Collaborate in real time with cross-platform mindmapper Coggle

April 25, 2013

Few people get excited about remotely collaborating with others anymore. Google Hangouts made video conferencing commonplace, and combined with Google Docs' real-time collaboration capabilities, working with a distributed team in real-time is easier than ever before. But one form of collaboration doesn't always get the love it deserves: mind mapping. This simple and powerful way to visually represent concepts can help move along any agenda and make complicated topics easier to digest, but isn't included in Google Docs by default. Coggle is a simple and free mind-mapping solution that fills the void, offering real-time collaboration and easy editing. Like MindMup, Coggle is based on HTML5, requiring nothing but a modern browser to work. And like most other mind-mapping software, Coggle starts you off with a single, blank central node. To get started, click the node rename it, then start building your mind map around it. You can drag subnodes around freely, and click connecting lines to change their colors. To keep things simple, Coggle derives the document's name from the central node. Coggle offers a simple help card to help you make your first steps with its bare-bones interface. Coggle goes out of its way to keep things simple. The toolbar consists of just four buttons in the top-right corner, letting you share the mind map, download it as a PNG or PDF (you can't download it in an editable format), view the revision history, and chat with collaborators. All of these are actions that apply to the map as a whole: There are no buttons for interacting with individual nodes. Instead, this is done using hotkeys and interface conventions that require some familiarity. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2035753/collaborate-in-real-time-with-cross-platform-mindmapper-coggle.html#tk.rss_reviews