After our podcast with James Kendrick and March Orchant, Michael Scherotter (Business Solutions Architect) from Mindjet dropped by and wrote a couple of words on Tabletology.com. During our podcast we were explaining how we wished we could pen all over our mindmaps. Currently, penning all over the map is impossible and, from our vantage point, something that really needs to be integrated into MindManager. We hope this is possible in future versions. When the new version of Mindmanager was recently released (along with Mindjet’s nice new logo) we were surprised that the entire Mindmapping canvas was not inking sensitive.

This reminded us a bit of how few robust inking capabilities are integrated into Adobe Acrobat. This had always baffled us because PDFs are perfect for inking! This gaping hole by Adobe has left the door open for software like PDF Annotator. I have used PDF Annotator on and off and have wrestled between the shortcomings in both PDF Annotator and Adobe Acrobat. We wrote a little review of it here.

Back to MindManager. Michael Scherotter from Mindjet dropped by to let Tabletology know about a plugin for MindManager where you can export a mindmap into Microsoft OneNote. This is a good start,  though for now this is obviously a workaround for having the entire MindMapping canvas inking sensitive. 

I tried to export 2 mindmaps I have been working on to OneNote and have mixed results. The first map (see below) worked fine. The map was successully exported into OneNote. I can now draw all over it. Of course if I want to make changes to my original mindmap I will have to switch back and forth between MindManager and OneNote.

Then I tried to export another map I have been working on. It is a large map and while I tried to adjust the zoom function, as you can see from the photo it produced a fuzzy non-workable OneNote page. This is too bad. Does anyone know whether there is a workaround for this? Do let us know.

Download the OneNote MindManger plug-in here and let us know your experiences. 

We have some other wishes for MindManager which we’ll write about in future posts.

I have been taking extensive notes using my Tablet PC within Adobe Acrobat Standard 6 on a 106 page PDF. I then opened another PDF document within Firefox and Crash, Boom! I am afraid many highlighted passages and notes have disappeared and I’ll have to start again. Grrrrrrrr. Lesson learned: Save frequently!
 

I’ve had PDF Annotator on my Tablet PC for about 6 months. I stopped using it because there were issues with it (Lynette really never took to it (yet)), like hogging the memory etc. Still, given that Adobe had failed to produce anything reasonable for inking I was happy with it and hoped it would develop further. The other problem is that I do at times lapse into printing off journal articles. So the combination of these two led me to ignore PDF Annotator for a little while. I decided today to see how things are coming along. I upgraded my version and opened up a pdf and things are looking ok. I have two immediate wishes I can think of right now:

• The ability to have some kind of bookmarking feature so I can easily figure out where in my 313 page document I bothered to highlight or make notations. Preventing me from looking through the entire document again looking for annotations would be very useful
• I also would like to have the option, like in Adobe Acrobat, to use the dragging tool (the little hand) to move from one page to the next rather than clicking (see in pic below) or using the scrolling wheel on the side of the TC1100.  

What about Adobe? I have Adobe Acrobat Standard 6. It can bookmark notes and give me one click access to the page and its annotation.  The Adobe marking tool is a sad imitation of inking. Both programmes have something that is useful. My happy understanding is that the developer of PDF Annotator is working on the bookmarking feature.

The continuing problem I seem to have with Acrobat is that it crashes way too much and is basically a memory hog.