MindMapper vs. MindManager
Thanks to JD Meier at Microsoft I have become a huge fan of mind mapping in the last few years. When JD first introduced Mark Curphey and myself to this, I have to admit I wasn't on board immediately. It was a little too "new age" for me. So I went about 6 months down the road before I had the inclination to use it again. But then as a bunch of people at work will testify I had drunk the kool-aid. I was using mind mapping for everything from building threat models and doing code reviews to working out my articles and presentations. I even convinced Foundstone to purchase a bunch of licenses of MindMapper as a lot of other people at Foundstone had become fans as well. Why MindMapper – well that was what JD was using and what another friend from back at CMU was using as well. Anyways about three years went by and I continue to be a big fan, to the point where I was accused of owning stock in MindMapper since I was evangelizing it so much J.
In March this year I was at the MVP summit in Seattle and met JD on the sidelines. We were chatting about a bunch of things and mind mapping came up again. Turns out JD has been using MindManager more recently. One benefit of being an MVP is I often get sent review copies of books / software etc and consequently I know have a free copy of MindManager. While I don't have a final verdict on which one of the two mind mapping software is better I do have some initial thoughts. One of the things I love about MindMapper is the fact that you can easily work on your mind map using just your keyboard. Hit enter to edit a topic, type "over" a topic to add a new child topic and use the arrow keys to navigate in between. MindManager on the other hand (and the little I have seen of it I must admit) has support for the tablet pc and ink as well as in general seems to have a richer overall user interface (ribbon etc). Also there seem to be newer versions of MindManager a lot more often than MindMapper and in my feeble mind that is an indication of some sort at least of innovation. Off course one challenge I would have moving from one product to another is that there is no easy way to export from MindMapper (in which I have a ton of threat models – and I do mean a ton – I did a search for file types on my drive and as it turns out I have more twd
MindMapper files than Word .doc files) to MindManager. I ran into this post though and decided to take on the author's challenge. Turns out it wasn't hard at all and in my limited testing it seems to work reasonably well. If anyone wants to try it out here is the process:
- Save the following code as mmconvert.xslt
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/02/xpath-functions" xmlns:xdt="http://www.w3.org/2005/02/xpath-datatypes" xmlns:ap="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Application/2003" xmlns:cor="http://schemas.mindjet.com/MindManager/Core/2003">
<xsl:output version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="no" omit-xml-declaration="no" media-type="text/html"/>
<xsl:template name="processItem">
<ap:Topic>
<xsl:if test="item">
<ap:SubTopics>
<xsl:for-each select="item">
<xsl:call-template name="processItem"/>
</xsl:for-each>
</ap:SubTopics>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:variable name="topicTitle" select="title"/>
<ap:Text PlainText="{$topicTitle}" ReadOnly="false">
<ap:Font/>
</ap:Text>
</ap:Topic>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="MindMapper/item">
<ap:Map>
<ap:OneTopic>
<xsl:call-template name="processItem"/>
</ap:OneTopic>
</ap:Map>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
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- Export your current mind map from MindMapper as XML
- Use some XSL transformation engine such as the one in XMLSpy to apply the above stylesheet to the XML file you got from MindMapper
- Open the XML file now obtained in step 3 (i.e. after the XSL transformation) in MindManager and voila you should have yourself a nice little MindManager mind map!
Bugs and feedback through the comments field pleaseJ.