Freemind vs Mindmanager

I've long been a fan of mindmapping for work and just general idea management. I am a big fan of Mindjet's Mindmanager software having found it very handy when preparing proposals, particularly heirarchical representations of website information architecture. However I have also found also found it to be very expensive. So after evaluating several different versions, installing and uninstalling them, I recently experimented with a piece of software called "Free mind". Before this, I hadn't been able to find anything quite like Mindjet's offering.

Freemind does most of what Mindmanager does, the main difference being that it is free and runs just as well on any platform and the XML support is much better for integration with websites. Freemind even allows you to import mindmaps directly from MindManager. While the interface isn't as slick as Mindmanager (certain things like linking nodes, icons and notes can be tricky at first), and I still haven't figured out how to get all the tree nodes on one side, Freemind still holds its own.

I'm interested to see what other people use and if there is anything better out there or if people really feel that Mindmanager is worth the money they are paying for it.

Alternative to MS Project - OpenProj

I've begun trying a few freeware alternatives to Microsoft Project.

After trying several tools including Open Workbench 1.16 by Computer Associates, I've settled on OpenProj 1.3.1 by Projity.

OpenProj seems to offer almost everything that Project does. It is a Java application, but I've found it to run pretty fast, at least as fast as MS Project 2007 does, which is very suprising for a cross-platform application.

The interface is intuitive and familiar and it contains many of the same features offered by other project management suites.

The only current difficulty I'm having is working out how to assign multiple predecessors to a task.

But I can't complain, it is completely free.