Review - Visual Concept

Visual Concepts is a tool for recording and structuring ideas. In approach it is very (very!) similar to that used by The Creative Thinker, but the implementation is signficantly better. Ideas are placed in shapes (typically hexagons, though they don't have to be) and structured on a working surface. This software looks and feels very professional. It is easy to achieve just what you want in placing shapes, filling text and generally manipulating ideas.

I particularly liked the brainstorming wizard, that lets you pour ideas into shapes and cluster them automatically, and the rather neat selection wizard to pull out shapes by colour, text etc. There's plenty of support too for making meta-models, grouping together the results of other models and to link from model to model. 

Being a thoroughly up-to-date program, there's Internet support - you can not only output your model to the Web but can also link shapes to Web sites.

As a personal tool, this is absolutely great, though as with The Creative Thinker, I do think that physical magnetic hexagons (available from both Inspiration Resources and Idon) are still better for group working - even with projection video, the workspace doesn't compare with a magnetic whiteboard, and I miss the physical feel of handling the hexagons.

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Well worth checking out the free trial version. See Inspiration Resources' web site for more information.