 feet and with the amazing ability to do the Vulcan hand sign with her toes. Now if no one knows what I'm talking about, you have to go check out Chuck's interview with Alistair on the road to Max Dock. Would you know that made that into the couple of days? You know, I did not listen. Oh wait, I probably have to turn myself on here. There we go. One, two, three. There we go. Yeah, no, I didn't watch all the way to the end's credit, so. You got it all the way to the end. It's not everybody knows this, but I can do live long and prosper with my toes. And so that is my big claim to fame here, right? This is the kind of stuff you miss if you do not watch Road to Max Dock. That's right, that's the pod feet, right? That's the pod feet, right? So we're ready to roll. Podcast, Alison Sheridan. And Thorne and Mike Seid. Well, I want to start by explaining why everybody's been talking about that I changed my top. Why don't you let you introduce your topic? Oh, I'm sorry. Well, I'm not to my topic yet. I'm talking about the topic I'm not doing. Oh, that's right, yes. I was going to introduce that as the title. Okay. The topic I'm not actually doing. So everybody thinks that I'm really mean to Chuck Joyner, right? They think that it's all me, it's my fault, it's a big problem, but I want to show you this is my iPhone. This is what's normally on my iPhone screen because that's my adorable grants on Forbes, but at the last party I went to when I got my phone, I mean, look at those cold, dead eyes. Look at that. And that's the kind of horror that I deal with. So anyway, when I was on the Road to Max Dock with Chuck and I kept begging to be on, begging to be on, he wouldn't let me be on. Finally, a week and a half before the show, he lets me finally be on. And I'm talking about my topic and my topic was going to be keystrokes inside text editing because I write about 5,000 words a week and I've gotten really good at a bunch of really cool keystrokes. But it turns out there was a problem in them and I'm going to demonstrate this, hopefully this video will play. I want you in the back of the room to tell me how well you can see the cursor blinking in that, in this, oh, I got a hit play here. Can you guys see where the cursor is from the back? Oh, well, then I should have done it. Well, so the point of what I was trying to tell Chuck and the thing was I was really struggling with it. You can't make the blinking eye beam thicker. There is no way to make it thicker. There's no accessibility you can do. There is no way to do it. You can do it like a control scroll and zoom up. But I was going to be showing the keystrokes using Boinx's mouse posse. So it shows you what the keystroke is down below. So if I did a control scroll zoom, that would disappear off the screen, completely defeating the purpose of being able to show it to you. So I'm telling Chuck all this that I'm really struggling with how I'm going to make this work and he kind of gets me off the topic and he says, so, you know, how do you organize your talks? And I say, well, I use mind maps and yeah, and I do this and it's really cool. And he goes, wow, you should talk about that instead. And so I am not going to be talking about keystrokes at all. If you want to know my keystrokes, you can ask me about it. Instead, let's see if I can get out of this and switch. We're going to switch keynotes. There it is. Instead, we are going to do mind map your way to productivity. So Mike is mad at me because I did this after he had already printed the schedules. He had to print him again, but it's Chuck's fault. Okay? Does everybody understand? Chuck made me do it. Does he get equal time? I would say no. Sit down. Sit down. All right. I will never again surrender my phone. I watched it like a hawk last night. Let me tell you. All right. So we're going to talk about mind maps today. And the first thing I just want to bring up is what is a mind map? A mind map is a way of visually creating, getting ideas down and organizing them in order to complete some sort of task, some sort of project you're working on. I'm going to be showing a lot of different views. You're going to see mind maps that look all different colors. And I just want to, I did that on purpose, not to make an inconsistent slide deck, but to make it where you guys could actually tell that you can be a lot more creative than just one way of making a mind map. I'm going to be using iThoughts from Toketaware. This is my favorite mind mapping app. It is by no means the only one out there. I like it because it runs on the Mac. It runs on the iPhone. It runs on the iPad. I sync it through Dropbox. There's other ways you can sync it. It even runs on Windows. I mean, anybody here might care. I met a woman this morning who uses Windows. So there she can use it too. But it is definitely not the only one in town. I have learned since I've been here it is in SetApp. So if you guys have SetApp, you can give it a try. It's kind of the big guns version. There's another favorite one is MindNode. People like that one a lot. I used to use MindNode. I switched iThoughts. And to be honest, I cannot remember why. So I was