Earlier this week I finally published the new version of my Web design business site, webfocusdesign.com which I've worked at on and off for several months now. The site finally reflects my current company branding and sports the same visual identity as my business card, invoices and other client facing print materials. It also finally showcases some of my recent and ongoing projects unlike the previous version of the site whcih had projects that were at least 2 or 3 years old in the portfolio and didn't reflect where I or Webfocus Design are at  now. After going freelance full time in mid August, I finally feel like I am in it completely and it feels very good.

Like many designers out there, I find it very hard to design for myself. A personal site like pixelyzed can be and was a fun endeavor to create but a business site has to have much more clearly defined goals and follow a more rigorous process. Furthermore, writing marketing copy for ourselves is very difficult for a lot of us. But I had a lot of help for that and I would especially want to thank Erica Holden who has helped me write much better copy with more impact than what I already had. Her professionalism and enthusiasm have made this tedious writing process a lot easier for me as she took a large part of it upon herself. Erica, you rock!

Many of my other Twitter friends have been great help towards the end of the process when came time to tweak functionality and test in various browsers. I have yet to implement some of the suggestions I've had.

The site is not quite complete yet as I left a few areas unfinished in order to go back to client work. I still need to flesh out the portfolio and add the online version of my Project Planner. I also want to add a blog for my clients and that one will be in both French and English. Those will be done as I have time over the coming weeks. But even in an unfinished state, this is the best version of webfocusdesign.com I've designed so far and I'm very proud of it. I finally feel like I'm really in business...

So thanks again to all who have encouraged me to finish what I started months ago. I hope to be able to repay your kindness by somehow helping you with your own projects someday. Social media can be so much more than buzzwords and forced "viral" marketing...

There is a meme popping on Twitter and the blogosphere where some Web professionals are wondering if it is a good thing to listen to music while working or not. I had been reflecting on that very thing recently so this comes at a timely moment for me.

Of course, to a point this comes down to personal preferences but it seems that, musicians like me respond to music in a different way than non-musicians which makes it harder for us to concentrate on the work at hand when listening to music. For example, look at the quote from Mark W. Shead in the “Should we listen to music while working?” post on Designer Daily. Thanks to Mirko Humbert on Twitter for the heads up on that article. He makes the point that if background noise is needed, the sound of waves or rain or something equally neutral is better than music as he states that he simply cannot perform tasks requiring high levels of concentration while listening to music.

I myself generally like to listen to music while working but whether I do or not depends directly on the kind of task I am working on at that moment and how I feel on that particular day. If I’m more tired for example I’ll have a harder time concentrating to begin with so I may prefer the silence. Furthermore, my music listening habits have evolved over time and as my circumstances changed. When I was still a student living with my parents, I used to need to put some music on at a reasonably low volume to “shield” myself from the noises in the rest of the house. That “wall of sound” effect permitted me to reach incredible levels of concentration. When I was in the “zone” like that, a train could have passed in my room and I would not have noticed. I’m not exaggerating. As a teenager I could reach levels of concentration that I simply cannot attain anymore which makes me very jealous of my teenage self…

Nowadays, I’m a full time freelancer working from home in a very quiet environment. I need no shielding from ambient noises but I still need the music a lot of the times for different reasons not the least of which is that it can get lonely working alone in complete silence. But what I listen to is directly related to what I’m doing. For example, when I’m doing simple administrative tasks or anything around the office not requiring great concentration I’ll listen to either my MP3 player on shuffle (very varied stuff in there) or to XM Radio (I particularly love XM Café and the alternative channels). But if I’m in developer mode writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript or ColdFusion code, I usually switch to mostly non-vocal music and for that I really love the XM Radio Chill channel. The fact that I do not know a lot of the music helps me “ignore” it better. Like I said before, I’ll often just turn off the music if I don’t feel it is helping at a particular moment.

