Marco Milani

I just read this post in which the author depicted the main differences between works involving static environments, like accountants management, in which the way of making things changes slowly and more dynamic environments, like IT related areas, in which things change terribly faster.

Reading this I realized what I recently thought about the continue and strong knowledge process I need to face to in my everyday work and I put myself a question: would I like to live without continuously learning new things?

In last few month I become aware of one big truth: I'm not happy at night if during the day I didn't learn something new.

I suppose that this is due mainly to two factors:
1. I'm forced to learn new things every day, because technologies and markets move faster and faster and the knowledge must run ,at least at the same speed. Any IT professional is on the cutting edge of the technology and has to remain on the edge in order to offer excellent products.
2. I physically require to learn something new every day. My soul and my brain ask this.

The first is an external conditioning, the second is a condition imposed by my way of being. These two penetrate mutually in such a strong way that I can't decide which of the two is the independent cause: is my soul that makes me "decide" to become an IT professional or is the IT market that addicted me to such an high rate of changes and making me unable to live without continuous improvements?

I suppose, and I like to think that, neither the first nor the second is the unique independent cause, but both com-penetrates in making me like I am.

I also realized that is really difficult to me working on repetitive duties (sometimes this is necessary even in IT activities) without giving up to the seduction of suspend my tasks and start exploring new solutions and paths in order to find optimized and more efficient ways of doing the same things.

This is good because improves my abilities and my background, but it is also a doom because it continuously train my brain and make me addicted to a continuous learning process.

I wonder why Google places my blog in first page if I look for "Marco Milani" but it cannot find my site at all if I search "Milani Marco", It seams that google sees Marco Milani as a whole and not as two separate words.

I recently discovered XMind,  a mind mapping software, formerly commercial and now branched into two versions: Open Source (published on sourceforge) and Professional (commercial).
I tried both the two versions of this software, however I'm interested in understanding if the Open Source version can actually replace Freemind, the mind mapping software I'm using in my everyday life.

In this post I write about my really first impressions about XMind. I don't touch deeply every functionality and every aspect involved in this project (see the website for a complete description of the software and a comparison matrix for the two versions), in this post I'm only highlighting the features I consider necessary in the choice of a good mind mapping solution.

At the first use of XMind I was immediately impressed about the GUI. The GUI is really modern and nice, nodes are animated, colors are well chosen, elements in the GUI react really fast at the user input and the node dragging is really smooth so the user experience is really intense and pleasant.
I liked a lot the hi-res markers (icons) useful to remember and highlight nodes meaning, and the map styles (structure) one can apply to the map: fishbone, map, org char, spreadsheet, this can make the map apparence different from the classical  "tree view" form.
I also appreciate the sheets, making the application a good box in which effectively opening more than one map and clearly see which map is the current and which are in background.

Unfortunately I didn't find a way to propagate markers hierarchically from a node up to the root. I use this feature in freemind and I consider this functionality really useful in order to immediately identify important area of the map.

Of course, XMind provide also all the main features needed in a mind mapping tool, like:

• Cut/Paste for nodes
• Creation of outlines
• attachment of notes and files to nodes
• creation of link (relation) between nodes
• creation of clouds or boundaries around nodes

This functionalities are deeply integrate with the advanced GUI, so the resulting sight is really impressive.

In the PRO version there some other interesting features, enabling a more professional use of this tool, like:

• project management and "Todo" primitives with a simple gantt chart
• presentation tools
• various export filters

Around XMind there is also a nice and good looking website that is the base for an active community sharing mind maps.  I don't evaluate aspects related to sharing maps because at the moment I'm not interested and sensible to this topics. In any case I was impressed by the clear and good looking website and the excellent integration between XMind pc client and the web community.

In a mind mapping tools I best appreciate features related to "project management" and "getting things done" (see my previous posts in the "mind mapping" section), unfortunately these features are only provided by the professional (non free) version. This is the main reason because don't plan to switch to XMind now, even if XMind has outstanding functionality in terms of usability, look and feel.

I'm interesting about the road of the OS version compared to the PRO version,  in the past I appreciated similar approaches, I'm thinking, for example, to the Interbase/Firebird initiative started by Borland.

IMHO the OS version is an excellent starting point, it isn't common that the OS community can gather a so rich gift, I hope that now the OS community will notice this product and concur in short to the development of the product (at the date of this post the OS project on sourceforge counts only one developer) in order to ensure long and productive life even to the OS version of  XMind.

I will follow the Xmind project with great interest.