Freeware Friday - Freemind

Freemind is the ultimate free planning tool for designers. Using a mindmap view of your plans will help you generate ideas for a website, book or video more quickly than a just having a features or requirements list.

Freemind is the ultimate free planning tool not only for designers, but for anyone who has to crank out a project. Use Freemind it to create mind maps for those projects that have a lot of information such as websites and books, even video editing. Organize in visual categories any way you like. Don’t know what mind maps are? Imagine instead of writing a To-do list, instead creating a diagram of things that you need to do. Freemind let’s you insert ideas into cells called nodes and drag them around and put them into your own categories and subcategories.

When redesigning a website. If you have hundreds of pages that you need to organize, you can put their names in your mind map and drag them around until you feel like they are under a topic that makes sense. From there, you are visually building your website navigation menu structure.

I use mindmaps all the time when starting new projects. The easy keyboard shortcuts make it so fast to generate your thoughts that you seriously won’t want to give it up. It’s much better than writing objectives down in a text file. Things are more visual than a block of text, it seems easier to brainstorm and generate ideas. Then you can export from freemind to a neat little outline in HTML, PDF, SVG, or OpenOffice.org 1.4 document.

Freemind is a must have program. It is Java based, so it runs on any platform you probably have, as the Java Runtime environment is common and easy to get. As of this writing, Freemind is in version 0.80 with a developer alpha version at 0.81 on the horizon for release soon. Download here:

http://freemind.sourceforge.net