When I’m in design mode, I usually like more upbeat or heavier music. I rarely design in silence. The musical stimulus really helps idea generation. The style here is very varied and depends a lot more on my own mood than the type of project I’m working on. Again here, I often turn to XM or to my MP3 player but with a more focused genre depending on the day.

So, what about you? Is music part of your work process too or do you need complete silence to be able to work?

3 days ago, I started my new career as a full time Web design professional freelancer...

Well, it's actually not a new career because I've been doing it for over 12 years now. But for a while in the mid 90's, it did play second fiddle to music and working a production job in a screen printing company. But as it became clear I would not succeed professionally playing in my band, I put more and more time into working and learning the Web design craft. When the band ended in early 2000, I put all my "free" time into the Web work and built my clients base and kept on learning new skills.

In 2001, I got promoted at the screen printing job into a multi tasking position. I worked as a Customer Representative but also worked in the design and drawing of membrane switch keyboard circuits. I spent a lot of time in Illustrator which I'd started learning in 1996. I will keep doing that on a contract basis for the foreseeable future. I'm now realizing how much the customer rep work taught me even if it was truly challenging for me. I learned how to interact with clients, be there for them and support them and realized how much easier it is in a service industry like Web and new media design than it is in a commodities B2B market like industrial screen printing.

I've been getting a lot of positive feedback on my service and attitude from my Web design clients and it makes me happy I didn't rush into going into it full time until now. My basic work skills never worried me but I feel like it's not until recently I developed the business skills that now makes interacting with my clients easy and fun.

I feel very excited about this new chapter of my life that is just starting and, although I'm the kind of guy that tends to worry about a lot of stuff, this decision and move just feel right and I have very little worries about the future. For now, I have a lot of work on my plate for clients I love to deal with and I feel like the luckiest guy in the world. I feel like I just took back control of my life and it feels very empowering...

It's been a week since I signed up on Twitter now and, in spite of my expectaions I must say I'm loving it. There are a lot of very helpful people there and it makes me feel like I'm more part of the community.

As I said before, the experience is made a lot more enjoyable by using a good Twitter client instead on the Web interface. I still use Twhirl which I mentionned in my last post and it works great for me. Seems popular too. But the one thing that is really annoying is the limits Twitter puts on the number of "API requests" such clients make. For some reasons, this number is set to 20/hour these days (usually around 70) so I can't get as frequent updates as I did last week.

Twitter's infrastructure seems quite fragile and is frequently overloaded which is too bad because the service is great and far more useful than I expected (more on that later). So it seems I'm there to stay...

I've started to use jQuery on the current project I'm working on and I really love it so far. It's a lot easier to grasp than I expected and is very lightweight for such a powerful framework.

When the site is done I'll post a link to it. I've used jQuery for tabbed forms, form data manipulation and updating of page text and more. There's one thing I didn't find out how to do with it or if even a plugin exists for it and it's a specific kind of tooltips implementation. jQuery does have tooltip plugins but none I found can easily take the text from ANY element in a page and show it in the tooltip when mousing over another element.

The contents of my tooltips was long and needed to be formatted so I placed it in hidden divs with a class named "descriptions" and those divs are hidden by the script so available as linked references if JS is off. I'm really surpised I couldn't find a similar implementation for jQuery. The tooltips script I used is the one from Walter Zorn. If anyone knows of one that works similarly (needs to load content from any ID'd element on the page) then please share! :-) The one thing I do not like about Zorn's script is that it relies on the onmouseover and onmouseout attributes and I would like to keep the code cleaner.

An overview of the last year on pixelyzed.com

Now that 2008 is just about to start, I thought it would be a good idea to write a pixelyzed.com style year end review.

