I’m a long time listener and fan of TFTTF, so I was intrigued to hear you mention Up to the Top Floor, and your reason’s for starting. I admire your courage, and am rooting for you to have success in your new business venture.

Regarding episode #03; I downloaded Freemind and have really enjoyed using it over the past couple of days, however couldn’t help but notice that you’re graph looks a little different than the ones it produces. I’m curious, did you go with a commercial product instead? if so, which one? Any other details you can offer regarding this would be appreciated.

Thanks, and keep up the great work!

Thanks for the tip-off to FreeMind! It’s a great bit of software…one question though…how did you get your mind map to look like that? I can’t seem to get past the basic oval for the starting node and the tiny lines for the branches…

Good luck with your new business! I’m trying to start something similar here in Pennsylvania, though I’m a composer/photographer/designer without much recording experience.

Cheers,
Phil

(State College, Pennsylvania)

I’ve been a freemind fan for years on a number of OS’s (Windows, Linux and Solaris).

I use it for working out all sorts of things like (not limited to)
- Photographic themes/ideas
- Creating solutions to problems or design issues (I’m an IT Manager - always have lots of solutions to create or problems to solve)
- Organising my thoughts (I find it’s great for taking a whole lot of ideas that sort of relate to each other but can’t figure out how exactly. I find that in the process of adding them to Freemind the relationships appear as if by magic - magic!)
- and anything that benefits from brainstorming

Good luck Chris and as you say ‘Happy (trouble) shooting’

Cheers

Scott
(Melbourne, Australia)

I just started listening to “Tips from the Top Floor” and I really like it :o)! Then I stumbled across this other podcast of yours and saw this episode on mind mapping. I just wanted to point you to another free (open source) tool for managing information (it’s not “exactly” mind mapping) that I developed with five talented people from the TU Darmstadt:

It’s called “TwoMore” and can be freely downloaded at http://www.pi.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/se2004/byteme/. Maybe you want to check it out as another option for organizing your thoughts. If you could even provide me some feedback on the tool, I would be really happy.

Now I wish you all the best for your career and hope for many many more episodes of “Tips from the Top Floor”.

Matthias