going to do a thing saying why pros and cons, but I don't remember why. They're both great. So what can I do with a mind map? The first thing you might want to do is plan a talk at Mac stock. You know, you've got to figure out, okay, you can just throw down ideas. I've got to have my topic ideas. I've got to decide if I'm going to do keynote or I'm going to do a live demo. Never do a live demo. It always fails. Plan the flow of my talk. I've got to think about which part is my deep dive. You could, let's see, we already said that, didn't we? Did I go ahead? That's right. You could organize a complex project. I happen to be doing a home remodel right now. So you've got your, you've got to find a contractor. You've got to look at materials. You've got to think of the stuff to buy. How are you going to figure all these things out? You just throw these ideas out here and get them out so that you can start organizing and figuring out where you're going to do in how you're going to do that. The next thing you might want to do is plan a vacation. My notes here say click twice and I always forget to click the second time. So you want to do, I'm planning a vacation. I want to do a packing list. I'm going to need my electronics, my clothes, my swim gear, sundry, and then start filling in all these different things that you need within those. I'm going to need my big girl camera, my iPhone, my iPad. You know, these things are all crucial here, right? Click twice, Allison. There we go. So you could write a book. If you're going to write a book, you've got to figure out, you've got to have characters. You're going to need to have a plot line. You're going to want to be able to figure out how I'm going to, what are my options for publishing. I've got to figure out what I'm going to do when I make my millions of dollars after I write my book, right? So I'm going to have all of these different things that I'm going to keep plopping these in. I've got my characters. I'm modeling my house, by the way. I did this to make them laugh, because they were mad at me for making this, stopping the jackhammers that were running while I was trying to work on this. So you can see, you can start fleshing out more and more ideas on all kinds of different topics. I'm going to give you some real life examples here. So when Game of Thrones first came out, I was really confused. If you haven't seen it, don't look, if you don't want any spoilers. The red ones are the dead ones, as of when I made this. I'm pretty sure they're all red by the end of the series. But anyway, I made this my map, because I was trying to figure out, okay, who is Joffrey? Who is this guy? And I was real funny. If you look at these up close, you can see I'm saying all kinds of ridiculous things in the way I described it. And I sent it to my son, who's really into Game of Thrones. And I thought I was being clever and look at me being all hip, watching this, and he put it on Reddit to make fun of his mom. And I was really, really sad. I was like, I'm that loser, my mom's trying to watch Game of Thrones. But I thought it was a good way to keep track of what was going on. This is not even close to one of my most complex mindmaps. I do mindmaps when I'm trying to plan out a video. I do screencasts online. I do screencasts online. I do videos for Don. And when I'm starting to work on a new app, even if it's an app I know really well, I have to go through and figure out what's the order that I'm going to explain this. What are the important pieces? And I do that all in a mindmap. So I'll go through the menus and highlight what it is I want to say about each thing. And I can move things around and say, okay, I need to talk about this first. Oh wait, this idea goes over with that idea. I can slide things around and reorganize it. Because when I first start, it's just a jumble of ideas. These are the things I like about the app. I can bring them out there, but then I can reorganize them and get them into a path that I can go through and figure out which piece I'm going to do next. And as I'm working, as I'm actually doing the video, I bring this up and I highlight in a different color. So I usually flip it from purple to green. And so when I've already done it, I can hit it green. And once all the bubbles are green within a branch, I can collapse that branch and make it go away and get it out of my way so I can see the progress as I go through it. Steve and my driver, he drives us around everywhere at MacStock. And he made fun of me because he said, you know, we have this thing called rain in Chicago. And you, being from California, might not know that we don't stop and not do anything when it rains. In California, we shut down. And people leave work early if it's going to sprinkle a quarter of an inch. Because it'll take you like six days to get home because nobody knows how to drive in the rain. Because in the Midwest, you grab your umbrella and if it rains in your raincoat, they're right by the door and you go about your business. You go to play, work, do your duty, you get all these things done. But in California, we leave work early, we stay inside and we