Increasingly I rely on a graphical outliner/mind mapper for core
outlining tasks. I want to experiment with taking this trend further
and actually do a project through a first draft in a visual outliner.
My graphical outliner is Visual-Mind, and I am not completely
satisfied with it. I think it has the smoothest interface for creating
hierarchies, but its text abilities are meager and probably most
importantly, in my experience it is fairly unstable.

MindGenius, MindManager - the mind mapping hype created to advertise
these products make me instinctively distrust them. (Perhaps this is
why I _seriously_ harbor the delusion that I can judge a program by
its name. Tell me what the developer is trying to do and how aptly he
tends to do it, and I can tell you how good the program is. Or so I am
deluded enough to half-believe.) Besides that, as a brainstorming
tool, I think Visual-Mind is a lot better than those programs.

So I am now considering a program that I would not have previously
looked at - although I always liked its name best. The program is
VisiMap, which seems and advertises itself as well-suited for heavy
text demands - and writing within the program - and which has a
brainstorming interface as slick as Visual-Mind. The reason I would
not have previously considered it is that it lacks one feature I have
announced is crucial in a modern outliner or quasi-outliner: multiple
selection of objects to reorganize a hierarchy.

It isn't all single selection in VisiMap. For those who know MyInfo
3.5, movement of multiple objects is implemented to the same degree.
They provide the equivalent of mark and gather of a subset of siblings.

If it were a matter of VisiMap having failed to plan its
infra-structure and having as a result, precluded this ability, that
would probably be end of the matter for me. But VisiMap is the best
planned of the visual outliners that I have examined. And its
developer seems to have made a conscious decision not to allow
multiple objects to be selected, a decision based on preserving
simplicity of operation. Indeed, in a visual-mapping application, it
is not clear that multiple selection is needed. If you look at the
actions involved, multi-selection does not clearly increase
efficiency, because each drop is much easier in a visual outliner. If
you base an estimate of simplicity on the number of movements, the
comparison with using multiple selection depends on the convention for
counting acts.

Has anyone had any experience with VisiMap or have any opinions about
this product. It has decreased its price, making me wonder whether it
is still being actively developed.