There's been a lot of activity in our little world last year as well as in other areas of the software industry. Throughout 2007, I discussed products and technologies that can help our work flows and processes in new ways and my own process has evolved significantly. Now I'll try to summarize some of it and share some of my best finds of the year in several categories. There are some new things in here I didn't discuss before so enjoy!

pixelyzed is growing

Although I still am not a very prolific blogger, Pixelyzed has grown in readership last year and I have made an effort to share my more interesting discoveries as they apply to Web designers and creative professionals. I have also tried to write about more varied topics and I will keep doing so in the new year.

2007 has been a year of growth and change for my career as well. I have tackled a couple of large Web design projects and have started doing sub-contracting work again.

Behind the scenes, I have been working on a new version of my professional site webfocusdesign.com and started marketing locally more aggressively. Once the new version of that site goes up sometime in the next few months, I will intensify these marketing efforts.

Another project I've been working on is my wife's portfolio site as she is a gifted artist- painter. I've gone through a few design iterations and we finally decided to go with a very simplified and uncluttered look. I've looked at dozens of painters and photographers' Web sites and realized that the better ones really put the emphasis on the artist's work and everything else recedes. We also decided to go Flash all the way which means I'll have to re-acquaint myself with it and give myself a quick crash course. If anyone has good advice on good Flash books, I'm all ears. I don't want books that go through the basics but books that teach solid techniques for real world projects and functionality.

The year in software

This is a really quick overview as I will write a separate post dedicated to the year in software to be published later. I must say that 2007 has been a very exciting year for me. Here are a few of the standout products I've been using last year which have been helping me get my job done more efficiently.

Adobe Creative Suite 3

The major new software suite release from Adobe... and the first iteration of the integration of existing Adobe products and former Macromedia ones. There was a lot to get excited about here as most products received serious upgrades. Standouts for me include Illustrator and InDesign.

Fireworks CS3

In spite of all our speculation, Fireworks is still alive and got better under Adobe's care. After the extreme disappointment that Fireworks 8 was, Fireworks CS3 was an encouraging release. But Adobe still has a lot of work to do to fulfill Fireworks' early promise as key areas of the application have been neglected for years and still have got no love in CS3. Looking forward to CS4, there are several key areas I'd like to see improve. More in my next post...

FreeHand MXa

Creative Suite 3 is the release that finally and officially marked the death of FreeHand and the official word from Adobe is that FreeHand users should now migrate to Illustrator. This decision leaves a lot of long time FreeHand users who feel that Illustrator is not an adequate replacement in the cold and I feel for them. Removing competition is never good for any industry and this is no exception. More later...

MindJet MindManager 7

MindManager is my best software find of 2007. It's the application that had the biggest impact on my process and work flow. It is a fantastic knowledge and information management tool that is flexible enough to help through all phases of a Web design projects. I would really encourage every creative professional to at least try it. I will keep sharing tips and ideas on how I use MindManager in my own work through the new year so stay tuned!

JCVGantt Pro 3.0

The perfect companion to MindManager, JCVGantt can both be use as a standalone application and as an add-in for MindManager. Planning and scheduling projects has always been a hard and tedious task for me. JCVGantt Pro makes it a lot easier and integrates seamlessly with MindManager. It is extremely flexible in how it lets users set resources parameters like working and non-working times and days, hourly and fixed costs and more. It updates the Gantt charts, total costs and the MindManager maps it is tied to in real time as you make changes to resources or tasks. A great discovery for me.

Studiometry 5.0

The other piece in my project management and administration puzzle. I've been using Studiometry since mid 2006 to track and keep client and project information, track communications but also as a timer for billable time and then for invoicing. Studiometry does a lot more than that and it got a major upgrade to version 5.0 in 2007. Check it out!

FeedDemon 2.5

Control information overload and get the latest info from all your favourite Web sites in one place. I've been using FeedDemon to subscribe and read RSS feeds for a while now (since it first came out) and I couldn't live without it. It this age of information overload, it's the main "hub" through which I get industry news and more. It has too many features to go into here but if you use Windows, this is the only feed reader you need to consider...

