The last time I wrote about a new build is nearly a year ago about build 39. Today I just wanted to let everybody know that I released build 47. We generally have a Google Groups page where releases are listed, but unfortunately it’s broken. Some weird Google problems concerning the revisions of that page going on there, and it declines to save any edits.
So what has happened since build 39? Mainly only little tweaks, like the preselection of the root node when opening a map, the map title showing up in the browser title and such things. Besides that of course bug fixes whenever we found one, and some updates to ensure browser compatibility e.g. with IE8. So nothing special, just maintenance.
A mail from a Mind42 user reminded me that I haven’t posted anything for more than 6 months and that he was unsure about the future of Mind42. So here is the state of affairs:
Mind42 is a project (and kind of experiment) by Irian Solutions which I work for. At the moment I have to work on a lot of other things for my company, so there was no new stuff and is no new stuff in the making for Mind42. But of course it continues to live, and actually the user base grows pretty nice! That also lead to our 3rd server switch in the history of Mind42. New and stronger database server, and a new web-server (nginx instead of apache). I really like our new setup and I think it already pays of with faster response times and less downtimes.
Besides that I’ve done a new project which is publicly available. It started as an idea within Irian, but ended as a semi-private project of mine: Spaaze. It’s a virtual corkboard where you can organize all kinds of stuff. I use it on a daily base to keep track of all kinds of information I stumble upon during a day in the web. This means that when i stumble upon youtube videos (1 hour long google tech talks) or links I want to read later, or I hear a song in the radio look it up in iTunes, … - all this temporary stuff goes into my Spaaze, where I look at it later and then decide wether to keep the item on my corkboard or not. So it’s really a buffer for temporary information which I don’t want to store permanently in my browsers bookmarks and so on. On the other hand I keep track of permanent information in Spaaze. It’s like my own del.icio.us in a visual way, but additionally I keep todo lists in there and some youtube favorites and so on and so on. A screencast of how I use Spaaze is available on the page (which is a spaaze itself). Of course I hope that I can attract users with this service, but at the moment I’m the biggest user of Spaaze myself, and so I develop the features I need.
By the way: Spaaze implements OpenID, so if you have a Google or Yahoo account you don’t even have to sign up. Just sign in and give it a try. Maybe this concept of keeping track of information works for you as well.
As some of our users already recognized our server is a little bit slow lately. We haven’t found a solution to the problem by now, but be assured that we are working on the issues. We try to keep the service running (even if slow) during the problem resolution, but can’t make any guarantees.
Thank you for your understanding.
Update:
The problems are fixed by now. Thank you for your patience.
Betrifft momentan zwar nur Deutschland, aber wenn die das als EU-Gesetzesvorlage einbringen betrifft es uns alle. Da sieht man wieder was passiert, wenn man das Internet, Internet-Ausdruckern überlässt.
After a silent maintenance release #40 we now release build #41 which mainly adds support for Internet Explorer 8, and as always fixed some bugs. Enjoy!
Yesterday we had a major, but the whole week long announced outage. We moved to another server, upgraded the server software, and release a new build. Unfortunately the outage may was a little bit longer for some of you, since the change of the domain mind42.com to the new IP address of the server of course can take a while until it’s available world-wide.
Since the last post we had build #38 which was a bugfix and enhancement build, and yesterday we release build #39, which introduced some new feature which only the updated server software allowed us to do. All changes can (as always) be found in our changelog, but here comes the good stuff:
We’ve replace the piece of software which did the JPG/PNG/PDF exporting which on the one hand should give us better results (and less errors), and on the other hand more possibilities. Like this we hopefully got finally rid of the exported PDFs which can’t be opened by Adobe Reader (although other PDF applications like Apple Preview still have been able to open them). But the cool new thing is multi-page exporting. Just choose PDF, a paper format of choice and the orientation and you’ll receive an already splitted PDF perfectly suited for printing. Of course it’s still possible to export it in one big PDF, as it was before.
We are still tweaking around on this new piece of the server, so temporarily it could happen that the exported image contains no icons and mind map images, but we are confidendt to solve this minor issues during next week.
Although not mentioned yet, we also have a cool new collaboration feature. Since yesterday all collaborators which are offline while somebody else changes something on a shared map will receive a change notification. Like this it’s much easier to keep track on all the changes in the shared maps. We hope you enjoy these new features.
This release is a pure bugfix release, as it can be seen in out changelog. We fixed some minor client bugs, but also one major server bug which was caused by the changes to our data structure we did last build. This error caused the map list to never finish loading and should now be fixed. If anybody still has problems accessing the map list or certain mind maps please contact the support with details about the error and or the affected maps.
We’ve replace the piece of software which did the JPG/PNG/PDF exporting which on the one hand should give us better results (and less errors), and on the other hand more possibilities. Like this we hopefully got finally rid of the exported PDFs which can’t be opened by Adobe Reader (although other PDF applications like Apple Preview still have been able to open them). But the cool new thing is multi-page exporting. Just choose PDF, a paper format of choice and the orientation and you’ll receive an already splitted PDF perfectly suited for printing. Of course it’s still possible to export it in one big PDF, as it was before.
We are still tweaking around on this new piece of the server, so temporarily it could happen that the exported image contains no icons and mind map images, but we are confidendt to solve this minor issues during next week.