Blumind

Blumind--it's like "Blue-Mind," not "Bloomin'"--is freeware that creates mind maps, those diagrams dominated by a central idea or goal, with elements, subconcepts, and other related things radiating outward. They can plot everything from sewage systems to philosophies, as simple as your breakfast diet or as complex as quantum physics. Any concept that can be centralized and studied in parts can be mapped with Blumind's easy-to-use graphical tools and handy themes.

Blumind works like a graphics tool but looks like a browser, with tabs, a Menu button, and sidebars. But the tabs open New Documents, not Web pages, and the toolbar and sidebars have program-specific options, such as our new document's Center Topic object and its configuration options in the Property sidebar, which changes the color of objects, fonts, and backgrounds. Blumind offers many preconfigured color schemes under the Themes menu. We could customize these themes or create our own. We started our New Document by creating a name, shape, color, and other attributes for our Center Topic. Right-clicking it let us add level after level of Subtopics, which linked themselves automatically to the Center Topic. A handy list kept track of our many submenus in a sidebar. In no time we'd added and labeled numerous Subtopic as well as Icons, Progress Bars, and Notes. No matter how far-flung our map became, we could collapse and expand all or parts of it from the Folding menu. We could save and export our map in eight different formats: JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG, TIFF, SVG, FreeMind, and Text.

With the ability to customize Icons and other objects, Blumind can create highly personalized or specialized mind maps for business, education, projects, and many other uses. Its right-click menus let us add and configure ideas and concepts as they appeared instead of having to save them elsewhere and draw them up when we had time to sit down and do it (which is when, exactly?). Blumind made it easy to create, save, and export detailed yet legible mind maps.