Or perhaps make an iphone app for rationale

It would be nice if the map could show which of the green and red boxes were one person's ideas (e.g. Aristotle's) and which were another person's reactions to those ideas (e.g. the Philsophy student's responses to Aristotle's claims). Perhaps do it via colour coding inside the box or by adding a palette of faces to paste into the boixes? Any other suggestions on how best to do it?

Mark Matcott
Lilydale High School

At the moment, one box (e.g., Reason) can be connected to only one other box. It would be very useful if a box could be connected to more than box. This would allow such situations as Complex Dilemma to be illustrated

It would be useful to be able to set a periodic autosave so that when a user gets tied up with their thinking they don't lose their work through a power outage or accidental click.

Contention, reason, objection, and basis boxes allow a single hyperlink. However, multiple sources are often available. It would be nice to have multiple active hyperlinks (rather than just URL's in the text field)

Right now "Extra" boxes retain their icons only in the grouping map. Would be great if also would retain icons (right now icons disappear and you just have text) in the reasoning and advanced maps. This would allow additional commenting options in those two categories.

It is terribly slow on an Intel core2 duo with 4 GB RAM running Vista 64 bit. Opening a file takes more than three minutes! All other programs run at acceptable speed on this machine.

This would probably require significant work, but the ability to have a class log in and edit a map would be sweet. Something like GoogleDocs real-time editing feature. In the increasingly connected classroom, having the ability to use Rationale to organize discussions would be a significant advance in discussion pedagogy. I'm going to experiment with Debategraph next semester, but since Rationale is aimed at the education sector it would be a very valuable function to consider adding. Not sure how it would work vis-a-vis licensing--of course it might be a useful teaser for selling the full version of the software.

It would be great to manage a list of articles/essays I've written. Maybe a sortable list by keywords or something. its just painful to write hundreds of items, and then have them laying all around my hard disk, not readily accessible.

$70 is too high for 1 semester in addition to textbook. I'm unable to use this software in classes for that reason. If it were priced cheaply ($20 for a year or a half year), I might require it for around 50 students a year, or at least 25, in my critical thinking classes. It can be the greatest piece of software in the world but unless there is either an affordable site-license or it is made very cheap for students it will remain unusable for my classes. You could sell a lot of $15-20 licenses.

Especially in case of long texts that are to be analysed, it would be useful have those texts highlighted in the Scratchpad which are previously dropped into the Workspace. Highlight color could be in accordance with box type.

I would like to be able to format text (particularly basis boxes) as something other than centered text. For example, I'd like to have a basis box with bibliographic references with hanging indents, or maybe a bulleted or numbered list.

In today's world many people utilize more that one device professionally and personally. Not to mention that the availability of three downloads is common practice software programs.

It would be great if the personal changes I make to my PC within 'appearance settings' that affect the how my screen looks to me would filter through to the workspace. I choose to have a slightly off white screen (light blue) which affects my MS Word, Excel and Outlook screens. This only filters into Rationale in the Text Panel and not the Workspace. Any ideas? It would help anyone with dyslexia or eye problems too!