Review - Spark-Space

There are plenty of good idea structuring packages on the market - to stand out, a program needs some unique features. Spark-Space certainly has some of these, but there are significant doubts as to whether or not they are enough to justify buying it.

Spark-Space sits somewhere between flowchart software and idea bubble type software. It's certainly not a mind map product and doesn't pretend to be. Each idea is entered in a blob, either by clicking on the workspace or just pressing enter in the special fast entry mode. These blobs can be linked using link lines. Things get a bit more interesting when you start to give ideas visual identities. The cow in the picture comes from the clipart with Spark-Space, or the more artistic among us can design their own.

Any of the ideas can also have associated notes - double clicking an idea brings up an associated window with a simple word processor. There is also text to speech to read out the text. By exporting to (say) a Word format, these associated notes can be pulled together into a structured document.

Another of Spark-Space's little tricks is being able to rotate the workspace in three dimensions. This is quite fun to play with, but I'm not quite sure what use it is. It does mean that you can put some ideas in the background and they get smaller with perspective, but you can't move ideas out of the plane, so it's a 2D idea space in a 3D model.

One useful advantage of Spark-Space in multi-environment businesses is that it works on the PC, Mac and Linux operating systems.

Although Spark-Space is cute, it doesn't have the polished feel of some of the other idea structuring packages and at £300 for the professional version (£99 basic) it's nowhere near as cheap you might hope. In fact, when you compare it with £199 for the Pro version of Mind Manager (or nothing for FreeMind), it's very poor value for money. Spark-Space seems more aimed at the academic market - as a business tool it's hard to see why you would want to use it rather than one of the competitors.

Download now

Don't take our word for it, though! You can download a free trial copy of Spark-Space from the website www.spark-space.com