
While SimpleMind is quite good, when compared side-by-side to iThoughts, it falls short. IThoughts is, hands down, the best mind mapping app that I’ve had the pleasure to use on an iOS device and it may be the best I’ve used on any platform. In short, I found iThoughts to be stupendous. Finally, you can copy a text outline you’ve created using any iOS app and paste it into your map-iThoughts will create an appropriately organized map from that outline.
ITHOUGHTS VS SIMPLEMIND MAC
You’ll also find that you can open files created by most every mind-mapping application available for the Mac or PC. iThoughts also offers multiple levels of undo and excellent integration with Dropbox, MobileMe, Box.net, and any WebDAV server. You can also hold and drag ideas that you’ve already added to your map to link them with other ideas or set them apart as floating ideas. IThoughts offers a number of ways for you to manipulate and add new ideas to your map, including keyboard shortcuts so that you can keep your fingers on the keys while adding new ideas. The map’s central idea is the same as what you named the map, but you are able to change the name of the central idea without changing the mind map’s name. You can name this map anything you want, select an icon to represent the map, choose the folder you’d like to save it to, and use an existing map as a template to start your map.

ITHOUGHTS VS SIMPLEMIND PLUS
To create a new iThoughts map, you tap a small plus sign that appears in the app’s map menu. Once you get past the way the apps look and how they handle menus, though, map creation is exactly the same.

The smaller version allows you to hide these menus, only displaying small triangles in three of the four corners of your device, which you tap to hide or reveal the app’s assorted tools. The HD version’s use of the large screen allows for onscreen menus and map options that you can see all the time. Unlike SimpleMind, the iPad and iPhone/iPod touch versions of iThoughts sport completely different interfaces. Just a Thought: iThoughts and iThoughtsHD (pictured here) both offer a set of features that rival desktop mind-mapping apps, with numerous options for creating and manipulating your mind maps. Simplified: SimpleMind makes it easy to quickly create mind maps and also offers up an inexpensive desktop version that simplifies sharing maps between iOS devices.ĬMS’s iThoughts and iThoughtsHD are by far the most sophisticated of the three mind mapping apps reviewed here and they both offer features that rival or exceed features found in similar desktop applications.

All the features available on the iPad version of the app are the same as those you’ll find on the iPhone and iPod touch, though they suffer from the limitations of a smaller screen as I mentioned earlier.
ITHOUGHTS VS SIMPLEMIND SOFTWARE
XPT Software & Consulting’s SimpleMind represents a collection of iOS, Windows and Mac mind-mapping applications that all sport a common interface and which seamlessly share your maps across all of those platforms. Overall, I found the entire process to be a bit clunky. Customization is limited to changing colors and adding notes, but you can only make these changes by tapping a bubble, then tapping an edit button, and then selecting a menu for what you want to change. IBlueSky does offer nice drag, copy, cut, and paste options for moving and copying branches and placing them in other locations on your map. This may not sound significant, but as your map grows, you’ll end up doing a fair amount of scrolling, or squeezing and pinching to navigate around the screen as the map expands well beyond what you can see. This marks iBlueSky’s first shortcoming-New branches added to your map are placed about an inch away from the bubble they’re linked to.

You add new sub-ideas by selecting the bubble that you want your new idea to branch off of and then tapping the small (+) button that appears at the bottom right-hand side of the screen. When you type a title in that bubble, your project takes on the same name any time you edit the bubble, the name of your project will change as well. New iBlueSky projects open to a blank page with a single main heading bubble in the center.