Windows Vista

Vista got a bad rap last year for a variety of reasons but I love it myself. Moving to Vista has brought me little trouble and a real boost in enjoyment and productivity. It'S true that my new computer has the powerful hardware to support it so Vista for me is fast and extremely stable. Much more so in fact than XP ever was for me. A great surprise for me and I can't wait to see the improvements SP1 brings.

The year in music

Many of you know I'm a musician and a music fanatic in general. 2007 was a great year in music for me as well. I'll also post a separate entry on my musical finds of the last year but here's a little taste of my 3 best musical discoveries of 2007. More later...

XM Radio

2007 is the year I discovered satellite radio and more specifically, XM Radio. It is where I discovered several of the artists who's music I fell in love with in 2007. XM Radio has more varied playlists than Sirius and more interesting channels. I carry my radio from the home to my car and the office and I re-discovered the joy of listening to music for hours. I discovered many new talents on XM and I bought more CDs in the last year alone than in the prior 5 because of it. Couldn't live without it now...

Grace Potter and The Nocturnals

My biggest musical crush of the year... on more levels than one ;-). If you never heard of Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, you have to visit their site and listen to some of the samples.

They play great music lead by a phenomenal voice with amazing raw emotional intensity. And Grace is adorable to boot... ;- ) Just give them a listen if you like rootsy but intense rock music based on well above average songwriting. Current stand out songs for me include "Apologies" and "Loose Some Time" (next week it may be two other songs...) both of which are slower numbers but the band also excels at the more intense rockers that fill out the rest of the album and fuel their live shows.

The music press is simply gushing about them and her and the band apparently gives amazing concerts. Don't miss them if they come play in your city. If they ever come play in Montreal, I'll be first in line to see them... In the meantime read this review of one of their recent shows to whet your appetite.

Missy Higgins

Another young and extremely gifted female songwriter. Higgins is folksier than Potter but just as intense. This Australia native was another XM Radio discovery for me. Not long after hearing her music on XM, my wife and I had the pleasure of seeing her perform on the Australian segment of Live Earth and we were immediately hooked. Great melodies sung with a very noticeable Aussie accent that just adds to the charm of her music. I'm really surprised she does not get more airplay or exposure in North America.

Again, give her music a listen, you'll be glad you did.

The year in learning

One of the more exciting aspects of working in the Web design industry for me is the need to continually learn new things. I have discovered a few great resources last year that I will now share with you.

Some of those resources or sites that may seem pretty basic to those who've been in this business for a while but I like reading about different approaches so I can look at my work from a fresh perspective from time to time. Some of this stuff will be known to you but it may still contain great refreshers.

Less experienced Web designers would be wise to look at some of those resources closely, spend quality time at those sites and absorb some of the wisdom their creators are spreading mostly for free.

Learning keeps your mind young and fresh so, enjoy!

Before & After PDF Subscription

For any designer interested in reading excellent practical articles with great design tips and ideas published on a regular basis, Before & After delivers great value for the money and teaches you how the pros do it and why. Even pros will learn new things and will at the very least be inspired to try new approaches to solve design problems. I know I have.

I've actually been a subscriber for a couple years now but it seems the quality of the articles has kept improving throughout the year. If you subscribe you'll also get access to a number of past issues. Before & After magazine is one of the best of its kind so take a look at the sample PDF's on the site and you'll see what a great value it is.

Save The Pixel - The Art of Simple Web Design

I discovered this e-book through the feed of the "Web Design From Scratch" Web site created by Ben Hunt. Every working Web designer should probably read it as it is shock full of great tips and advice for creating efficient Web sites that succeed at creating great user experiences.

The book is very well written in that it does not just explain the principles behind Hunt's "Save the Pixel" design philosophy but also provides numerous case studies of Web site re-designs. Each case study shows the original site and explains why it wasn't exactly successful. Then it shows the redesigned version and explains why it works better and why key design decisions were made.

