Thortspace

"Nice"

Pros: It is an excellent service, I recommend it to everyone.

"Cartoonish, but Poignant"

Overall: Overall the workflow creates organic structures that aid in understanding complex topics and provide context to attach details to in subjectively relevant locations that contribute to knowledge retention. It creates the most organic-looking results among mind-mapping tools that I've considered. Being required to break down content so atomically forces the user to distill information to its essential components and consider its emergent structure from there. I find complex topics grow organically like colonies of bacteria across sphere surfaces. Thortspace has become my primary tool for learning any important topic. I have created publicly view-able spheres on diverse topics including tax liens and deed investing, blockchain fundamentals, advanced Matlab and Simulink programming for control systems engineering, and a verse-wise study of the Book of Psalms. Several of those maps would span unwieldy acreage in any less succinct mind-mapping tool.

Pros: Thortspace is the only mind-mapping software available with any 3D capabilities. It's really 2 1/2 D, mapping everything on spheres instead of flat pages. But spheres can be chained together in 3D to create clouds of related topics. Sacrifices were made to enable the paradigm. All content must be broken down into sub-tweet-sized "thorts", shown as text-laiden bubbles. Thorts are then categorized and organized into groups which are sticky blobs of thorts that can be rotated, re positioned, and titled. Paths can then be used to relate thorts or groups, or spheres. Categories and path types are entirely user-configurable. I've one set I use for computer science, and an entirely different set I use for Bible study. Thortspace has a "do" mode that presents groups of thorts as a list of lists. Its...there. I've little use for it personally. I find it looses the positional and relational context the information is built with. The "explore" mode has all of the navigation tools "think" mode does, but is read-only. It's useful for freeform review of a sphere's information. Thortspace also has a "present" mode. I often use it to blow people's minds when they're expecting death by PowerPoint in the conservatory. It allows for views of spheres to be sequenced instead of slides.

Cons: The user interface was designed by the psychology department, not the usual software engineering folk. Controls are all present and functional, but not where a sane user would expect to find them, nor is everything entirely labeled sensibly. "Search" for example really acts more like "File", switching among and managing your inventory of spheres. It all makes sense if you're willing to adopt a certain level of psychosis. The image handling features need some streamlining, but they are functional if you're willing to wrestle them. Specifically Thortspace imports image files into its available catalog, and then allows thorts to be painted from its image pallet. Managing the pallet is not intuitive. Pasting an image from the clipboard directly to a thort is a glaringly missing feature.