Suprise, suprise! Another day another build!

Generally too many builds in such a short period of time are a bad sign. Normally this would mean that we’ve found a major bug which had to be fixed, which is bad - But not in this case. Ok, of course this build also includes some bugfixes, but nothing serious. The reason for today’s build is easy! Yesterday we’ve just forgotten to add a new feature to the build: The image search.

With the image search it became much easier to use images in your mind maps. Instead of manually entering an URL, just enter a search term and search for appropriate images using the Yahoo image search or Flickr. Browse through the results and add your image of choice to the map by simply clicking it. We hope you enjoy it!

Today we’ve updated mind42 to the new build #12. Beside some minor changes we’ve done the following improvements:

• Increased color picker reliability
• Ctrl-Z/Y keyboard shortcuts for undo/redo
• Browser back/forward buttons now coupled with the undo/redo system
• Preview tooltips for richtext notes
• Resizeable sidebar → By resizing the sidebar you can increase the available size for the richtext editor. But actually it currently doesn’t work for the gTalk widget.
• Input field for the del.icio.us tag search to provide custom search terms
• Removed the node collapse button → Node collapsing now directly works within the map

We hope that we’ve met the needs of some of our users with this changes and are pleased about every feedback.

Altough I hadn’t planned to write too much personal stuff into this blog I think it’s time to report some things and to give an additional little summary about the Barcamp Vienna.

1. On Monday June 11th I successfully completed my studies by passing my diploma examination. For my diploma thesis I’ve researched and implemented a prototype for graphical modeling using JavaScript. The results of this work already can be seen at mind42.com
   By completing the educational part of my life (at least for now) I’m fully motivated looking forward into my bright and hopefully successful and glorious future.
2. To celebrate #1 I’ve took the last 10 days off. I didn’t work anything, I rarely used the computer (ok, that’s a lie :). I’ve got my new Mac Pro last week) and enjoyed my last vacations aka my first paid holidays.
3. Shame on me. Because of #1 and #2 which was exactly after the Barcamp I barely wrote about it. As already reported previously I held a session about mind42. Although only 1/4 of the people attended my session (the other 3/4 joined the Tag Your City session) I’ve got plenty of very constructive feedback. Also I had some interesting talks about mind42 and other stuff after my session which definitely makes the Barcamp a commendable revisit-able event.I’ve even seen that Hannes used mind42 to share his paper based mindmap from the flip chart in the web (1, 2). And also Heinz wrote in his blog Lost and Found about mind42 (The slides to my Webinale session he mentiond can be found here). I’m really happy with all the overwhelming and constructive feedback from the Barcamp or as comments in this blog and in the form of emails and so on…Unfortunately also because of #1 and #2 I already had to leave the Barcamp very early (going home learning and shivering of nerviness). Because of that and because of all the interesting talks, I really wasn’t able to attend very much of the other sessions. I watched the presentations and discussions about “High Tech Finanzierung” and “Medien, Telcos and Brands” but missed all the other stuff. It’s a pity, as I really wanted to get an insight into Processing (which I know have to do on my own) and waste some time with Shitter.Hope to see all the Barcampers again in September if the date doesn’t collide with my summer holidays.

So much for that - hopefully some more mind42 news in the near future

Just finished my software demo about mind42.com on the Barcamp Vienna (10.06.2007). Some Feature requests and fresh ideas for the project came in, but as I didn’t wrote them down the risk is high that I already forgot most of them

Check out the barcamp wiki to help me out remembering all the inputs! Go to the wiki.

First impressions:

Before starting with the real article I want to mention two things:

1. Actually I wanted to do a Google Gears roundup as my first non mind42 javascript article. But actually I’m still not finished with playing around with the possibilities myself. Article will have to wait
2. I’m really unsure about the knowledge level I assume. Personally I would like to target a pretty high javascript knowledge level. But as I’m unsure this article will be something like a tryout and therefore the assumed level will fluctuate a bit (medium to high level knowledge).

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You may have heard about Yahoo Pipes previously. It’s a real neat service from Yahoo which enables everybody to play around with RSS feeds and create mashups. Here’s what they say:

“Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources.”

Continue reading »

Hi folks!

Just a quick update concerning our mind42.com mail server. As more and more people had troubles signing up because of missing activation emails we’ve changed to a new mail server. When we’ve recognized the problems we’ve started to activate the accounts manually, but if we’ve missed somebody who still waits please don’t hesitate to contact us under mind42@irian.at.

We hope that from now on missing emails will be a thing of the past.