The book would be an excellent resource even for seasoned Web design pros but it should be required reading for all aspiring and new Web designers but especially wannabes who think that what they do is design when they have no real process and just like to make "pretty things" without forethought, planning or direction. Sadly, there are a lot of people like that in our industry vying for the same projects we're pitching for. This book demonstrates very well why real design is a lot more than mere decoration and why every pixel counts when your site tries to communicate a brand or message as clearly as possible. Best $30 I spent all year...

Start creating better, more effective designs too. Get "Save The Pixel" through my affiliate link here.

Web Design from Scratch

Ben Hunt's Web site which claims to be "A complete guide to designing web sites that work".

This site is an extensive resource that contains a lot of free content as well as paid stuff like the "Save the Pixel" book discussed above. One of my great finds of the year.

ideasonideas

A site I discovered through another site's feed in FeedDemon. IdeasonIdeas touches on a wider variety of subjects than pure design talk. One of the recent discussions centered on the pros and cons of Requests For Proposal or RFPs and started the discussion by stating why they thought they were bad for designers and why.

If you've ever had to deal with such issues (and what designers hasn't) then you know what a pain and a waste of time RFPs can be. Commenters brought up other good points and that is what that blog is about. Great discussions on subjects that matter to communications professionals and brand strategists.

Looking forward to 2008

While I don't like to play the guessing game of predicting the future, we should probably all look ahead to the future now and plan where we'd want this year to take us. Our future is ours to create and imagine so here's a few things I'm looking forward to in 2008.

Continuing growth

I'm planting the seeds of a growing business by re-designing my own professional Web site. We might all benefit from re-visiting our own branding and marketing efforts. As a freelancer it is sometimes more difficult because what we are marketing is our own expertise and our brand is ourselves. I'm looking forward to improving my own marketing skills as this will also benefit my clients.

Waiting for Fireworks CS4

Readers of this blog know how important Fireworks is to my design process. I have been a vocal Fireworks evangelist for years now. As I stated above, I think that Fireworks CS3 was solid transitional release under the new care of Adobe. But Fireworks is not without problems... In my next post which will be about the year 2007 in software, I'll discuss how I now see Fireworks' place in mine and a typical Web designer's arsenal and where I would like it to go next.

2008 on Pixelyzed.com

All in all, 2007 was a great year on many levels for me and for the industry but I feel it was a transitional year. I'm really looking forward to what 2008 brings and hopefully, some of the bigger personal changes I have been planning on for a long time will finally happen. Stay tuned!

Regarding the blog, I don't like to make promises and break them so I will not claim that I will write more often in 2008. All I can promise is that I'll keep working on building my "voice". What I try to share with people here are ideas and resources I feel are worthwhile. What this blog and site will never become is a link whore that simply links to other content with little or no new take on it. If that means I post less often than some other bloggers because I don't spread the latest "meme" without critical thought or commentary then so be it.

I will keep speaking my mind and try to strike conversations on issues that matter to me and which I believe should matter to other design professionals.

Thank you very much to all who follow this site and blog and those who have commented here or sent me e-mail throughout the year. It's good to know people appreciate what I try to share and care enough to comment on it. See you all in 2008!

Following on my two previous posts on the subject of mind mapping (here and here), I have recently found another piece of my "mind mapping for project management" puzzle.

I'm currently developping my project planning and tracking methodology based on mind maps made with MindManager  and I am determining both what specific maps I'll use and what are the exact client deliverables I'll create from them. One particular aspect I've often had trouble with is determining a project's schedule. I've now found the perfect tool to help me with this pocess and it is a plugin for MindManager called JCVGantt Pro.

As the name implies, JCVGantt Pro creates Gantt charts which are a staple of project management methodologies. I had never used Gantt charts previously eventhough I knew what they were (my other project tracking application Studiometry has them) but I had never used them before because, for me at least, they were a pain to create directly.

