Hi I tried to use mindmanager for giving lectures and had some limited success. It was really great for organising the material and switching between details and overviews but it utterly failed for presentation and printing notes.
The current navigation in presentation mode is way too simplistic and seems only useful for a boring presentation with a fixed level of bullet points. If you're trying to present a complex topic with a flexible structure and lots of diagrams you have to abandon the automatic navigation and position, zoom and expose each topic by hand as your talking (which is clumsy and irritating) ... then flicking back a topic or two becomes a real nightmare. You can't use a wireless slide switcher either since you need access to the mouse, scrollbars and zoom controls.
Similarly, printing a large map is really painful. Fitting it to a page means the resolution is too small to read. Automatically splitting it to multiple pages gives no control over where the split happens and so is only useful if the end user is going to paste together a huge piece of paper which is unreasonable. In the end you either have to split the large map into smaller linked maps (and lose the ability to re-organise the map quickly and to give quick overviews or reviews) or you have to set each print view manually, setting what is exposed, the zoom level and the position for each page (then when you edit something you have to do it all over again).
In the end, after trying hard for 3 weeks to make it work, I gave up and went back to powerpoint.
Mindmanager would be a great alternative to powerpoint if the above issues could be fixed, and here is how it could be done:
Create commands that can record and organise "views". Each view stores the map position (relative to screen), the zoom level and which items are open and closed. The presentation mode then switches between these stored views (with nice transitions if you like). This way the presenter can choose exactly what to present and when. It solves the print problem too - with a "print views" option.
The original blog article was here: http://ectropy.info/2008/03/mindmaps-in-lectures/