So Sad to Lose iThoughts

I found out iThoughts was gone by accident.

I was recommending it to a coworker. I had been telling people about it for years. It was the app I built my teaching notes in, and I couldn't imagine preparing a message without it. So I told them what to look for, and they couldn't find it.

I went looking myself and found the developer's post: toketaWare, the business behind iThoughts, had ceased trading in January 2024, after eleven years.

A Trusty Tool

I bought iThoughts in 2013, right after my first try at mind mapping convinced me to switch for good. Of everything I tried, its maps looked by far the best.

For the next ten years it was part of every week. I taught at least twice a week, and those messages started as iThoughts maps: about 1,000 of them by the time I resigned as pastor in 2023. I preached from those maps on my iPad. (I wrote about how that works in I Thought Mind Maps Were Chaos. I Was Wrong..)

So when I learned it was going away, I was sad. It was a trusty tool I had learned to rely on, and you don't realize how much you lean on something like that until it's gone.

My Maps Were Safe

Here is the part I most want other iThoughts users to hear: losing the app did not mean losing my maps.

Other mind-mapping apps quickly added the ability to import iThoughts maps, so I never had to worry about losing my library. If you have years of iThoughts maps and you've been afraid of what happens to them, take a breath. Your work isn't stuck.

Nothing Fit Quite Right

What I lost was harder to replace than files. I've tried so many mind-mapping apps since then, and none of them fit quite right. Some had performance problems. Some leaned hard toward certain styles of map. Some struggled with tall maps, and mine are tall: I keep every note on one side so that I only scroll down, never side to side.

That isn't a knock on those apps. They're built for the way other people think. They just weren't built for the way I prepare a message.

Thank You

To the developer of iThoughts: thank you. Your app sat open on my iPad for ten years and about a thousand messages, and every one of them was taught to real people. I'm grateful for the work you put into it.

What Came Next

That search for a tool that fit is part of why I eventually built my own, FerventMind. That's a story for another post. FerventMind is my own independent project and isn't affiliated with iThoughts. It does open iThoughts maps, so ten years of messages still open on my iPad.

If you're an iThoughts user feeling the same loss, I understand. It's all right to be sad about a tool. It carried a lot of good work.