During my morning news feed reading this cold and rainy Saturday morning, I saw an article on TUAW that XMind has gone open source. XMind was a commercial mind mapping tool, and I guess it still is, as there is still a Pro version which includes online collaboration, a few extra report types and support. It’s written in Java and there are downloads available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, including a “portable” version that runs from a USB stick.

During my quick evaluation I saw no performance issues despite XMind being written in Java. Adding new nodes to the mind map was quick and easy. This is definitely a quality piece of software that I plan to add to my list of productivity tools.

Thank you XMind Ltd. for making this application open source!