Suppose we want to understand a really difficult topic.
We have lots of notes, and ideas,
or references and abstracts, or paragraphs
or other kind of text snippets.
And we have to read them again and again
to find the relevant connections,
again and again.
Which is cumbersome because
they are spread all over the place.
We wish to pull them all together as closely as possible.
We might try to break them up into smaller parts
and put them in neat categories
-- into pigeonholes.
But this is sometimes dangerous --
if we disrupt and ignore
important cross-connections.
This little think tool pulls everything together:
All connections,
and all detail texts.
Please watch how the texts
are already there
in the right pane
when you flash your eyes
that way.
Perhaps it is only a quarter of a second faster
than a good hyperlink,
but this is time where the brain
needs to switch
into a "wait" mode
until the response has arrived,
and this probably disables our big picture overview.
We throw our eye saccade directly to the fixed corner
and the text is already there.
All texts are already there
when we touch their handles on the visual overview.
And it enables an densely packed concentration
of details and overview.
I do not know any existing mapping application
that enables such immediate detail view,
except some that don't work reasonably with non-hierarchical
floating topics,
or some that don't allow imports.
How is such a map produced?
Well, first we simply paste text into a window.
Each paragraph shows up as an icon.
We can highlight text.
We can label the icon.
We can paste text into the label field.
And we can combine bold highlighting with labelling.
We can move an icon,
and when the topics are related
we can draw a connector line.
Just hold down the ALT key
while dragging the mousepointer.
The highlighted words suggest
that this topic of "Phasellus"
is related to Lorem ipsum.
and this is related to Pellentesque.
This as well.
Another one related to Phasellus
Number 8 is related to both 4
and 5.
Fortunately we are not forced
to pigeonhole it!
Now we see another commonality:
both talk about Curabitur.
Let us tag them accordingly
using a new icon:
Rightclick the background
Finally we can rearrange the network
to minimize overlaps.
and when you are lost,
rightclick the background.