This morning I attended the Mindjet webinar entitled Get the Inside Look at MindManager 7 Mac and Walk Away with your Own Copy. The webinar was recorded and will be made available from the Events page of Mindjet’s web site.

Introduction
The ancestry of MindManager on the Mac was about 12 years on the Windows platform, and then Mindjet released a new version of MindManager for the Mac in May 2005 (Version 6.0).

There are a variety of new features in Version 7, the first four of which will be discussed explicitly in this call:

• Outline view
• Select by rule
• Printing improvements
• Timer
• Enhanced import and export
• Image library enhancements
• Position notes window
• Improved background handling
• Main topic alignment

Scott Thompson, Senior Engineer, Mindjet
MindManager came to the Mac platform out of customer demand. Some customers said things like, “I’m only keeping a Windows machine in the office because I can’t run MindManager on the Mac”. The two key objectives were to (a) deliver a MindManager application, and (b) deliver a Mac application. They didn’t want a ported version, but rather something that has a Mac look-and-feel. Eg, Inspector UI, menus rearranged on the Mac to make sense to a Mac user. Going forward, Mindjet will continue to develop with this philosophy, and integrate into new features of the Mac operating system.

David Roemer, Co-Founder, Campus MovieFest
It started about 7 years ago when they gave Apple laptops and cameras to students, and within a week had 1500 movies to share. Now, they are running 35 events with out 50,000 students; they hand out about 500 laptops and camcorders a week. The team at MovieFest is located in the US and UK, are on the road 9 months of the year, and thus need a way to manage the team, think creatively, decide on strategies and more.

Thus MindManager Mac 7 is the tool of choice. Key features are Spotlight search (eg, search for any idea that they’ve ever had before) and Brainstorming (organizing thousands of ideas, eg, movie to show online).

Jeff Lynch (Senior Engineer from Mindjet) gave a demonstration on the brainstorming mode. It provides a way to quickly capture information in an Outline mode / text only, and then return to a map view.

See Campus Moviefest.

Jason Womack, Executive Coach, The Jason Womack Company
The introduction for Jason to mindmapping was at junior high when a teacher told him to write project thoughts on 3×5 cards and lay it all out on the floor. Then in graduate school, a history teacher taught mind mapping explicitly as a way of getting ideas out quickly and then re-organize those thoughts later. After a 1996 trip to Argentina, he came back with 900 ideas for improving his teaching in the next year. He discovered MindManager (on the Windows platform), and it was an absolute boon to him.

Jason argues that MindManager is all about time management … managing effort and focus toward our desired results. He uses MindManager for (a) writing for journals or his blog, (b) public speaking (both for planning an upcoming speech, and also at the beginning of a presentation for capturing audience desired outcomes), and (c) organizing thoughts and ideas (he often uses the brainstorming mode for this). Jason finds that the timer is incredibly helpful for his work, but that you should set the timer for odd amounts of time, eg, 7 minutes.

Jason posted his notes at his blog.

Jeff showed how to create floating topics in Map View for quickly brainstorming ideas. If you go back to Outline view, you can drag-and-drop topics for re-organizing thoughts and ideas.

Dr. Brian Friedlander, Assistant Professor of Education, College of St. Elizabeth and Founder of the AssistiveTek Blog
Brain has been using MindManager for the last two years, and cross-platform support is really important. He worked on a Mac at home, and on PCs at the college. Thus has to be able to work seamlessly between the two. Brain teaches courses on the application of technology for students with learning disabilities.

He uses MindManager for (a) developing the course plan for the year (ideas, dates, tasks due from students), (b) developing lectures, (c) as a presentation tool during a lecture, and (d) sharing lecture information with the students (Brain’s College uses BlackBoard and can export the mindmaps as PDF files and post them to BlackBoard for student access). Brian thinks that he’s modelling how his graduate students–other teachers–can use technologies like MindManager in the classroom.

Features in MindManager 7 Mac that Brian particularly likes are filtering (quickly set up rules, much like email rules, and these can be saved for later use), and printing mindmaps across multiple pages (including headers and footers on the print out). MindManager gives a nice graphical overview of what you’re going to get when you print out:

See Brian’s blog at assistivetek.blogspot.com.

Scott addressed additional nuance about the cross-platform compatibility. The best way to get 100% compatibility is to use cross-platform technologies, eg, JPG for image files, and avoid things that are tied to one of the platforms. There are some smarts in MindManager for enabling cross-platform viewing, eg, saving previews of Windows-specific image formats.

Questions & Answers
1. How long have the developers been working on the new version?
We started working on it in May 2005.

2. Are notes only a pane in the map or outline view, or can you open it as a separate window?
It is a slide out window in either view, but not as a separate window.

3. Will Spotlight work with the new things in Leopard?
We’re under NDA so can’t address Leopard issues; however we do intend to support forthcoming things from Apple.

4. To Brian … how do you use MindManager as a presentation tool?
A couple of thoughts:
(a) collapse thoughts that aren’t currently under focus so that people can keep their attention on one topic.
(b) easy ability to add new ideas during the lecture / presentation
(c) finds it more interactive than PowerPoint (Brian’s students have been “PowerPointed-to-death”)

Jeff talked to the keyboard navigation capabilities in MindManager Mac 7 for quickly getting around.

5. When we will see PC version quality to HTML or output to Web site? Are you caught up to the Windows platform?
From Scott … “caught up” … yes and no … there are some things that you can do on the Mac platform that you can’t do on the Windows one. The intention isn’t a port strategy.

In terms of HTML output and Web site export, it comes down to customer demand. Mindjet has to prioritize customer requirements with each new release. There’s an email address for sending customer feedback.

6. Unicode support in MindManager 7?
We leverage the Unicode capabilities from the Mac operating system, and we support what the operating system supports.

7. Can any map element be exported to Apple Keynote for presentations?
Do not currently have a direct export to Keynote or PowerPoint. Have not yet added the functionality. It comes down to customer demand for new features. However, you can export things from MindManager to PDF and bring it into Keynote. There’s no direct integration at the moment.

8. On the Mac version, will we see circular idea flow?
Within MindManager, you can introduce relationships to link topics between the two. You can model circular relationships that way. But the mapping is based on Tony Buzan’s ideas for mapping ideas hierarchically.

9. Will the new Finder cover flow of documents work with Map previews?
We do not comment on features that are covered by Apple NDA, but if we did do it, then you would be able to.

Final Comments
The price has been reduced to US$129 per copy, from US$229 with Version 6.

Another good book on mind mapping is Idea Mapping.