In the Mind of a Mind Mapper

Out of the Box

2006-09-06T02:29:00.000-07:00

This is what HeadCase currently looks like when you first start it up. Pretty, no?

Help Central

2006-07-14T13:54:00.000-07:00

This is the main Mind Map for the help files which greets you when you start the current version of HeadCase. The branches hyperlink to other Mind Maps making a unique Mind Mapping help system. In this way, I hope to make a contribution to the way information is presented and linked on the web itself.

Anatomy of a HeadCase Mind Map

2006-07-09T23:06:00.000-07:00

This is a Mind Map of the anatomy and vocabulary of a HeadCase Mind Map drawn using HeadCase. It explains how the salient features of a Mind Map in HeadCase are termed and relate to one another.

Laws of Mind Mapping

2006-06-26T01:41:00.000-07:00

This is a Mind Map of the Laws of Mind Mapping, created by Vanda North and redrawn using HeadCase. It was a crucial test for HeadCase since it was the explicit aim of HeadCase to be able to create Mind Maps that conform with these laws.

Tree of Life, Beta Version...

2006-06-26T01:37:00.000-07:00

This is the HeadCase Tree of Life. Doesn't mean anything, I just created it because I thought it would look nice and because business-oriented "Mind Mapping" software can't do anything remotely like it.

2006-06-21T01:56:00.000-07:00

This week I've been working on Windows Shell Extensions. I don't have a screenshot to post, but the idea has a lot of potential. So far I've added thumbnail views in Windows Explorer, and a pop-up text outline of the content of the file. That way you can browse the content of your files to some degree without having to open HeadCase to see them. I've also added context menu entries so that you can go to a file in explorer and convert it to an MS Office format or export outlines or images in a single operation without loading HeadCase. I'll do the same for the links in the Mind Maps shortly so that one can go to them directly as well. This is potentially a really powerful way of organising references, photos or whatever - you could select five Mind Maps of your holiday photos and spit them out into a captioned HTML gallery in one go, for instance.

The next stage is potentially very exciting, because I intend to add virtual directory support. That means that, like WinZip files, Explorer will be able to look inside HeadCase Mind Maps as if they were a directory tree. Footnotes will be represented as text files which can be edited with any text editor; linked files will be available as if they were in a folder - one will be able to interact with the entire Mind Map structure and its linked data via the familiar Explorer idioms.

Way cool.

Evolution

2006-06-20T00:58:00.000-07:00

HeadCase also now has a small selection of shapes and other pictorial embellishments which can be "grown" with a basic evolutionary algorithm. This is something that I always wanted to do and I think it gets around a lot of the problems with standard ClipArt - you can never find exactly what you want, can you? With a decent evolutionary algorithm, which I'm gradually working towards, you should be able to grow your own. A bit of a hobbyist's toy, perhaps, but they look cool...

Here's a genealogical tree "Mind Map" of the basic flower "Evolvon" created using HeadCase:

2006-06-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

Here's what I created. Not just for humans!

Hello, world

2006-06-18T23:27:00.000-07:00

I'm the man who wrote the HeadCase Mind Mapper, the first ever hand-drawn Mind Mapping software. It's been a long, hard and lonely road, but not without its rewards and satisfactions, and I chose the nom de guerre "Loaned Genius" as a play on words and to wave my own flag a bit! This blog will serve to put on record what I have been doing and thinking, what I have planned and maybe attract some ideas.