I attended an event today, hosted by the Thames Valley Innovation and Growth team, on developing iPhone applications. A couple of Apple employees were on hand to walk us through the process and answer any questions.
When I have attended these sort of events in the past I have tended to take notes in my notebook in the form of a mind map. I thought that this time I would try doing the same on my iPhone using the SimpleMind application.
SimpleMind is a mind mapping application that comes in two versions, free and paid. The only difference between the two is that the paid app can export the map to a number of different files such as Acrobat and formats that can be imported into other desktop mind mapping applications.
In use SimpleMind is, as the name suggests, simple. You create a new map and name your central node. Double clicking on the screen will create a sub-node associated with the current node. You can drag nodes around and even drop them on top of other nodes to move them. There is an undo function that allows you to step back through your recent changes. As you can see from the screenshots below it is also possible to change the style of the map.
And that is pretty much about it. However, it doesn’t need much more as speed is important particularly when note taking. On a complex map such as this on such a small screen it did become difficult to move the screen without moving the nodes but others with less fat fingers won’t have too much of a problem.
Those interested in see the map full size can see it in PDF format here. And those that thought that they were going to be hearing about my trip to see Simple Minds can read that here!
