Xmind is cute and has all the bells and whistles needed to enjoy the ride, but it has a resources hungry monster under the hood and is very slow when you have more than 6 or 7 big mindmaps with more than 6 or 7 tabs in each of them.
For brainstorming and quick and simple mindmaps FreeMind is my piece of choice. I love its simplicity and the low level of resources usage it has compared with Xmind.
Under this duality I thanks the import and export capabilities of XMind. It makes the life easier..... until java came along.
Xmind exports to freemind 0.8 format. But now the stable version of FreeMind is 0.9. FreeMind 0.9 due to a java bug does not always opens FreeMind 0.8 maps, and fails with :
Error while parsing file:freemind.main.XMLParseException: XML Parse Exception during parsing of a map element at line 1: Expected: =
This has been also reported here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/freemind/discussion/330666/thread/d09d930c/?limit=50
And the solution is to install the latest FreeMind. In my case the 1.0 RC4
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/files/freemind-unstable/1.0.0_RC4/freemind-bin-max-1.0.0_RC_4.zip/download
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