes.

Pretty please?

Have a great day, keep up the great work Omni team!

[psidnell]

For those with an iPad/iPhone, iThoughts(HD) is worth a look. It has excellent import/export functions. I've used it to work on freemind/freeplane docs via dropbox and I'm experimenting with omnioutliner docs at the moment via opml.

[canadianchris]

Am I allowed to bump my own thread?! :) It's been a few months, and I'm still wallowing around in substandard mind mapping apps. OmniMap? OmniMind?

[RobTrew]

It's a very pleasing thought, but I won't be holding my breath.

While Mindjet is selling into corporate markets, with a rather focused offering and higher license prices, Omni's diverse and artisanal low-license-cost model (with generously frequent non-paying updates) seems to make it hard to hire large numbers of engineers. (And maybe they prefer small scale. Why not ?).

The engineers they do have are thinly spread around a fairly diverse set of products, now doubled by the diversions of the iToy platform – my guess is that an additional product might be the last thing they could cope with right now ...

[RobTrew]

PS OmniGraffle outline view - especially with a bit of Applescript band-aid - is really not bad for this, though the outline control is a bit mousy (not as keyboard-fluid as it could be) and uses smaller (fixed-size) characters than one might wish.

You can at least export to OO3, and thence to OPML ...