The first review in this year's visual mapping review series is Mindly. Mindly is an iOS based visual mapping tool. The basic app is free with a paid upgrade for more options.
You can follow this link to download Mindly from the iTunes Store. It's free (offers an in-app purchase).
This review is part of the Visual Mapping Review Series 2014.
YouTube Link (Length: 8:36)
Video Highlights:
00:46 – Benefits of free version
00:56 – Features demonstration
1:47 – Adding new nodes
3:05 – Adding photos and images
04:14 – What I like about Mindly
05:58 – What I don’t like about Mindly
Transcripts:
Today want to talk about Mindly. It's an iOS app that purports to do visual mapping.
And it actually does it in a bit of a neat way. I'm going to go through and review it. I'll Tell you what I like and I don't like, and maybe give you some ideas about whether this might be used for you or maybe not.
Hey everyone, Kevin here. I want to go through some of the things about Mindly. It's an iOS app. There's a free version and also a paid one.. It's $6.99 to upgrade to the paid version.
So, I'll talk about that in the little bit. Let's go in. I want to show you a little bit about what it does. If you start with the free version new you'll get three different maps in any . You can make the maps gigantic down below that, but you have three different topics. I'm going to go into my Mindly review.
The first thing I'm going to go over is how this thing works. Now you can see I've got my main idea, my Mindly review, and I've created three separate topics around it. I can grab it and spin it around. I'm going to go into the specs area first. I'm just going to tap it. You can see in specs, I've got a couple of things. I've got a little thumbs up sign… it might be a little small depending on how big your screen is. I'm going to click on specs.
I want to show you how deep this can go. So I'm going to click on next, and next, and next. You can keep going down, down, down. So when you get to the appropriate level of the node you want, you can go ahead and add more information if you want. You can tap on any of the plus signs around next.
I'll click on that one, and type Hello. I'll hit next. It'll allow me to add extra information. Once you've finished adding your information, you can add some different colors, and then some icons. There's tons of different icons. There are several different categories, and when you go into the categories, there are several more. How about this. Everybody likes a sunny day. There's a sun icon in there. Then I'll hit the checkmark to get me back then.
I just added my new space. If I want to get back in, all I do is double tap the blue dot. Tap, tap. It takes me back in. If I need to get back out, I just hit the checkmark again. Now, when I want to go back, I just hit the upper left hand corner, the next…
I can keep going up until I find what I'm looking for.
Something that's pretty cool about this is that you can add pictures right into your map. So let's go in, and we'll add a picture to our map. They way to add pictures, is to go to the upper right hand corner. It looks like a little image. I'm going to tap on that. I”m going to say, “Take photo.” I'll give you a picture of my keyboard.
Perfect!
And, Use Photo. And it inserts it. If you look in the upper right corner. you can see that now there's this miniscule picture of my keyboard. If you're using a phone, you can obviously see it better. It's awfully tiny though. All we need to do is press and hold, and we can drag it down.
As I get close to the +, it turn blue. It's telling me exactly where it's going to go, so I'm going to release it on there. There we go.
From here, if I want to see the image, all I do is double tap. Tap, tap, and there's the image. That's good as well. To have the ability to quickly take images of things. Maybe you're doing a product comparison, or you're studying.
What I like:
I want to go over a few things that I do like about Mindly. Let's go in and have a quick look.
Like I talked about. The ability to add notes, and I do like the ability (like I already mentioned) to have images added. There's a little selfie (Even my selfie pouty face). I thought you guys would like that. I like the fact that you can spin
it. If you want to have a bit off a different direction, or maybe you want to have something at the top or the side. You can just grab and spin it. It's a neat thing you can do.And it just looks cool too.
I do like how Mindly turned out, because it was designed to be used on a mobile device and the circles of do work well with limited screen real estate.
Something else that's pretty cool is the working view where we can go in and see all the detail. They also have a mind map view. If we go down to the bottom right, there's a little up arrow. We'll tap on that and it'll give us a couple options. The home button just takes us back to the home screen. When I click on the mind map button, it shows me my mind map in real time. I can come in here and zoom in and out, and have a quick look. This is a cool way to see relationships between different objects, as well as the depth that your visual map goes. Here's the node we added a while ago. The hello node. It's pretty neat. Then, when we're done we can go back to the working view.
The Emoji's. I already showed them to you. You can add a couple of things. Add a smelly face. Add some images. They're pretty tiny, but it's neat to have some of those things. It's another way to say more with fewer words.
What I don’t like:
Let's talk about a couple things that I'm not as big of a fan of.
The upgrade price is $6.99. That's a bit pricy as far as app standards go. When you upgrade, what it does is it allows you to create more than three maps. The other thing it does is, when I hit share…It unlocks a few more of the ways that we can share. You can see with the free version you can either email it as a Mindly file or as a PDF. The text option is completely locked out.
If you plan on using this with a laptop, or with your home computer, you're going to need the text option, or HTML option. Something to get this information out of here, because there's no web interface. There's no desktop client, so either you're all on the phone or you’ve got no way across unless you go ahead and pay for the upgrade to get the option to have text or HTML.
So that's your decision. Whether you want to leave it on the phone. You can make three gigantic maps.
Something else, that I'm not a huge fan is zooming. You can't zoom in. I wish I could just take two fingers and just drag it out. You can't zoom-in while in the work view. I think it would be neat sometimes for some of the images or Emojis, instead of having to double click on an image and look at the image I can just zoom in a little bit and see a bit more. I understand they're trying to make it as simple as possible and still make a functional.
The obvious limitation to the free version is that you can only save as a PDF or a .Mindly file. This will be OK if this is the only place you're going to have it, but whenever you wan to transfer information out, this this is going to hamstring you, unless you go ahead and upgrade to the full version.
That's my initial impression of Mindly.
I like it. It's a really neat app. I just think that if it was in the $3 to $4 to $5 range, I'm more likely to call it a buy, because everyone likes cheap apps. But for $7 it's not that big of a deal. If you want to go ahead, and this works for you, check it out. Drop the $7. I think you'll actually be really happy with going with it. It's a neat app.
