MindManager and my wallet

Blog

I kept hearing about MindManager from MindJet so I thought I should check it out.  Both Marc Orchant and James Kendrick sing its praises quite a lot.  I pulled down the free trial and started whipping up maps for several things I had going.

First of all I’d like to say within 15 minutes I wanted to purchase the software.  Mapping out ideas and moving them around was just incredibly easy.  I found a couple of issues here and there on my tablet (see below), but over all the experience was good. 

I was just about to go plop down my $80-$100 on the software when….wait….did I say $80-$100?  Try more like a suggested retail of $349 for a single user license.  Okay, so that’s the professional version…it has some things I would use but maybe the basic version is more in line with my original estimate.  Nope, suggested retail is set at $229 for a single user license.  Let’s compare this with OneNote coming at $80 from Amazon.  Or even compare that to the full Microsoft Office 2003 Professional package (including Outlook, Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Publisher) at $368.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think MindManager is a pretty powerful tool.  But I definitely don’t think it is worth only $20 less than the full Office package.  Sure, it integrates with several other applications, including the MS office applications, Project, etc.  Sure its tablet enabled (which is sweet).  I would have gladly paid upwards of $120 for something like this, but not over $200 and definitely not over $300. 

So, now I know I really like the Mind Mapping idea but I can see that MindManager isn’t what I’m going to be using.  I’m off to test a couple of mapping applications to see if anything will work out better for me (there is a free, open source tool that has the basics for mapping called FreeMind…too bad it’s written in Java ;)  just kidding ).

  • Issues:

  1. I had it start up in Pen mode on my tablet and when I did so it sometimes had a hard time coming out of pen mode.  Even when I clicked on mouse and then attempted to type it would keep popping up the handwriting entry area.

  2. In the handwritten notes area they needed the ability to turn on rule lines (not really an issue, but a usability thought I had).