When I was in Paris last week, I not only had the opportunity to test my tips on how to use an IBM ThinkPad during a presentation, but I also faced the challenge of preparing the material for a three-day training on a tight schedule. I needed a tool for keeping track of new ideas and of the topics I had already covered, with spending as little time as possible on the organizing part.

A good tool for such a task is FreeMind, which organizes information in a "flexible" tree. Being a Java Swing application, its toolbars and menus look ugly, but this is made up by the keyboard shortcuts and mouse button actions. Information can be added, modified and moved around so easily and is displayed in such a nice way, that you can fully concentrate on being creative. And the Java Swing implementation has the advantage of working under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.