Amazing and continually getting better

iThoughtsX and iThoughtsHD (iDevice) have become my favorite mindmapping tool after trying pretty much every one out there. Among its advantages:

* Super fluid interface. Fast and intuitive to add, move, delete and edit nodes. Mouse or pure keyboard work great.
* Mac—iOS sharing is seamless through any of several options.
* Imports and exports to almost every format out there. The ability to go in and out of OPML and Markdown are particularly nice, but all of its import/exports are accurate, fast and thoughtfully done. For example, the Word export options include producing Headers, Bulletted List or a Table of 2 — 4 columns.
* Produces good looking maps using any of its provided styles, which are easy to customize if desired.
* An excellent tool for basic project management. Allows assigning start/due dates, resources, effort, priority and progress. Its easy to use child nodes as subtasks and set effort and/or progress of the parent node to "Rollup", which aggregates effort/progress for all of its children. This can work over multiple generations -- parents, children, grand children, etc. The ability to view or hide levels allows you to focus on specific parts of a project without being overwhelmed. I use it to track preparations to teach my classes each semester and it is more than sufficient. If more is needed, it can be exported to MS Project.
* If you want to present directly in iThoughtsX, rather than exporting to PowerPoint, there is a simple, but powerful "Presentation" option that lets you make "Slides" in advance. Frankly, I find the combination of the AutoFit and Focus options suffice to manage a presentation most of the time.
* Powerful filtering options to show (or hide) nodes based on text, task information, date of last modification, etc.

Perhaps most impressively, the last three points, along with lots of other neat features, are all relatively recent additions. The developer is continuously adding new features, but at a considered enough pace that it never feels like the underlying functionality of the app is being muddled. He is also very responsive to support questions and feature requests.

There are some cheaper options, but none of them have come close to iThoughtsXs functionality and polish—at least for my purposes. There are also much more expensive options, and I have to say that they also havent come close. For what it does and how well it does it, it is more than fairly priced.

GPH sudoku about iThoughtsX - Mind Map