FreeMind

great and informative post. http://www.mindmappingsite.com/sw-tool-reviews/software-reviews

Download link does not work.

What a great little app! The documentation says to use the Insert key to insert a "child" node; on a Mac this was baffling, but a quick Google search gave the answer – use the Tab key. Some of the other keystrokes & functionality are not intuitive e.g. to insert line breaks, but it's all learnable. It does work, it's pretty quick to get started, and it's free!

Brilliant app. No frills, no fuss. Easy to use and easy to learn. Can only imagine how awesome it would be if I really had learnt how to use it and not just messed around. Don't expect flying saucers and amazing Flash or Java capabilities - this is an application for people who want to work and get the work done, not bother around with fancy things that take up time. Give it a few years and it probably will have some flying saucers - not necessary in my opinion, but inevitable as a part of evolution. Congrats to the developers for creating this awesome app!

When I open it, the app shows and empty doc and many tools, but all tools stay grey (unusable), so I have to search through the menu items to do something, but futile. The only usable item is "Help > Documentation" which closes (!) my empty doc and opens a mindmap explaining commands that simply do not work. One of the hardest-to-use and most user-unfriendly apps I've ever met. Should be called "UnfreeMind" instead! While so much great, self-explaining GUIs exist since the nineties, this 2012 app sux cog.

Well I guess you get what you pay for. The Java roots show through, and although there is some promise here, it is held back by technology choices (and with Apple backing away from Java in Lion, the future looks a bit questionable), and missing functionality. I tried all the apps and eventually went with NovaMind - not a free app, but certainly the best mind mapping app for Mac, and has all the features I need for both business and personal use.

As a French user, using accentuated characters, I noticed that (at least) the accents are not supported during the Mind Manager Map (Try out 8) import even if all works perfectly fine (even from MMP 8) It's too new for me to rate properly this product My bests

I found Freemind to be a great program. Even better then the new MindNode Pro paid program (~$20-25), it's features are way more advanced then MindNodePro. With this new 0.9 version they added a feature called attributes, consider it a type of "tags" for nodes, allowing you to assign all sorts of "tags", then you can filter and show only the nodes that have the "tags/attributes" you want. This can be a very powerfull feature if used. The only big weakness is, that it is not as intuitive or user friendly as other programs, but it's also Free!!!! Look up videos on youtube on how to use it, and keep the keyboard shortcuts handy, this will speed things ups. There is an active opensource proggrammer base that have created all sorts of extra plugins that allow it to integrate with other programs like GTD, Microsoft Project, etc... It can also export into all sorts of different files including pdf, webpage, jpg, etc...

Not bad. Price of Free is nice. I've tried several. No ones got it exactly right yet. Freemind is OK. It feels a little restrictive in that its not totally freeform as it could be. It doesn't lend itself to slapping "Notecard" type of boxes all over the page & connecting & organizing them after-the-fact as well as it might. I was hoping for Inspiration on steroids. Haven't really found any mindmappers which aren't restrictive or without an involved learning curve, while having a rich feature set. Inspiration, ThinkingRock. There used to be a wiki-type of flow charter in the OS 8 days that had the right idea, but couldn't break away from scrollbars & claustrophobic page sizes. Pretty good for simple stuff. It can only get better.

FYI, this is a universal Intel/PowerPC application.

Nodes are auto-positioned and repositioning (using arrow keys!) is limited. Furthermore, does not follow convention of starting at 1300hr and working round clockwise. This is a "cannot use" dealbreaker for me. Can live without hoist facility but cannot work with inflexible interface. The thing I really like about Freemind is that it is cross-platform, but as it stands, I cannot use it

Question: If RC10 is for 10.6/Intel only, then how come it's built as a Universal Intel/PPC binary?

This program has a hell of a lot of horsepower and features for a free program. I own and use Mindjet MindManager for mind mapping, and this free program has an amazing amount of the same advanced features, like filtering, notes, hot links to the web and docs, and customizable icons that allow you filter. Plus, the program is quite zippy (on my Intel iMac with Snow Leopard) even though its Java-based. (Maybe I shouldn't expect it to be slow -- Personal Brain mind mapper is also Java-based and it totally responsive with its live links and way-cool animated navigation.) The biggest difference between this free program and something like MindManager is the overall refinement of the user interface, the look and feel, and navigation. For example, unless I missed it, I didn't see a way in FreeMind to hoist a node, or hide other nodes so I could just see a node I wanted to focus on, and I missed MindManager's nifty ability to "Fit Selection" to your screen. (In a huge mind map, being able to select a node and its children, and then hide others, and then have your selected node expanded or shrunk to "fit to screen" is a huge aid in working with your data. Again, FreeMind may do these things, but I couldn't find out how, if it does. I found the bazillion icons all around the FreeMind window hard to interpret, though each icon did have a hover pop-up -- after a while, I guess you'd get to know what the icons meant. That said, of course one might expect a paid program of the price of MindManager to be way more refined and visually appealing, but in terms of pure functionality, FreeMind has the majority of features even a hard-core mind mapper would want. If I didn't own MindManager, I think FreeMind would definitely be my program of choice. Kudos to the open source community for making a remarkably powerful and useful program.

only PPC? Mistake or are there still people coding apps just for ppc's?

XMIND is a more elegant and powerful free alternative to FreeMind.

I have been looking at mind mapping software for a while, but the price always drove me away. Since FreeMind was Free, I figured I would try it. Right now I am using it for document management as I have 1000's of ebooks, etc for my ministry. It is quickly becoming one of those tools that I do not know how I got along without it. I now have everything nicely sorted by catageory that I can easily find with just a click, and it does not hog my hard drive space like MS onenote did. I am so glad I discovered mind mapping and this product. It now one of my crucial apps I could not live without and makes my mac that much more enjoyable.

This is a very useful application. On a Mac it suffers from "not looking like a Mac app" (as others have commented) because it is implemented in Java, but in exchange it is cross-platform, so you can easily share mindmaps with users using Windows or Linux. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get over it, you can quickly and easily use it to brainstorm, to create outlines, to plan projects or papers, etc.

I was very excited to find free "mind map" software, but I found this software grossly unintuitive. Besides the supplied commands documented in the help section, a user should be able to do natural things like double-clicking white space to create a new node, and hooking it in afterwards the way he or she sees fit. My first experience with a "mind map" was with a PC app at work. I don't recall what it was called but I definitely didn't need to read extensive documentation to use it. I will continue my search for good, intuitive mind-mapping software for the mac - paying for it if necessary, and until FreeMind improves, I suggest you do the same.

It's fantastic to have an application like that for free! But there's room for improvement, too. The icons are so ugly they look like from a homepage of a 12 years old PC user. And the quality of the German translation is not ready for primetime.

FreeMind is an application to recommend. I have tested version 0.8.0 and it feels already like a full featured mind mapping application. Of course it has to evolve some graphical issues (e.g. icon quality).