Yours,
Stefan Schuster

And here the first of many promised news articles about mind42. As of today, a new build of mind42 has gone online featuring the following improvements:

• Fixed JavaScript error when including mind map into a blog
• Performance boost when loading big maps
• New help texts for the publish dialog
• New prompts when leaving map with unsaved changes

And of course some minor bug fixes have gone into this release too, as they always will in future builds as well. But we’ve also changed something in the Terms of Use! As a reaction to a comment on mind-mapping.org we’ve changed our terms of use concerning the rights of user generated content.

Hopefully you’ve also recognized one of the biggest changes of the last build #10: The Todo Attachment.
Just open the attachment panel of any node and check out the new todo attachment which allows you to manage a todo list for every node.

Welcome to the official unofficial blog to mind42.com

My name is Stefan Schuster and I’m the mind42 client lead developer and designer. With this blog I’ve the honor to be the official unofficial contact point for all mind42 community related issues. So what will it be about? Let me answer the question with a mindmap

Continue reading »

English translation coming soon…
Phänomenal…
Spät aber doch, habe auch ich meine Existenz in der Blogosphere gestartet.

Über mich:
Mein Name ist Stefan Schuster, bin Mitte 20 und Programmierer (+Designer). Ich bin gerade dabei meinen Diplomstudiengang “Informationstechnologie und Telekommunikation” an einer Fachhochschule in Wien zu beenden, arbeite aber bereits seit 3 Jahren als “professioneller” Programmierer neben dem Studium (seit Anfang des Jahres sogar Vollzeit).

Was euch erwartet:
In der Arbeit beschäftige ich mit allen Neuigkeiten und Techniken rund um Web-Applikations-Entwicklung mit JavaScript. Aber auch privat fesseln mich die vielen neuen Themen rund um Web 2.0, Fat-Clients, Single Page Applications und was man dabei alles aus JavaScript herausholen kann. Daher werde ich in diesem Blog vor allem auf diese Themen eingehen: Neuigkeiten der sich rasch entwickelnden Ajax/JavaScript Welt, meine Projekte sowie allerhand interessante Fakten und Kniffe rund um JavaScript über die ich bei meinen Projekten stolpere.

…, oder warum ich Blogs nicht leiden kann:
Ein Blog mit der Headline “warum ich Blogs nicht leiden kann” zu eröffnen ist sicherlich gewagt, allerdings war und ist meine Meindung zum Blog-Hype nicht immer unbedingt die Beste. Vor meinem Studium habe ich Community-Webseiten zu verschiedenen Computerspielen betrieben, und auch selbst programmiert (LAMP). Und dann kam irgendwann das Thema Blogs auf…

Für mich war und ist der Unterschied zwischen einem Blog, und den News-Skripten die ich früher selber programmierte einfach nicht ersichtlich. Was sind denn schon Blogs? Blogs sind eine Sammlung von chronologisch geordneten und kategorisierten Artikeln + Feedbackmöglichkeit. Was waren meine News-Skripte? Eine Sammlung von chronologisch geordneten und kategorisierten Artikeln + Feedbackmöglichkeit. Für mich war ein Blog, und vor allem die Blogging-Plattformen nicht viel mehr als eine Möglichkeit für technisch weniger versierte Leute sich selbst zu publizieren. Doch was soll dabei der ganze Hype? Persönliche Homepages, auch mit chronologisch sortierten und kategorisierten Artikeln + Feedbackmöglichkeit in einem News Bereich gab es auch schon vorher (auch mit RSS Feed wenn man wollte und konnte)! So ganz verstanden habe ich das nie.

Aber was solls: Blogs haben sich mittlerweile dermaßen etabliert, das nun auch ich meine persönliche Web-Präsenz in Form eines Blogs gestartet habe. Und schließlich haben Blogs mit Ihren Track- und Pingbacks ja schließlich doch noch ein technisches Merkmal was Blogs von einfach News-Skripten unterscheidet.

In diesem Sinne: Viel Spaß mit meinem Blog…

P.S.: Noch was zum nörgeln an Blogs. Ich kann das Wort Permalinks nicht leiden. Was soll bitte an Permalinks permanent sein, so wie der Begriff das einem suggerieren will. Permanent klingt nach einer Garantie, das der Link immer bestehen wird. Eine solche Garantie kann im World-Wide-Web aber allein schon aus technischer Sicht nicht abgegeben werden! Was wäre wenn ich die Domain oder den Webspace kündige? Oder ich einfach die Struktur meiner Homepage ändere und sich hinter index.php nicht mehr Wordpress verbirgt? Dann wars das mit der Permanenz. Daher heißen die Permalinks bei mir einfach “Direct Links”…