Modes

FreeMind itself is only a framework which makes it very easy to write editors for tree-structured data. The functionality itself is implemented by the different Modes of FreeMind. A Mode can be written in at least about 100 lines of code (while FreeMind currently consists of about 6000 lines of code), so if you have an idea for a new mode, it should be a very easy task to implement it. Modes that are/should be implemented are:

MindMap Mode

This is the first Mode that was implemented and simply allows you to edit a tree/Mind map as you wish. You can choose color, font, style, links etc. yourself and the Mind maps are stored in a human-readable XML format.
Status: Implemented/Nearly Stable
Author: Jörg

File Mode

This is intended as a file system explorer/editor. I implemented it because I needed a totally different kind of tree-structured data than a Mind map to find out how FreeMind must be designed to provide greatest flexibility. This is experimental and not intended for daily use, the performance is poor and there are many bugs. It just shows you the flexibility of FreeMind.
Status: Experimental/Author needed
Author: Jörg

XML Mode

This could become a useful and intuitive XML editor, because XML Documents are tree-structured, as the DOM shows us. I think this will be the next Mode that will be implemented, and could become the most important and maybe only reason to use FreeMind for a long time.
Status: Seeks Author
Author: Your name could be here!

TopicMap Mode

The recently released ISO Standard "Topic Maps" provides a way to store knowledge and keep the associations between the knowledge nodes. It will become very important in future, and FreeMind could become the first useful "Topic Map Application"!
Status: Seeks Author
Author: Your name could be here!

Mail Mode

Have you ever been seeking "this damned one email" in your X unsorted mail folders, while you couldn't remember in which folder it was? Because FreeMind works like the brain does (with tree-structured instead of linear data, providing many possible associations so you can remember the right branch (color, style, font, font attributes, location (upper left) etc.)), it could be a great tool for sorting email, either automatically or manually.
Status: Seeks Author
Author: Your name could be here!

HTML Mode

Because HTML is eventual like XML tree-structured data, it is possible to write a HTML Mode for FreeMind. To be honest, I don't know how useful this could be ;-)
Status: Seeks Author
Author: Your name could be here!