SimpleMind Lite is intended for brainstorming, organizing ideas, and outlining research. In this regard, the application helps you present, organize and analyze ideas. The tool is ideal for not only professionals, such as marketers and writers, but also students. Its interface is minimalistic with a clean layout, which makes it easy to find your way. Besides, you do not have to start from scratch thanks to the availability of several pre-built layouts. Still, you can decide to use the free-form feature for more creativity freedom.
As with many other similar tools, most of your work consists mainly in creating topics and establishing the relationships and hierarchies between them. In this respect, relationships can be expressed with arrows while hierarchies are created by stacking topics on top of each other. The resulting maps can be further explained by adding labels, callouts and notes. Unfortunately, many-to-many associations between topics are not supported.
Luckily, you do not have to put too much care in placing each element exactly where you want it, as the tool can arrange topics without your intervention. Moreover, it is possible to manipulate not only individual but also multiple objects with such actions as rotating and moving. Additionally, there are various alignment functions. All this makes it ideal for brainstorming, which require agile map drawing.
It is excellent that topics can be enriched with multimedia elements. For instance, you can insert images inside a topic to make it stand out. Likewise, it is possible to attach video and sound files to your topics.
In a nutshell, SimpleMind Lite is an excellent mind-mapping tool, probably the best of its type. However, notice that the version being reviewed here is the Lite (free) version and there are some limitations derived from this. In this regard, it does not allow sharing or synchronizing your work on the cloud. Still, you can simply send it to a virtual printer and create a PDF file instead. These inconveniences can be avoided by unlocking Pro features via in-app purchases.
v1.2 [Feb 13, 2018]
• Unlock Pro Functionality with InApp purchase
• New brainstorm bar: designed to quickly get ideas on the canvas. It frees you from having to think about where each idea belongs within your mind map, and enables you to focus on idea generation. Once done, order your ideas using drag and drop.
