I can be something of an intellectual pack rabbit, collecting diverse ideas or things I want to explore. I’m also someone who prefers a synoptic view. So mental maps are very appealing to me.
But I have discovered what appears to be the one function I would really like to see in Freeform, Notability, Muse, MindNode and other such apps: I want to be able to grab an image from the web, either dragged from the page or a screenshot, throw it onto a board or into a space and then associate a link to that web page.
You cannot do this in Freeform: it will let you insert a link, but then it determines the graphic.
You cannot do this in Notability.
You cannot do this in Muse.
I haven’t tried this in MindNode (because, honestly, MindNode tends to be too neat sometimes).
If you use an html anchor link in a text box <a href="https://macpowerusers.com">Link text</a> in Freefom the link works (it is ugly) and it isn’t associated with an image.
@johnlaudun - I have similarly been on the hunt for such a tool, and recently happened upon Affine (AFFiNE Edgeless: Your Ultimate Online Whiteboard Experience | AFFiNE) which has an “edgeless” infinite canvas mode. It can take images etc and also supports Markdown. It’s FOSS and can be run in local only mode using its Mac app. It’s also trying to be a competitor to Notion and Obsidian - it has support for simple pages, bases, Kanban boards etc. But so far all I’ve been using it for is the canvas.
One of its key benefits in my opinion is that a canvas can be exported to a markdown file (with attached assets in a subfolder) - there are some caveats - any text boxes you add to the canvas must be set to “add in page” if you want them to be part of the output. But it does mean you’re not locked into having that content in one place (like it is with Freeform, Miro etc).
It doesn’t cost anything if you don’t subscribe to their AI feature so it’s worth a look at.
There’s an interesting option in https://www.noteey.com (MacOS only for now). You can even embed functional websites, annotate YouTube videos etc. Frequently updated, pretty, fast. I like to use it as a kanban board as well (the cards workflow allows to neatly keep related ideas, images etc on 1 card and edit them fast)
Of all the suggestions, Noteey might be the winner. I’ve always wanted to like Curio, and it does make keyboarding easier than the other apps, which is especially useful when mind mapping and you don’t want to slow down, but ultimately I always feel like I could use Keynote instead of Curio because of the way Curio imagines projects.
Noteey feels a bit more open. It also feels, to me, a bit more polished than Affine.
I’m not quite sure if I follow the difference between mind-mapping and the creation of text boxes with connections, but I’m willing to explore that a bit more. (One of the things I have been looking for in a mind-mapping app is the ability for a node to have more than one parent or for their to be relationships across branches—cousins, if you will.) MindNode just doesn’t handle this very well.
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