Create mind maps easily with mind42

Collaborative mind mapping in your browser Isn't 42 the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Well, in this case it means FOR TWO and indicates the collaborative character of mind42. Manage all your ideas, whether alone, twosome or working together with the whole world - collaborative, browser-based and for free.

About

mind42.com

In Mind42, 42 is not only the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything! 42 means FOR TWO and indicates the collaborative character of mind42, because that is exactly what mind42 is: A collaborative browser-based online mind mapping tool.

It allows you to manage all your ideas, whether alone, twosome or working together with the whole world. As mind42 runs inside the browser, installing mind mapping tools is no longer needed - for a hassle-free mindmapping experience. Just open the browser and launch the application when needed - it behaves like a classical desktop application!

Mind42 is a web application - however, this doesn't mean yout have to set your comfort aside. Mind42 is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mind map editor supporting keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop, zooming and much more. No forms and lists which are generally used in web application. A real application - within your browser.

What is mind mapping

Mind map drawn by Aranya - GNU Free Documentation License

Short answer: A very useful image based method for brainstorming

However, this short answer only covers a fraction of what mind42 is about. And of course there is a more precise description of mind mapping available at Wikipedia.

Mind mapping is about collecting ideas arranged in a tree like diagram. From a programmers point of view, the creation of such diagrams requires graphical processing. As web browsers weren't able to do graphical processing for a long time, such applications only existed as classical desktop applications which had to be installed. But times have changed, computers got faster and browsers became more powerful. Mind42 is one of the first solutions for mind mapping which is a pure web application - with all it's advantages. No installation required - Accessable everywhere!

Being a web application, mind42 enables another interesting feature realizable on the web: Collaboration. Brainstorming is no single user activity - the more people take part in a brainstorming session, the better the results will be. When using mind42, every participant of a brainstorming session has an immediately updated view onto all the already collected ideas.

Overview

Creating a mind map - Screencast

Interface

The mind42 mind map edit interface

Creating a mind map with mind42 is very intuitive and easy to master. After creating your first mindmap you will see the root node of your map. By clicking it, it will be focused (blue border) and a menu will appear beyond the node. Such a menu exists for every map item in mind42 and holds the available actions for this node. This includes adding child or sibling nodes, deleting the node, or changing node attributes like it's color or icon. To edit the content of any node within the map just double click it.

Newly created nodes will be aligned automatically, but of course you can change their order. To achieve this, just drag the node to the desired place - a grey preview will show where it would be after dropping. Besides the automatic layouting of the map, mind42 also helps you to keep the overview by offering features like the birdview, zoom and branch collapsing. To collapse a whole branch just click the "-" sign beside the node.

Collaboration

The collaboration dialog

The main benefit of using mind42 (besides its hight availability directly in the web-browser) is collaboration.

To start collaborating on a mindmap, just open the collaboration dialog by clicking the link "Invite and manage collaborators" in the top menu bar. In this dialog, you can send invitation e-mails to your friends and colleagues. The mail will contain a link pointing them directly to the mind map editor. They just have to open a link to start working on the map - no download, no installation.

When multiple users are online at the same time, every participant will see the changes the others made instantly.

Publishing

Another possibility of letting others see your map is publishing. By clicking the antenna icon in the top left corner of the application the publish dialog will be opened. Within this dialog you can select whether your map should be publicly available or not. When choosing to make the map public, you'll get different links which will allow visitors to reach your map. You could send out mails with the link to the map, or you could link from or integrate it into another web page.