The amazing thing with JCVGantt Pro is that it ties directly into MindManager maps and updates you make in one app are directly reflected into the other. What this means is that, from a specifications map for example, I can separate each item into smaller specific tasks which I can time estimate more easily and create dependencies between them using relationships. When I then sent that to JCV Gantt Pro it creates a timeline for the project as a Gantt chart and I can track tasks as they get done.

But the really great thing I discovered which I didn't know about previously is that, in JCV Gantt Pro and probably in other similar software, I can give each task a "resource". Resources can be anything from specific items like fonts or stock images you need to purchase (whose cost goes towards the project total)  but, more importantly in this case, "human resources". The human resource concept is very significant because it defines how much time a "human resource" can devote to tasks within each week and the hourly cost of each "resource". The time per week concept is important for me because I am a one man operation and I can devote only a specific amount of hours each weekday to Web work and slightly more on weekends. What that means is that, not only does JCVGantt Pro calculates the cost of the project based on all the tasks and their allocated resources but it "spreads" the work across the timeline according to the time constraints of each resource.

In short, if a project required 100 hours to complete in total and I could work 40 hours a week on weekdays and not on weekends then it would require 2 1/2 weekes to complete the project. Since, in reality I can only devote about 22 hours a week to Web work (at best) spread on all 7 days of the week, the same project would take me over 4 1/2 weeks to complete and JCVGantt Pro will determine that automatically and draw the Gantt chart accordingly. It even goes further into spreading resources across concurrently running tasks and moving tasks that depend on the completion of previous ones further on the timeline.

I really wish I had discoverd all those incredible tools earlier. Not only do MindManager maps help me keep track of all project specific info in one place but, with the help of JCV Gantt Pro, I can now give clients realistic schedules and get much better cost estimates than ever before. My first project using this new methodology is taking me longer than usual to complete but from that project I will be able to create the map templates I will re-use on every future project..

There is a significant time investment in the learning process in addition to the cost of the software the software for a one man shop like mine but I would really encourage other freelancers and small Web shops to explore similar methodologies if you are not already using them. It's really proving to work very well for me and will remove a lot of the tedium of project management tasks that used to slow down projects for me. Not only that, it will help me create better early clients deliverables (specification documents, creative briefs, proposals/quotations, etc) but it will also help me create better quality projects.

In the last few weeks I have been researching and evaluating Mind Mapping software to aid me in the early planning stages as well as structuring of Web site design and re-design projects. I think the concept of Mind Mapping offers a very efficient manner of gathering large amounts of data or ideas quickly then organize it, format it, tag it, transform it into an action-plan, schedule, to do list or re-use it in a multitude of other formats.

If you are intrigued by the idea of Mind Mapping or have been looking for such software yourself, here's some comments on my recent experience and short reviews of the 5 applications that made my short list and why. I've tried several others but I quickly "rejected" them for several reasons and I won't mention them here.

You probably should know right off the start that I am quite new to mind mapping to begin with so my criteria and experience may differ from someone who's been using it for a long time. I also plan to mostly use mind mapping in relation to the planning and management of Web site design and re-design projects. During the course of my evaluation, I've created and re-created a map of a Web site I've been hired to re-design. It's a large Web site with a lot of content as well as llinks to external resources. Re-creating its structure as a mind map has permitted me to identify and note repetition in content, out of date content and links as well as find relationships between elements found in separate sections of the site. It was the perfect project for me to try out mind mapping and I loved it.

The Mind Mapping Process

About the applications I tried themselves, the first thing I have to tell you is that, aside from one exception, it seems you really get what you pay for in the area of mind mapping software because most mind mapping apps only excel one area and are really weak in others. In order to understand what I mean by that you have to know that I divide the process of mind mapping into 3 areas or steps. Not all areas may be as important to you as they were to me. Those area for me include, brainstorming, editing/adding information and exporting.

