Inter­est­ing soft­ware for mind-​​maping/​brainstorming ideas called Scrap­ple. Cur­rently free while in beta.

In short, then, Scap­ple is a tool for get­ting early ideas down as quickly as pos­si­ble and mak­ing con­nec­tions between them. The main advan­tage of doing this in Scap­ple instead of on paper is that you don’t run out of paper (the Scap­ple can­vas expands to fit as many notes as you want to cre­ate), you can move notes around to make room for new ideas and con­nec­tions, it’s easy to delete and edit notes, and it’s easy to export your notes into other appli­ca­tions when you know what you want to do with them.

In the past I’ve used soft­ware like this to plan out large projects (i.e. a web­site with a whole bunch of content/​pages) and I’ve found it really helps because you don’t have to worry about con­nect­ing things together like in a spread­sheet or text doc­u­ment right away — just dump it all on the “page” and con­nect the dots afterwards.