IThoughts is constantly saving your work in the background so you don’t have to fret about losing any of your brainstorm.īut I also sync my maps to Dropbox. You tap the little arrow in the top center and start typing.Ī tiny icon on the topic indicates if a note has been added. I use this quite a bit to expound upon my topic. You can also add freeform notes to any topic. You’ll only need to understand a few of Markdown basics, but honestly you probably won’t be doing a lot of rich text in your mind-map. Markdown is a special formatting language developed for quickly writing blog posts for the web, etc.Ī great resource is the Markdown Field Guide from California attorney David Sparks. IThoughts supports rich text so you can bold, and underline your text, although the caveat here is that it’s based on the “ Markdown” language. You can also select multiple topics by using the “Shift” button in the top left corner of the screen. If you have an empty box or need to edit the text of a box, just double-tap the box to get a cursor.Īnd now here’s the brilliant part – if you need to re-organize anything in your mind-map, just simply tap and drag the boxes around. Hitting Tab creates a new subtopic or “child”Īnd Return creates a new “sibling.” You actually hit Return the first time to end the “text edit” mode, and then the second time creates the sibling topic. You can hold down the Command button on your external keyboard to see a list of the keyboard shortcuts (note there are multiple pages that you can swipe). I find it’s best to use an external keyboard with iThoughts because I can type fairly fast, and the keyboard shortcuts let me get ideas down quicker.
I start with a central thought or topic right in the middle and frankly, just start dumping out all my thoughts. the vertical layout or “ fishbone” layout I prefer the horizontal layout most of the time vs. There are a few default styles available in iThoughts for the design of your mind-map but I usually stay with the basics and don’t get too fancy. So it was the iPad that finally allowed me to embrace this amazing approach to outlining … and I landed on the iThoughts app.
#ITHOUGHTS MARKDOWN GFM PLUS#
Plus I love being able to zoom in and out of the mind-map to focus on a select area, or see the BIG PICTURE when I need to. And I think it was the simple fact that I could tap and drag the topics around with my finger. If I used a whiteboard, I was constantly erasing and re-drawing.Īnd on a computer using a mouse and keyboard just never clicked for me.īut the iPad was a total mind-changer. I had heard about mind-mapping for a long time but honestly, just never “got it.”
Some use it to keep track of their to-do list.Īnd some attorneys use a mind-map to outline their arguments or briefs. Some people use mind-maps for taking notes at lectures or conferences.
I find this lets me “connect the dots” in a different way than if I was constrained to a linear bullet list. I can just spew out all the thoughts rolling around in my head until I start to see the big picture, then I can re-organize everything until it makes even MORE sense. IThoughts is a delightful brainstorming machine.
#ITHOUGHTS MARKDOWN GFM MAC#
The company is called toketaWare … “ toketa” being a Judo term meaning “break free” as in “break free” from the bounds of a typical, traditional outline … I think 🙂Ĭraig first developed iThoughts in June 2008 originally for iOS, but shipped a Mac version in 2013, and more recently a Windows version in February 2017. Some people work better with a static, linear outline of bullet points but Craig Scott, the developer of iThoughts, explains that “a mind map is a bulleted list for those people who have a more visual predisposition.”Ĭraig is the one-man development team for iThoughts based in the UK. It’s a fantastic way to do a brain-dump of all the thoughts, ideas, impressions, strategies, and assessments that are floating around in your head. It usually starts with a central topic and then has multiple sub-topics branching off. Today’s app is iThoughts, a universal app available for both the iPhone and iPad designed for mapping the corners of your mind.Ī mind-map is a powerful, visual tool for comprehending the relationships between ideas and topics.
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