Hi everyone,
I’ve been using MN for a year now and I wanted to share with you the main difficulty I have to deal with and an idea that could help us all.
Like every one here I guess, I have a few notebooks with a lot of notes, most of them linked to others. There is so much materials that all links are lost in the melee. It is almost impossible to find new connexions and do the synthesis job in this mess.
Of course, I could use another app like tinderbox8 but, as you know (Here and There), the interraction between MN and TB8 is not easy. These two are not made to work together (yet).
However, I have something that may help people to clarify maps and keep the user-friendliness of MN3.
Let’s take an example.
I want to visualize the relationships between people around me. Some have family link, some have working relations, some are friends, some can be two of them or all three. When I draw all links between them, it gets impossible to see anything. I think it would help a lot to be able to add a “type” to the links: in this example: “family”, “friends”, “company” keywords.
From that, it would be possible to display relationships of one type only. So that I could have the map of friends, the map of family, the map of company, all in one map. Just filtering out the links that trouble the reading. I guess that might be done in MN3 adding some specific tags to links and add a dedicated filter.
I look forward to see what you guys think about that.
Adding filter is powerful but may cumbersome for the develop team, but adding keywords or colors on the link should contribute to your requirement.
Actually, I expected the mindmap in Marginnote working like other classical Mindmap apps such as Xmind, but unfortunately some functions such as link, as you said, are quite weak. @Support-Team
Yes, this would be a nice start. But it would requires more freedom for nodes placement. The example you gave would not be that clear if nodes were child/parents in MN3.
I see filtering as a way to avoid such a big change (node free placements).
This thread really helps me a lot to understand what mattered in a Mindmap software. I’ve been heard about Tinderbox many times. With your description，I got a better vision for MN improvement direction. I will consider how TB works better with MN and its tech-realization. And check out if the exiting hashtag system could also attach with Link.
(MN Mindmap Link based on Url-Scheme)
I’ve been endeavoring to use MarginNote annotated files in Tinderbox for some time. It’s not an easy undertaking for various reasons, but I hope it’ll get easier in the future.
I’ve found that the greatest hurdle lies in the problems with MarginNote’s exports. While many users here appreciate the many formats that MarginNote provides for exports, there are many glitches with the final export files – especially for DEVONthink, RTF, and OmniOutliner files. I think that @jprint has summed up many of those problems in this and other posts. Suffice it to say, I fully agree with his points since they greatly affect both the integrity of the exported files (and therein annotations), as well as the ability to use said files for inter-app functions, such as MarginNote-exported annotations in Tinderbox.
In fact, the main problem we are facing is more about visualization rather than links and tags.
A good first hint would be to add a “side mini-map” to display filter result (a mini-map just like the “link map” we already have by cliking on a link) @Lanco_Support-Team Is it something that could be in the scope of a short-coming update?
Of course, this could came in a second phase, with a better filter system. I mean filters that include logical operators (\and, \or, \without) that many people on this forum called. And it might be extended to links as well.
@Lanco_Support-Team I’m curious about the short and long term plans for the MN3 development. Would be nice if MN3-teams could tell us a bit more about future.
