iThoughts enables you to apply colour to your topics. Any colour is possible since iThoughts lets you choose not only the colour but its ‘lightness’ also - as can be seen in the screenshots below. You will notice that there is also an option to apply the colour to all child topics (by applying this to the root topic, the whole map can have its colour changed.)

One of the ‘standard’ 8 colours (ringed in red above) can be selected quickly by simply tapping on the appropriate swatch. A recently selected colour can also be selected by tapping it. To choose an entirely new colour, select ‘More Colours’ and choose the colour and lightness required.

NB: Colours in exported maps?

The default colour for a topic, when displayed on the iPhone, is blue. However, when exported to Freemind or MindManager, the colour attribute will not be set to blue (it will not be set to anything.) The reason for this is that blue may look good on an iPhone - but it’s not so pretty in Freemind on a PC. The same applies in reverse. If a Freemind map is imported, those topics that do not have a specific colour set will be displayed in blue (even though they are black in Freemind.)

So what if we really want the topic to be blue when exported?

To do this, you must select the topic and specifically choose the blue colour - then press save. It will not look any different on the iPhone - but when exported, it will appear blue.

So what if we want to remove the colour attribute when exporting (so that it appears as black in Freemind/MindManager?)

In the 3rd from left screen above, tap the large colour swatch at the top of the screen - it will turn blue - then hit save. This will remove the colour attribute and reset the topic to the default ‘blue’.

MindManager topic colours?

iThoughts only has a single colour attribute per topic. MindManager has 3 colour attributes (line, fill and font.) When translating between the two, iThoughts will use the ‘fill colour’ from MindManager. This means that simply changing the line or font colour will not change the colour as far as iThoughts is concerned. The same is true in reverse - a coloured topic in iThoughts will result in the ‘fill colour’ being set in MindManager.