These 3 areas are explained below:

1- The mind mapping or brainstorming process itself:
At this stage you need an app that gets out of the way and let you add topics and sub-topics (sometimes called ideas, nodes or items) and navigate them with the smallest amount of effort possible. You're trying to get your ideas or data down as quickly as possible without any thought flow interruptions.  The best apps let you start a map, then type your main idea/topic directly then hit enter to "finish" it then hit enter again to move to the next "sibling" topic or press Insert (close to Enter on most keyboards) to start a sub-topic then type text again, Enter to finish, Enter or Insert to move on. You would be surprised how many apps complicate this process needlessly. Navigation is done simply using the arrow keys. You should never have to touch the mouse to click in the map or worse still, click a button in the mapping app's UI to add an item. Quick and simple is the key here.

2- Editing and refining the map by adding data and adding formatting:
This is where you add icons, relationships, links (URLs or links to local documents or internal map topics, Web sites, etc), notes or attachments. This is also here where you format the look of specific items to differentiate them from one another and add further hierarchy than the natural topic/sub-topic/sub-sub-topic hierarchy the map contains naturally. This area is where all the mind mapping apps I tried vary the most. The one I chose has the richest set of tools here (and I'm just starting to skim the surface), including named styles you can use to format nodes/topics easily and spread changes automatically to others who have the same style applied. You also need to be able to add notes to further "explain" certain items or ideas further. Not all mind mapping apps offer the ability to add and format notes. You also should be able to change the layout of the entire map. This area is very deep so I'll stop here for now but there's a lot of stuff you can do here to enrich the basic map data and give it more meaning. Some of them even give you the ability to transform an item/topic into a task with start and end dates, icons to denote percentage of completion and more. Several apps excel here but none of those I tried go as deep as the one I chose.

3- Exporting to other formats (for client deliverables like outlines or interactive maps they themselves can play with for example):
This is the area where most mind mapping apps fall very short for me with a couple of exceptions. To me and I may be one of the few thinking this, what's the use of creating a detailed map if you cannot export this data into other useful forms. A simple hierarchical text outline really is something very basic that should be easy to export. Even better is if links, icons and notes are exported along with the outline and basic formatting applied to differentiate all elements. Better yet is tying the outline levels to styles in an existing Word template file directly. Again, only one app goes the extra mile and many do not go past the first step which is a pretty useless simple graphic export (inserted in a Word, Powerpoint or PDF file). Here, you'll here a lot of promises of MS Office integration and what-not. But if, like me, your idea of integration goes further than adding a solid bitmap image copy of your map to a Word or PowerPoint file with no text whatsoever, then many mind mapping apps will disappoint you here. Only 3 apps amongst those I tried offer anything really useful here and all 3 actually go above and beyond in different ways.

The Reviews

So what are all these apps I've kept hinting about. I'll spare you the worst and will only highlight 4 of them and mention a 5th because I think it has great potential and offers much more than mind mapping.

1- In first place and the top of the crop for me is MindManager 7 from Mindjet. It is also unfortunately one of the most expensive of the lot at $349.00 but it's already helping me greatly start a redesign project on the right foot. This one is deep and although it doesn't offer the stunning Flash export of the next second place app, MindJet offers a free reader application you can point your clients to if you want them to interact with the real app and see things the same way you did. Otherwise it can export to Word with a full outline, TOC, full map images and all the data and "metadata" you added to the map. Amazing. It also has 2 flavors of Powerpoint export which I haven't really explored yet. Next is Visio export. As I don't have Visio I cannot comment. Next is MS Project export which ties to the tasks oriented editing I hinted at earlier. I don't have Project either but think Gantt charts and the like. Seems quite powerful. Next still is what seems like great integration with Outlook. Think tasks again, schedules and the like. I don't use Outlook anymore and never did in that way so I cannot say how it does here. PDF export could be better but i goes beyond inserting a simple solid graphic in a PDF file. Think editable text here (it's rarer than you'd think). I'm still learning the app so I'm sure there's much more I could mention. Last point is about the UI. MindManager (like my Honorable mention app below) use a MS Office 2007 "ribbon-like" UI. Not everyone likes this but I use Office 2007 at work and although it took me a few days to get used to it, now love it nd would never go back. MindManager's UI is definitely the most sophisticated of all the apps I tried and it's very uncluttered for an app that offers so many tools at your fingertips. See it here:

