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Review: Axon Idea Processor's awkward interface hinders its productivity-boosting goal |
January 08, 2013
Axon Idea Processor ($135; limited demo) presents something of a paradox: I can see many potential uses for it that other applications will not fulfill, but the experience of working with it makes me wonder if it's worth it.
Axon Idea Processor is not purely an outliner or mindmapper or process simulator, though it has aspects of all of those. Axon's design encourages a creative flow from high-level abstraction and brainstorming to concrete models and plans, and this is a very good thing. Unfortunately, a clumsy interface hinders precisely the kind of free-flowing exploration the program's design encourages, and a mixture of bugs and poorly documented features compounds the problem.
Using Axon initially consists of placing ideas—essentially, labeled objects—onto the work area. Detail text can be attached to the ideas, either plain or rich-formatted, but formatting requires opening modal dialog boxes instead of using toolbars, one example of many in terms of how Axon first creates an alluring creative sandbox and then seeds it with bricks. Then one can add connectivity between objects, links that can also be labeled to show relationships and interactions. A writer might start with characters and then link them with lines labeled "loves," "hates," etc, while someone documenting the process by which an order is placed might link business departments and actions with "assigns to," "reports on," and so forth.
Axon provides a number of different ways to structure ideas, from simple blocks to complex hierarchies.
Axon provides a wide palette of shapes, colors, and styles for the various objects it allows you to create, and leaves it to you to add meaning; red boxes might mean "external companies" in one model, for example. This is not enforced by internal structure, but is there as a tool for you to use. Links can join multiple objects in complex patterns, and have a variety of shapes and colors to use to distinguish the meaning of each connection.
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2023857/review-axon-idea-processors-awkward-interface-hinders-its-productivity-boosting-goal.html
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