Following on from my earlier post on the “Fluent UI” one of the comments I’ve seen about MindManager Pro 7, and Office 2007, is concern at the amount of screen used by the ribbon in comparison to toolbars. It certainly looks bigger but can looks be deceptive?
Jensen Harris has blogged about this comparing Office 2007 to earlier versions so I decided to try some MindManager snags for comparison. I always ran Pro 6 with two rows of toolbars displayed at the top along with the map tabs and use a similar layout in MindManager Pro 7. My screen resolution is 1152 x 864 on a 19” CRT, sadly no high resolution LCD monitors at home 
The MindManager Pro 7 effective work area measures about 614 pixels high normally, increasing to 705 with the ribbon on auto-hide (double click any tab for this). MindManager Pro 6 is between at about 653 pixels high. Of course this will vary depending on your layout preferences and screen resolution.
I haven’t found the ribbon takes too much extra real estate but it does present more information with logical grouping. Perhaps a power user won’t benefit but I’ve found myself starting to re-visit features I knew were in 5/6, but didn’t use. This is simply because they are now on show, and in context, instead of buried in menus. While the ribbon will have more impact at lower screen resolutions stack your frequently used commands on the Quick Access Toolbar and you can run with the ribbon in auto-hide mode. Overall, although it’s different and takes some adjustment, I’m not missing toolbars at all.
See the extended post for full screen captures.
MindManager Pro 7 Working Area – Ribbon Displayed: 1100 x 614, Ribbon Hidden: 1100 x 705
I don’t have MindManager Pro 6 running anymore so had to resort to a old snag taken at the same resolution. I only had one with a tab displayed but it’s effective working area is 1100 x 653, about halfway between the two MindManager Pro 7 modes.
Disclosure: I purchased my MindManager x5 Pro licence, upgrade to Pro 7 was courtesy of Mindjet