http://www.mindjet.com

2- In second place for me is FreeMind... yes the free, open-source mind mapping app. It excels at brainstorming, does an adequate job of formatting and it offers the most incredible and unique interactive Flash export. It also export to a few other special formats like the also open-source ToDoList application. It has good Word export as well but it's been a while since I used that so I cannot remember the level of detail. Drawbacks include some rough areas due to the fact that it's still beta software (0.8.0 is the stable release, latest is 0.9.0 beta 12). Well worth considering. See it here:

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

3- In third place for me is MindApp from Varatek software. Very inexpensive at $29.95 and very good at steps 1 and 2 (brainstorming and formatting). Where it fell short for me is export. Well worth downloading the trial, especially if you don't foresee needing very detailed exporting into other formats. It was on my short list. See it here:

http://www.mindapp.com

4- In fourth place is The Brain's PersonalBrain. A most intriguing app which I really tried to like more. It may serve someone else's needs better. It is on the expensive side (not far behind MindManager) and doesn't have nearly the same depth in the formatting department. Maybe I would have discovered more had I spend more time with it. Great brainstorming abilities and very good Web export with a data pane at the bottom and interactive map at the top. See it here:

http://www.thebrain.com/

Honorable mention goes to SmartDraw 2008. It doesn't have as seamless brainstorming abilities as the 4 others but it still does a good job of it. It excels at the formatting aspects. It also offers a lot more than mind mapping so, eventhough that's not its core purpose, it's very good value for the money. Great formatting abilities, disappointing exporting. Not exactly cheap either but I'll keep an eye on its growth. Another point against it for me was a very cluttered ribbon-like UI. Much less successful here than MindManager. It sometimes feel more like a big glorified Microsoft Wizard than a drawing application. It may be that it's aimed at business people and I'm a designer used to apps like Fireworks, Illustrator, FreeHand or InDesign. Still well worth trying but you better be quick about it... it only offers a pityful 7 days trial. For an app sold at nearly $300 USD, this is rather cheap IMO. See it here:

http://www.smartdraw.com/

Last topic I'd like to touch is support and user community. Only two of the commercial apps I tried have forums: MindManager and PersonalBrain. FreeMind has a forum on SourceForge where developers seem to be active. I've also tried to contact two companies. One is SmartDraw which I contacted to express how disappointing I though their exporting abilities were (forgot to complain about their ridiculous trial's lenght). I then had a very interesting email conversation with one of their sales rep over the course of 2 or 3 days... even though I was clear I would not buy their product. They seemed open and eager to get user comments and suggestions. Kudos to them for this.

On the other end of the spectrum was MindApp. I wrote them with a couple of pre-sales questions using a form on their site. Never heard back. To me this is unforgivable, even when your product is as inexpensive as theirs is.

Conclusion

I hope my comments in this post will help anyone looking to get into mind mapping. The process of trying out mind mapping apps has definitely sold me on the idea of mind mapping itself. I find that using software to enter and organize ideas and data quickly very freeing. It also creates something tangible and much more malleable than scribbles on a piece of paper. You can come back to your map, refine it, add to it and re-export or re-purpose it in a variety of useful forms (denpending on the app you choose of course). It's also a lot quicker than doing it on paper would be for me.

I love mind mapping now eventhough I'm far from being an expert and can't wait too apply the process to other areas of both my professional and personal lives and see how it can help me further.