Maven Mapper's

Today, I was digging in a little bit into the new and improved version of MindManager.  It comes in the version of MindManager Pro 7 and among many other things includes an upgrade to one of the tools that I have consistently used the most in MindManager.

Its the File Explorer tool.  In the past, you could establish a link to a folder on your PC, then click the file explorer button.  MindManager would dig through the file list of that folder and create individual topics of all the files, with links to those topics.  This was amazingly useful for managing project files of all types.

NEW VERSION UPRGRADES

In the new version, you no longer have to create the link on a topic first, just hit the file explorer tool first, browse for the destination folder and wallah, you have your list.  Very Cool.  :)

Even Better, the new tool has a refresh option, so you can refresh the file list in the mind map and see an updated list after you have added, changed or removed a file.

What's Missing from this Great MindManager Tool Still

MindManager still does not provide a useful of way of sorting and organizing topics in an automated fashion.  You can filter, but not sort and organize.  This tool would be much more useful if it brought those files in under different sorting options including:

• Sorting by file type (Word, xls, pdf, wmv, etc)
• Sorting by file Date
• Sorting by File Name
• Including excluding specific file types

MindManager is a great software tool and I highly recommend it.  That said, the evolution of this software has been painfully slow over the last two years.  They have done some interesting things with MindManager making it more stable, but they always go half way with their evolution.

User feedback is addressed (eventually) but they never really go above and beyond taking the user feedback and doing something even better than asked for.  Mindjet gives 100% and not 110% in this way and it could be one of the reasons why their growth recipe has lost the momentum that they once had with versions 4 and 5.