Icons

I presume most of you know him, I refer to Philippe Boukobza and his fantastic blog Co-Nectar. Philippe is a rerefence in the mind mapping world and he is also a friend of mine. That's one reason for being lucky!

In his latest post he talks a little bit about different applications to draw. Fifty-three's Paper (we have already talked about this fantastic application in the blog) and Tayasui Sketches, another awesome application for drawing in the tablet world. But thr most important topic he talks is about using these software tools to create your icon's library for your software-made maps. That turns out to be really important to me because it's an open door to transform your software-made mindmaps a little bit more hand-crafted ones.

Using your personal icons (made/drawn by you) customize pretty much your maps and really helps you be much more focused on the topic.

For obvious reasons icons are extremely important parts in a map, because they are really what keep us our right hempisphere really focus in the topic and what sparks our creativity.

Getting back to the origin

First off, I apologize for not posting regularly in the latest months. I will try to catch up.
If we get back to the origin, the mindmaps come from our brains (the two ones we all have, I refer to our both hemispheres) and how they proccess the information they have got.
I have come across an image, which describes it in the best possible way. That image was published in a very interesting (cartoonaday.com), which I do recommend, it's worth a visit to see right hemispheres working properly.

Fiftythree´s Paper and MindMapping

In my latest post I talked about a famous applcation named Evernote and how we can approach this application in order to enhance our mindmapping experience. This time I would like to talk a little bit about a fantastic drawing tool (Fiftythree's Paper), it is an awesome application if you like to draw anytime, anywhere. I commonly use it in my iPad to draw everything around. This application can be used also to make handmade mindmaps by using its fantastic drawing capabilities in terms of colors, pen's variety and many possibilities to express yourself in a grafic way. What you can see in this post it is a picture of a mindmap made using Paper. It is contradictory and tricky but it is also a way to make software handmade mindmaps, so we will have to remake our previous mindmapping distintions: handmade and software-made. This distinction makes no sense whatsoever.

Evernote + MindMapping = Ever...Mapping

Now let's talk a little bit about mixing two different tools with features in common (mindmapping and Evernote). I will confess I'm an avid Evernote user, I used to throw everything I come across into that fantastic tool. I love the combination of massive storage and impressive mechanisms to look for specific information in this large amount of information. On the other hand one of the main features of mindmapping is using the two hemyspheres, among other things, to remind the information for the future. It turns out also important to keep track of your mindmaps in order to see you evolution. So gathering previous statements one can infer that just good things can be obtain by mixing those tools. That combination based on storing your handdrawn mindmaps and your softwaremade ones makes it easier to find maps related to specific tags, contents, words,... The only feature you have to be sure about in case of handmade is to be very straight in the art of writing. One doubt I have got is the difficulty to recognise words in the 6 hour branch in the map, vertical words must be difficult to find. It also important to say that mindmaps must be scanned or export to PDF, where Evernote makes it easier to find content

Mindmapping legal issues

I must recognize I'm really new to legal issues (trials, courts, judge, deeds, procedures,...).Due to a personal affair with my house's constructor, I was forced to step in this world.Coming from an engineer's mind, I made this map to understand the two deeds about our judicial procedure in our lawsuit.I am also sorry to say it's written in my mother tongue (Spanish) but in order to make it more understandable for not Spanish speakers, every cloud defines: who pays the costs of the procedure, which points I have in favour, which ones I have against and the players responsible for the facts in the deed.

Financial Information

One of my todo tasks for this Easter holidays was to develop an Excel macro, in order to retrieve financial information (my portfolio, stock markets evolutions, currencies exchange, commodities market evolutions, market movers in different stock markets...) for many different external sources to make it available to myself with just one click away on daily basis.
In the process to do that I mindmapped to analyze the different webpages and the most important financial information in every one of them.

Early steps with Digital Phtography

Some time ago I was lured by Digital Photography. There are some different concepts you need to deal with, if you want to understand what is on the game.
What was the best way to approach that matter those days?
Ja, mindmapping, sure.
One handicap, it was made in Spanish.