I’ve been evaluating MindManager X5 and I really dig it. It’s a great program, it’s able to work with ink on my Tablet PC, it can integrate with MS Project. I have tried eight other mind mapping tools (FreeMind, Visual Mind, ConceptDraw MINDMAP, Thought Mapper, MYmap, BrainMine, Mind Pad, Map it!, MindMapper and OpenMind, in case someone’s interested) and they just can’t compete with MindManager’s feature set. So, one seemingly small problem I’m having is that the fonts that MindManager shows in the diagrams are fuzzy. Look here:
Update: Have a look at the comments [SORRY, COMMENTS REMOVED] for a few more screenshots that may help you understand what I’m seeing. The problem is worst for the subtopic, slightly better for the other node types, but it depends on a style’s font settings - in smaller font sizes, the problem is more clearly visible (and it’s much more clearly visible if the whole screen is full of text, something I couldn’t show in the small screenshot). This doesn’t have anything to do with the font I use, nor with the Windows setting for font smoothing. Now, the thing is I contacted Mindjet support about this and got this reply:
The automatic antialiazing of MM X5 sadly causes on some screens a fuzzy appearance of the fonts. Unfortunately the antialiazing cannot be switched off in the actual MM X5-version and at this time I cannot tell you eihter, if this feature will be detachable in a future version. I´m sorry, that in this case I cannot offer you a solution for your problem.
What? I’m evaluating the best and most expensive mind mapping software in the market, the support guys acknowledge that they have a bad display bug, but they don’t feel they should promise a fix for the bug for any time in the future? Unbelievable! Looking around the peer to peer forums at Mindjet, I found that three others have posted about this problem in the past, here, here and here. The oldest post dates back to December 2003. So, if I can’t find a solution to this problem, it looks like I won’t buy MindManager, however great the functionality may be. I don’t like the bug because it makes the maps look ugly, and I don’t like the attitude any better, when I see how long this problem has apparently been known. Or does anybody have a solution to this problem?