In my day job as a consultant one of my current chunks of work is the development of an approach and plan for a Creativity Centre in Kilkenny. A physical building has been set aside for this and my role is to develop in some detail the activity range and focus of the Centre and to write the business plan for it.
In the earlier stages of this work mindmapping software was tremendously useful - I use a commercial version from Mindjet but there are several freeware versions also available. See my previous post here.
Now as I am sitting down to write the business plan I am being reminded (again) of the limitations of Word as a device for summarising and navigating large documents. It kind of goes against the creative grain to be using it.
So thinking sideways I went and found a freeware software tool for authors that I saw originally on downloadsquad. It offers a variety of ways of tracking, summarising and visualising a large document using plain text files as the basic component - the home page for yWriter is linked here.
I will let you know how I get on with this and whether it helps me in the development of the plan.
keith
Have ever tried an Outliner for such a task Keith? Dave Winer's OPML Editor is a free outliner and I'm amazed at how much more organised it has made my writings. Its very easy to rearrange everything you write using drag and drop node editing.
Posted by: James Corbett | June 07, 2006 at 12:55
hiya James
Perhaps this will happen when I reach my OPML tipping point :-)
And that will take some conscious effort on my part first.
keith
Posted by: keith bohanna | June 07, 2006 at 13:35
Get a Mac!!! I use Omni Outliner and you would love it, and I should know :-)
I have reviewed a number of Mac apps recently that you would just love, Boswell, VodooPad etc.
Posted by: ChrisM | June 07, 2006 at 18:37
Damn - my "switcher" detector is going ballistic here ;-)
keith
Posted by: keith bohanna | June 07, 2006 at 22:30