iPad lovers can finally enjoy their favorite mind mapping application for free. After great customer feedback on DropMind for iPad, we decided to surprise our users with the Lite version which has been officially released at the beginning of December 2011.

A wide range of features will help you enjoy mapping your personal and professional tasks and ideas.

What is great about DropMind Lite?

• It is free of charge;
• Allows 3 different views such: list, thumbnail and full screen view.
• Mind maps can be easily created and shared as email attachment in the following formats: .dmmx file, as an image and as PDF file.
• Facebook and Twitter integration are also available.
• You can also select more than one map and apply one action on all selected tasks. This allows you to complete tasks more quickly.

With more than 5000 downloads for just one month DropMind Lite is establishing its position and credibility in the mind mapping world. This fact is great motivation for our team to work harder in order to provide excellent mind mapping environment and set DropMind as one of yours must have applications.

Here are the results:

Certainly, this survey is just a step forward to revealing true value of mind mapping software and its application in the business world. We think that this is just the beginning of the mind mapping evolution.

We would be more than glad to hear your opinion on the topic.

Statistics say there are:

-4 billion searches per day
-175 million per hour
-2.9 million searches per minute
-1 trillion pages of content on the net
-150 pages content per person alive

Therefore in this article I will share with you several useful tips that will help you get the best research results and map them into your project or assignment.

Start with what you know

The first thing you need to do is visit your favorite websites related to the research topic. You already know the way they are organized and you can easily navigate and search for the relevant content. Also you can ask your friends to recommend their favorite websites; people have different habits and perspective when it comes to information exploration.

The internet is more than just Google

We often make the same mistake over and over again, we think of Google as the first and last place for data search. But the experience shows that although major commercial search engines often return similar results, they work differently enough that you should use several search engines for every research project to help you uncover different resources.

Results are not always on the first side

Sometimes, we are eager to find fast and reliable information and we read only the first page results of our search. From my experience every time I search for information it shows up after the first 3 pages of search results. Some websites are very good at making their content rank high in search engines for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their content. So whenever your start your internet investigation, be thorough and patient.

Use different phrases

Say it otherwise. Practice different phrases and related keywords and search for them in order to get the results wanted. Search engines have different way of ranking website’s content and by combining several related keywords you will certainly find better results. You can also limit searches say to a specific kind of data, such as news or blogs, books or set alerts to get the newest info on related topic.

Use tabs

We often lose relevant data jumping form one page to another, following related link and articles. If you are reading an article and you see a link you want to open, use another tab.  You can open multiple pages in this manner without losing your place on the current page.  This way you can stay more organized, more focused and never lose important information.

Bookmark or map you pages

While searching you can find content that is interesting but not relevant to your current needs. Bookmark it; maybe it will be useful in the future. Another option is to use automatic map building in DropMind.

The great thing is that this mind mapping software has integrated browser with the ability to drag and drop web content, links and images into a mind map, which is a better way of saving your effort and time while doing a research or a project. This functionality will become significant research tool, as we continue to struggle with information overload and time management.

Recent survey regarding mind mapping showed that over one-third of respondents (35.8%) said their mind mapping software helps them to manage information overload ?to a big extent.

Therefore combine this search tips and quality mind map software such as DropMind to effortlessly find and organize your relevant information. It will surely save you lot of effort and time.

We often use creative, critical and visual thinking and brainstorming interchangeably. In order to develop our thinking techniques properly and use these different types of thinking most effectively, we need to make a difference among them and combine it appropriately.

So let’s look at what theory says:

Creative thinking is the merging of ideas which have not been merged before. Brainstorming is one form of creative thinking: it works by merging someone else’s ideas with your own to create a new one. You are using the ideas of others as a stimulus for your own.
Critical thinking is the process we use to reflect on assess and judge the assumption underlying our own and others ideas and efforts.

On the other hand, visual thinking is the common phenomenon of thinking through visual processing using the part of the brain that is emotional and creative to organize information in an intuitive and simultaneous way.

When compared all of these definitions we can conclude that in order to maximize your thinking potential, the best formula is to combine critical, creative and visual thinking.

How is this possible?

When you think creatively, you are generating list of new ideas. The creative thought is unpredictable, revolutionary, original. It often happens spontaneously. But in order to grow and become achievable, critical thinking is needed. Critical thinking is exercised to achieve applied creativity. This is logical, focused, conservative, practical and reasonable.

We can first generate pool of ideas using creative thinking, analyze their potential and drawbacks with critical thinking and visualize the idea as a whole.  If you are working on product development and problem solving, one solution is to include more members in the team that have different opinions and perspective of the problem. Maybe one of them will be more creative, and another will have the real picture of the current situation. Combined with visual tool like DropMind, the effectiveness will be increased in no time.

The first one is visualization of how web designers and developers can use mind mapping to build the web site easier and organize web pages in logical sequence. With the help of mind mapping they can create blue print and see the big picture of their project.

Web design planning

The second map presents how mind maps can be used in event organization and planning. Simple and easy visualization of tasks to be done can greatly improve efficiency and improve the process.

Event management

Hope you will find this two examples interesting and useful.