New Branch Style: Free-form

Hi MarginNote team,

I’ve had MarginNote 3 installed since release, but haven’t begun to integrate it into my workflow yet. As a man of many PDF applications - PDF Expert, Skim, Goodreader, Adobe Acrobat, Highlights, Foxit, Sumatra, etc. - the unparelled power of tagging, colouring and filtering my annotations has kept MarginNote permanently on my radar. Oh, and the ability to spatially organise and connect the annotations! I’m sold.

While I agree with many of the criticisms piling up in this forum, particularly the weaknesses of the current export functionality and the management of files, I hope the idea of MarginNote reaches its potential. It deserves to be supported with patience, heralded, perhaps, as a proper attempt to bring an educational focus to an otherwise business-dominated sector of software development.

This post is to request a free-form branch style for notes. Currently, the three existing options cover the creation of a sub- mind-map, a structured hierarchy, and a Tinderbox-esque container. What I like about these options is the ability to set them on a per-note basis. But with a strong emphasis on the spatial arrangement of notes, there ought to be a free-form branch style to allow for manual positioning. I’d like to be able to drag and drop sibling notes, like I do in iThoughts X.


Gif. Demonstration of a desired placement for a sibling note

Thanks for app. I look forward to continuous refinements and additions, and especially to the MN4 over-haul.

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Thanks for this idea. But what would be the print of "search and outline? Probably muddled

Hello

Thank you for writing in. I have raised your request to our Development team but we cannot assure a time frame when it will be put into effect. Please feel free to contact us again if you need any assistance and we will be happy to provide further help.

Kind Regards,
MarginNote-Relight
Support Team

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I think one way to do this ‘elegantly’ yet in a way that isn’t as free-form as the OP suggested would be to allow the horizontal or vertical orientation of each tree (or even each branch!!) customisable. That would have solved many of the layout ugliness that I often have to work with.

Still, I move pretty quickly from the MN3 (after synthesis) into a real mind mapping tool (I use iThoughts even though it’s isn’t as freeform as I’d like) before then moving into document writing so this isn’t critical. If I did have more customisability in the structure I might not need iThoughts though there are other things I like about it too.

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