wonder, where is that umbrella we bought seven years ago and have never used? The craziest thing I ever did with of my map was I decided to map all of the iOS 11 settings. And this was a moment of madness that I should not have done. I'm going to click each level one time. So that was all of the top level. We've now gone out to the second level. That's the third level. Four. Five. Six. Now you'll notice it's falling off the screen, right? Seven. Wait for it. Eight. There, nine. That was the last one. If you look at that, here is the entire mind map. Now what I really learned from this is wouldn't you expect it to be deeper, not so tall, so the height of that tells you there are way too many things at the top level. So as I went through this, there's a lot of commentary going why is this at the top level? Like change wallpaper. If that had been buried a little bit deeper, Chuck would not have been able to get the time to get that face on there, right? I think that one needs to be lower is just what I'm saying. So if I did some math on this, if I printed this 11 inches wide, it would be 5 feet 4 inches tall. It would be as tall as me. Some people suggested I should print it out, roll it up, put it in a tube and mail it to Tim Cook. This is available online by the way if you would like a high res version you can print for your own wall. Now a lot of people say to me, why don't you just use an outline? How is an outline really that much different than a mind map? And this is the same information. I mean this would have to go taller than you can see it's falling off screen. But this is the same information that I have in a mind map in an outline. And that's a good question because there's a lot of times where an outline would be a better way to go. But the problem is that mind maps don't actually start like this. Here is my packing for a vacation in Hawaii. Look how organized that is. That's beautiful, right? You can tell exactly where ever it goes. But that's not the way we think of these ideas. What actually happens is these ideas just start popping into our brain going oh I need swim fins, I need a toothbrush, I need to bring my comb, I've got to have a t-shirt, my iPad, oh my batteries. That's the way that actually comes into our brain. So putting that into an outline you can't do it that way, right? It's a lot of work. The other thing is these ideas come to us at different times. They come to us when we're at work. These are the ideas that come in there. Then we get other ideas when we get home. And then we're at the gym when we think about even more things. And so the ideas are coming in all jumbled and they're coming in all different places. And they're also coming in when we're at different devices. So sometimes you're on your computer, sometimes you're on your phone, sometimes you're on your tablet. You're getting them at different times, different places, different devices you're on and they're all jumbled up. So let's take a look at the actual process to get packing for Hawaii together. So here is, I've got all my ideas. I've just thrown them into a mind map. But that isn't useful at all because it's not organized at all. So let's take a look at how we would organize this. Now this is the way iThoughts works. I'm clicking the center node and I'm going to create a category here and this is going to be for close. And I'm going to go around and grab things like shorts. And I don't know, it's pretty quick. When it gets to the right you see how an arrow clicks out to the right? That shows you that I'm making it subordinate to that node. So each one of those is going to pop to the right. So I've dragged a bunch of clothes up there but I'll make another one for my swimming stuff and that looks stupid there. So let me drag it up over here. I'll go get my snorkel and you saw that pop to the left. It had the arrow to the left. No, that one went to the left up there. We'll create another category now. We'll have one for sundry and we'll pop that one in between and everything moves out of my way. And so I'm not scrolling up and down a long list of items in an outline. I'm actually able to move these things and have them pop into the right category. I've got to have one for electronics. Let's just grab a whole bunch of nodes instead of doing one at a time and we'll drag them and we'll pop them into the electronics. And yes, you guys have noticed there's a mistake there. Now we'll get fixed. Pop those over to the right. Now this is a big mess. I need to move things around to where I can actually see what's going on. I need to add my charger and my cables to my iPad. I'm going to get the waterproof case that goes with my GoPro. Memory cards for the GoPro. Mask is in here. Let's get that over. Pop it into swimming stuff. This is actually how it works. You just kind of jump around throwing these things together. I've added a couple of things to my big girl camera and I've got my iPhone but it also needs a charger and cables. Let me select those. I'm going to copy those and of course I'm using command C, command V because I'm not an animal but I just thought I'd show it that way. And now I just pasted