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Thinking Space, Create Visual Thought Maps to Help with Organization

Posted Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 9:13 am by Jonathan Lonczak 0 Comments

User Rating4.00/5

Thinking Space. Create visual thought maps that help organize and plan your activities and ideas. Thinking Space is a Mind Mapping application for Android. Portable Mind Mapping has never been so much fun! Create visual mind maps that help organize and plan your activities and ideas. Awesome mind mapping tools (links, notes, colors, icons). Great for study, meetings, tasks, planning, or go wild!

Price: Free, $4.84 Ad-Free Pro Version

Tested on: Motorola Xoom, HTC Thunderbolt, Samsung Galaxy Tablet
Content Rating: Everyone

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• Allows you to create visual mappings of your thoughts, ideas, projects, and outlines!
• Great for entrepreneurs, business people, philosophers, game designers, thinkers, and college students!
• Excellent “Getting Started” section to demonstrate application’s features!
• Syncs with other mind mapping programs like Mind Meister!
• Allows you to sync your mind maps to the Cloud and back to all of your other devices!

Cons

• Does not support export of mind map to Dropbox within the application.
• Does not have explanatory tool tips for all the various mind mapping options.

Features:

Thinking Space is a mind mapping application for Android. The app allows you to create a visual outline of your ideas, projects, or papers in an easy to use and feature rich interface. It also allows you to sync all of your Mind Maps to the cloud so that you can view and edit them on other devices.

When you first load up Thinking Space you will have two options: to view the “Getting Started” mind map or to create a new mind map of your own. I highly recommend starting off by viewing the “Getting Started” mind map. It does a great job showing what is possible with this application once you become accustomed to it’s unique interface. It also contains a wealth of information about Thinking Space and how to use it to its full extent.

Thinking Space works by allowing the user to create the previously mentioned “Mind Maps.” A mind map is an outline of a series of ideas made into a visual diagram through Thinking Space. Each idea is given it’s own idea bubble or “node” in the mind map. These ideas are each connected by lines to the other ideas or topics that they are related to. For example, if I was creating a mind map of a new jet car I would link the engine with each of the parts of the engine in the mind map. You can see a visual representation of this concept in the screenshots.

Each “node” or idea bubble is fully customizable. You can change the color of each node, the font type, bold, italics, font size, and font color. This allows you to create a mind map with nodes that are easily distinguishable from each other by color and font style.

You can also link related ideas to each other. By adding a link between related ideas you can see how the requirements for the fuel of the new jet car are linked to specific parts of the engine. It also allows you to diagram other related ideas with each other while keeping them in the appropriate section of your mind map.

You can add notes to each node in Thinking Space if desired. This can allow you to put in any extra information that is needed to your mind map without having to create extra nodes. This can be useful for putting in extra information like requirements for a specific node of the mind map, book information, website information, etc. After creating a note, a tiny notepad is displayed next to the node with the note. In order to open up the note you merely need to click on the node with the notepad and then hit the “Notes” icon in the upper left hand corner of the application.

Finally, you can wirelessly sync your mind map using your Google Login. The wireless sync option can be found under the settings option in Thinking Space. Select the Cloud option and select enabled with specific login. This will allow you to backup your mind maps to the Google Cloud. While you are in the mind map you wish to backup to the cloud, just select the export option and your mind map will be instantly backed up to the cloud.

Usefulness:

Thinking Space is extremely useful for keeping track of all of your ideas and organizing them in one place. I began using this application in order to better document my ideas for several board games I am planning on creating and this application provides an excellent platform for me to organize all my ideas in to a useful format.

As I was writing this review I realized how useful this application would be for review writing as well. It helps you to easily create a useful outline of all of the relevant information about any product. College students could make excellent use of this for writing term papers.

I also think that Thinking Space would be an excellent application for collaborating on projects. It would allow you to break down all of the various aspects of the project into nodes. Then each of those nodes could be maintained by one individual to detail the aspects of their assignment. With the cloud functionality of this application multiple parties could be editing the Thinking Space together to keep up to date with the project.

Ease of Use:

Thinking Space is fairly easy to use. Most of the buttons are drawn in such a way that they are self-explanatory. The Getting Started project is also extremely useful to understand all the potential uses and options of the application.

However, I wish the application had tool tip descriptiona for each icon so that reading the “Getting Started” section was not nessecary. Without viewing this helpful section many of the buttons would be a mystery in their application, even with trial and error. The addition of written descriptions for each button would go a long way in making this application much easier to use.

Frequently Used:

If you aspire to be or are an entrepreneur, a college student, a businessman, a philosopher, or someone who just likes to document their thoughts then this is an application you will use almost daily. Thinking Space allows you to organize and document all of your thoughts and ideas within one application in it’s own easy to view mind map format. It also allows you to share those mind maps between devices so you can work on your tablet, phone, or home PC.

Interface:

The interface for Thinking Space is excellent and extremely feature rich. My only two complaints are it’s lack of captions for each of it’s tool icons and it’s inability to export to Dropbox from within the application.

As I stated earlier the lack of captions for each tool icon is extremely annoying. It makes initially learning how to use the application much more difficult then it should be. It also forces you to read the “Getting Started” section or spending an hour of trial and error learning what each button does. This problem could easily be fixed with captions for each of the tool icons.

Also the lack of Dropbox exporting support seems completely strange. In order for me to sync a mind map to my Dropbox instead of it going to the Google Cloud; I need to open my Dropbox application select my mind map folder and then select the mind map I wish to upload. When I open the export option in Thinking Space it shows Dropbox as an option to export to, but when I select- it tells me “This option is not supported.” I am sure it would not be difficult to allow you to export the mind map file as a file to your Dropbox, but the developers have not fixed this issue. So to save your mind maps to your Dropbox requires much more work.

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