Your Library And iCloud
The Library lists every map in the folder you choose, plus your FerventMind folder, and searches them all at once.
Choose Your Library Folder
The first time you open the Library it asks you to Choose Your Library Folder. Pick the folder that holds your mind maps, such as the iThoughts folder in iCloud Drive. FerventMind only reads it. You can change it later with Choose Folder… in the Library's toolbar.
Browse And Search
- All Maps, Favorites and Recents are in the sidebar, then your folders.
- Type in Search all maps to search every topic and note. Each map shows its best matches; choose one to open the map at that topic.
- Sort by name or date modified, and view as a list or as pictures of each map.
- Add a map to Favorites with a swipe (iPhone and iPad) or a right-click (Mac). Favorites and Recents follow you to your other devices.
- Maps still in iCloud that haven't downloaded yet are counted at the bottom of the Library, and are searched once they download.
The FerventMind Folder
FerventMind's own folder is in iCloud Drive, named FerventMind. It holds:
- copies made with Edit a Copy, and maps made by the New Map shortcut;
- Templates, the templates you save;
- Styles, your style sets;
- Recordings, from Presenter Mode (unless you chose another folder in Settings);
- Sample Maps, maps to explore and learn from.
Maps you make with New Map are saved wherever you choose, like any document. If iCloud Drive is off, the FerventMind folder is kept on the device.
Sample Maps
FerventMind adds a Sample Maps folder to the FerventMind folder the first time it opens. There are eleven so far:
- A Christmas Carol: the story told stave by stave as a timeline, with the characters as floating topics joined by labelled relationship lines.
- Fantasy Football: a draft-day plan for a friendly league, with a checklist that tracks progress, priorities, boundaries around position groups, a summary over the starters, a callout, and the league's other teams floating below.
- Party Planning Business Plan: a full business plan for an events company, curved with Radial, with some branches folded (unfold them to see more), a group linking weddings to the couples who book them, relationship lines between sections, and invented costs and prices.
- Physics Course: a college course as an instructor keeps it: the syllabus, fifteen weeks of classes with teaching notes in each topic's note, the homework plan with what's been graded, the grading weights, and the class roster in project teams. Align Levels keeps every depth in one column, and the course code, title, term and instructor are named text you can change once in Map Setup.
- Spring Garden Plan: a vegetable garden: a planting calendar with progress, care, a pest watch, supplies with a budget, harvest goals and ideas, and below it the four beds laid out as floating topics, with lines between plants that grow well together and plants to keep apart.
- Psalm 23 Message: a message written from the Message template, ready for Presenter Mode: three points with their Scripture, speaker notes, and the study in its Notes branch.
- Small Group Bible Study: Philippians 4:4–9 studied step by step, with discussion questions that a sort rule keeps in priority order, and references that open in your Bible app.
- Novel Outline: a mystery's premise, characters, setting and chapters in the Outline layout, with each chapter's summary in its note.
- Church Ministry Teams: an org chart in the Vertical layout, from the elder board and lead pastor down to every team.
- Root Cause Analysis: why customers are cancelling, as a fishbone diagram, with next steps below.
- Family Trip to Yellowstone: a week's itinerary, bookings with due dates and links, a budget, and a packing list whose progress adds up from its items.
Open a sample to see how a map is put together, and change it as you like.
Each sample is added once for your iCloud account, so your other devices don't add it again. If you delete one, it stays deleted; Settings ▸ Restore Sample Maps puts back any you deleted. A later version of FerventMind may bring new samples, and may update a sample you haven't changed; a sample you changed is left alone.
Backups
Before the first save of each session, FerventMind keeps a backup of the map, and keeps the last 5 for each map. Choose Backups… in the Map menu to see them: View opens one read-only, and Restore puts it back (the current version is backed up first, and Undo brings it back).
Export Many Maps At Once
Choose Export… in the Library's toolbar to export the selected maps, a folder, or the whole library, in any of the text formats. One file is written per map, in the same subfolders; the library itself is never changed.