it into big girl camera so I've got the charger and oh, I do need a memory card for my bigger camera. Let me copy and paste that over there. Now this is looking pretty good but it's kind of a big mess. Let me organize that like that. And now that's what it looks like when it's done. Looks like I got you guys sold on mind maps, right? But here's the problem. I remember you 30 years ago. But the thing is sometimes an outline is better. Sometimes I take my outline I take my mind map and I want it in the outline when I'm working on screencast online because maybe I want to put in more paragraphs of text and I want to be a little more detailed in it. But the thing is you don't actually have to choose between the two because mind maps speak OPML and so do outlines. OPML is the open processor markup language and David Sparks told me three times yesterday that I had to make sure I gave him credit that I learned this from him. So what he explained was that you can round trip between the two David Sparks maxsparky.com by his videos. You can't tell I'm being blackmailed for something, can you? But the cool thing is you can shove a mind map into OPML and then just simply open it up into your outlining application and then you can make changes and you can put it right back. So you don't actually have to choose between the two. So let's see that in action. This is a more boring format in iThoughts so this shows you that I've got the same thing. Here's my packing for vacation and I'm going to just go up to file and export, oh sorry share in this one and map and there's a lot of different sharing formats but one of them is my map and the desktop format is OPML. So I'm going to save that out. It's called packing for vacation and I'll hit save and let me pop down iThoughts and I've got an application called Cloud Outliner Pro. Very cool. You can get it in setup. So I'll say file open and I'm going to open that up and click open and there's all of the items that you saw before. I'm going to use a keystroke here to pop all of these down so you get to see everything that I had in my mind map is in here. And now let's say I want to change this up a little bit. I'm going to take my cameras and I'm going to put them in a separate category from electronics. So I created a new item down here and I'm going to put my main cameras down at the bottom and I'll fold up my big girl camera and my GoPro and I'm going to drag each one of those and put them under cameras. So electronics was a little bit big of a category so I want to move those down in. And now that that's done I can export this packing for a vacation back out to my desktop. I'm going to go to I forget what it said there, it says share and I'm going to change it to OPML and I've got to mess up on my title here but I want to call this V1 and I can tell it apart from the first one and I'll click save and I'm going to go back to iThoughts and this time I'm going to say file open and I can simply open an OPML there's V1, we'll open that up and there's our mind map and you can now see that the cameras are separated from electronics. Full circle. Yeah, so you don't have to choose, that's the main thing, right? There is easy to use back and forth and any, all of the outlining programs I believe read OPML. Alright, let's talk about what we're going to do in the deeper dive. By the way, these animations you're seeing in, of the way these things are growing that was all done in iThoughts. iThoughts creates these animations of, so you can create slides, it's really cool. I discovered that when I was starting my presentation a week and a half ago, thanks Chuck. So I am going to go, let's see, does it say click twice, there we go. So in a live demo, I'm going to do a live demo. We'll use iThoughts on a Mac with iOS if we have time. I'm going to show you how to create a map from scratch and we'll go through some efficiencies with keystrokes because you can do a lot more with keystrokes, you don't have to click buttons but you can if you want to. And we'll talk about how you can do search and filters within these when you get really complicated ones like the iOS 11 one. That's a lot, I can open that one for you guys in the deep dive if you actually want to go through it. We'll look at some of the other export options and there's a lot of elements beyond text that you can do in at least in iThoughts, I'm not sure about the other applications but you can do, it's got markdown support, you can put in graphics, you can have links, you can have photos. It's really, really powerful. So let's see. There we go. Oh, I already talked about elements beyond text, the other stuff, there's color coding, you can add icons, I forgot about those. You can do task management. I don't do that because I don't manage any tasks anymore. But you can do task management and I'll show you the animated slide thing is super fun. So let's see. Isn't that cool how that animates? I thought that was really nifty. We could definitely do some Q&A. A lot of people say to me I've tried to do mind maps but I just can't get my head around them and anything I can help to try to get you over that hump to help you