2 More From James Fallows

okay, I love mind-mapping software, and I just can't resist re-posting some more from James Fallows Sunday piece on new and upcoming software. Of course, my other excuse is that I'm just not fully well yet, but hey, here's a helping of technology fun, boyz n girlz...

"Mind mapping software, the focus of last month's column. Most of the correspondence about that column addressed an apparent anomaly: if mind mapping is so great for putting ideas in visual form, why was there no mention of programs designed for the leader in visually intuitive computing, the Macintosh?

The narrow answer is that the two programs I praised, MindManager and ResultsManager, will (like most other Windows software) run on the Mac under the Virtual PC utility that Microsoft sells for $129. Also, Robert Gordon, chief executive of the company that makes MindManager, says that it is "seriously considering" producing a native Mac version. (Impatient Mac users: write to him, not me.)

BUT the broader answer is that programs to collect information and organize ideas are so numerous, varied and rapidly proliferating that a list of the good ones soon grows very long.

Want a mind-mapper designed specifically for the Mac? There's Inspiration ($69 from www.inspiration.com; PC version available too), which is mainly marketed to schools but is also useful for other writing projects. Or FreeMind, which lacks a few advanced features, but is free (from freemind.sourceforge.net). Or ConceptDraw Mindmap ($149, from www.csodessa.com), which runs on the Mac and is made by a company in Ukraine. MindGenius - yes, the names do get sort of creepy - is a mapper for the PC that costs $59 and comes from www.mindgenius.com in Scotland.

NoteTaker ($69.95 from www.aquaminds.com) is an attractive and powerful Mac-only data organizer. Axon Idea Processor is an unattractive and powerful PC-only organizer. It is $135, from Singapore.) I hope to say more about these in the future - along with the likes of: BrainStorm ($75, from www.brainstormsw.com in England); ADM or Advanced Data Manager ($129, from www.adm21.net in Canada); Tinderbox ($165, Mac-only, from www.eastgate.com/tinderbox in Massachusetts); Omea Pro ($49 from www.jetbrains.com in the Czech Republic); Zoot ($99 from www.zootsoftware.com in Florida); and whatever promising newcomers have appeared by then, from whatever odd corners of the world. In the meantime, try them yourself."

How Microsoft Got It Wrong

Larry Seltzer points out that you really, really have to try hard to screw up hard to mess up your Windows PC's copy of Internet Explorer with a Java applet that can run via Firefox, and some other non-Internet Explorer browsers.

I mean the spyware-bearing applet on Firefox does everything except scream at you that installing it is a bad idea.

People being people, I understand that it's spreading rapidly.

Maybe we should have a gate on the Internet saying "you must be at least this smart to ride on this network."

While this particular bug requires stupidity above and beyond the call of idiocy to get, it does point out a problem that's peculiar in modern operating systems to the Windows desktop.

Windows—be it 3.1, the first usable version, or XP Pro—was designed to be a single-user, stand-alone PC operating system.

Because of that design, Microsoft made what seemed like a good move at the time. The boys from Redmond made its IPC (interprocess communications), like ActiveX, DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries) and OCX (OLE Control Extension), extremely powerful and without any real security.

Remember, they were thinking single-user, non-networked computer.

In turn, Microsoft designed its most important applications - IE, Microsoft Office, and Outlook - to not only use, but depend, on these IPC mechanisms. The problem, of course, is that Windows PCs don't exist as stand-alone machines. OOPS..... !!!