Writing.Com General Discussion

I have both. I use Zim-Wiki for notes and research, because wiki's are really good for organising and hot-linking notes togeter that way. Scrivener is where I do my writing.

Scapple is sort of like mind-mapping software, but it has a major difference. In mind-mapping, every node in the map must link, directly or indirectly, back to the root node. Not so with Scapple. Scapple allows each node to stand alone or form its own grouping. This makes it ideal for brainstorming: drop some random ideas onto the page, rearrange them, create links between them if you feel those links are important - delete some when you realise they're not doing anything for you and just muddying the water.

Scapple is ridiculously cheap too. It is much better for brainstorming than mind-map software. I used it once to create a diagram of information flow from various 'agents' to the rest of the agents, to determine how long it would take any given piece of information discovered by one agent to reach each of the others. The linkages were complex, and I had to include 'Chinese Whisper' algorithms to see how much distortion the information had by the time it reached the POV agent. It would have been very difficult to do with pen and paper.