feel the love for it can be good. You might want to see that OPML thing again more slowly. Maybe it was slowly enough. And what was that cool outlining program? Let's see. Oh, I remembered to hit it twice. And we can talk about some of the other mind mapping apps. I'm curious what mind mapping apps you guys use if there's some that you really like. There's open source mind mapping apps you don't have to pay a fortune. They're not all expensive and we can talk through a few of those. So at this point you're thinking I must attend where and when is this deeper dive. It is at one o'clock today in breakout room one. You absolutely should be there. I do want to make a shout out to all of the NoCillicast ways that are here. If you've ever listened to the live show, if you've ever the NoCillicast, especially if you've ever been in the live show at 12.30 in the lunch room there, we're going to try to get a picture together. So I hope people will show up. You can even pretend you listen. I don't care. Make the picture. There's only like three people. That looked really bad. No, I know there's actually 12 people from my live show here at the event. And especially when Toby is here for the first time. Wave at everybody. Toby there. Toby is I believe is now our youngest. Daniel, you're like old news now, right? You're the old guy showing them the ropes. And if you are interested in checking out any of my other stuff, I do three podcasts, the NoCillicast, which is mostly me, but also Bart Bouchotte's doing security bits. Great segment. A lot of love for Bart. Yeah, absolutely. And I have an interview show called Chit Chat Across the Pond Light, which is whoever I find interesting to talk to on the internet, usually of a technical nature of some sort. And then for the heavy propeller beanie types, we've got programming by Stealth where we're learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in an audio podcast, which sounds ridiculous, but it actually works. Let's see, how's my time? Nobody told me time. Two minutes. Questions? Yes, over here first then down here. Can you roundtrip OPML with the Notes app? I don't know. Does Notes app import and export OPML? Yeah, the lists in there, I don't know whether those are real, they're a little more staticky. It'd be interesting to try. If it's got an export, then yes. If it doesn't... Yeah, we could try it. Oh, okay. Okay, so I'm going to repeat what Brett answered. He said, if you copy and paste it, if it was a checklist, if you copy and pasted it will be you could put it in OPML into an outline that would work. Not quite as elegant. She had her hand up there. Well, Microsoft Word outlines transfer into MyMap. If it reads and writes OPML, yes. Yeah, we could check it out in the deep dive. We could give that a try. I've got word on here. I don't ever use it, but I pay for it, Chuck. Don't ever use it. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, the answer was Omni Outliner is her favorite outlining app. I think it's too expensive. That's why I use Outliner. Okay. She loves knowing now that she can do a round trip. Does drag and drop work the same in the iPad as it does in the Mac? Yeah. You can drag things around with your finger and it all reflects through and syncs. It's a little slow syncing through Dropbox because it's got to go all the way up and all the way back down, but it absolutely does work. Was there a hand over here? Oh, Steve. All right, so my videographer says never do a live demo. Never do a live demo on the big stage. Maybe that was what I meant. Yeah, I got a question in the very back. Okay, he's saying word does Okay, he's saying in word, I could have increased the iBeam size. I'll have to check that. I'll have to check that. You just tested it. So it gets thicker? Wow. Okay, so there was one other example Don. What is the name of your developer? Simon Wolfe figured out that TextEdit was open sourced a few years ago by Apple and you can get old versions of it. He got an old version of it and hacked it so that he made a thicker iBeam for me. So I could have used that, but the point was to show you it was everywhere that you could do these keystrokes. Chuck, the question was can you add graphics at any level to a mind map? Absolutely. You can do it too. Like I said, I don't use all of the mind mapping applications, but I know and I thought it's absolutely. So I take screenshots and throw them in there so I can just remember something and then edit later. And you can shrink them so they're real small and they don't splat all over the page, but you can also increase them in size when you want to look at them. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. I'm getting the hook here. One last question. I'm going to repeat that for the video. He said he thought it was endearing that I actually was going to tweet out. I should have done it. I was getting ready for this conference. I didn't pack makeup. I didn't pack earrings, but I thought very long and hard about which Apple Watch band I was going to wear. And that's my kind of conference. Thank you very much. Hope to see you at the deep dive in the photo at 12.30. Thank you.