Yale Daily News

MindManager is a great program. I have been using it on Tablet PCs to take notes for three years.

You said However, I think I would be uncomfortable solely using MindManager to take notes, as the hierarchical “mind-mapping” format is a bit constraining when you don’t know how your professor will structure the remainder of a lecture."

I think this is one of the powers of MindManager compared to mind mapping on paper, that you can rearrange the topics easily by dragging and dropping anywhere else on the map either during the lecture or afterwards in your review.

Another tool worth checking out is comapping.com which has taken mind mapping onto a different level by allowing collaboration with multiple users at the same time.

The design of comapping is fundamentally different from existing mind mapping applications (such as mind manager) in that it maps left to right as opposed to mapping around a central node. The benefit of such a structure is that the user can scan the infomation in less eye spans. This is coupled together with a unique auto-collapsing algorithm which allows users to focus on infomation that is relevant. In other words, Comapping displays maximum infomation on the screen for those areas that the user is interested in. This really shines through when the size and complexity of the maps increases and the user wants to quickly navigate through the map as opposed to scrolling up and down and left and right.

Comapping.com is compatible with most standard mind mapping application and can serve as an excellent add-on software for collaboration with multiple users.

Thanks for your article. I have used Evernote 2 to capture text, web pages, make to do lists, and it does work with tablets (although I haven't tried).

Regarding #2 comment, Mind Mapping grew from research showing that people have strong abilities to remember visual information. Is there peer-reviewed research showing that group collaboration is facilitated better with certain mind map structures?