Vic’s Picks is here!

Vic Gee is a technology consultant with a strong personal interest in mind mapping, and especially the software used. He has mind mapped with software since the mid-90s, though he did manual mapping long before that. He started collecting information about the many software types early on. In February 2006 he had details of over a hundred and decided to share all the information he had. That was when he founded mind-mapping.org -- a personal activity -- he says he's sure no one would pay him to maintain it. Vic is based in London but travels on consulting assignments.

How Vic's Picks was born
When I first set up mind-mapping.org I thought it would be stable. Update a few entries a year and that would be it.

I had no idea what the reality was to be. What happened was an explosion of new software driven first by Web 2.0, then by the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Strawberry, and Blueberry (well -- I'm quoting an American Airlines pilot asking for electronic devices to be turned off, but the list is long). And that growth drove the expansion of desktop software for mapping as well.

Four and a half years later, mind-mapping.org has 290 entries for current products. It also has 87 historical entries (no longer supported) though you won't see these unless you go digging. With three entries on a page, there are 126 pages. Most entries show three thumbnails linked to full-size screenshots, price, OS, map types that can be produced, publishers comments (stripped of the worst hype) and often my own observations.

Although you can filter by OS and map type, sheer numbers have made this unwieldy. There are many 'current' products that really haven't established themselves, which led me to start thinking about what general readers would want.

I decided that it would be to see only the popular ones, and the interesting ones even though they may be less popular. And as these are products for visual thinking, they will immediately want to see something, without grinding through page after page.



This reduced 377 entries to 94, and adopting a new layout with just 18 large thumbnails on a page reduced the number of pages from 126 to 6.

All the detail has gone from these pages - the software is sorted in order of name, but you won't see the name until you click the red tab at the top of the thumbnail, or select the white button at the bottom right to read my brief summary about that software. Every article contains a link to the main entry in mind-mapping.org with more screenshots and much more information.

Speak out!
Vic's Picks is has a two way conversation at its heart. You can rate products with one to five stars, and make your own comments about their special qualities, passing on your experience to others, or read comments from users before you commit yourself to a new package.


To suggest new software, you can leave a comment on the Speak out! article:
http://www.mind-mapping.org/VicsPicks/2010/08/speak-out/

Browsing and searching
If you arrive at Vic's Picks just to browse, you'll probably want to scan all the pages. But if you're looking for something specific, choose an item from the red menu bar to cut down what you see. Or go for something even more specific from the category picker on the right hand side.

You could choose to see all 19 programs capable of producing some kind of concept map, for example, or all 42 free software packages, or everything that runs on a Mac (28 items).

My own special Faves--software I use regularly and appreciatively--have their own category, if you're curious about my own likes and daily practice.