Last Friday we’ve released a new build of Mind42. Beside many bug-fixes it includes one new major feature: Position offsets!
Noticed the new gray positioning-icon right to the nodes on mouse-over? Using this handle you can add offsets to the nodes. This means that by dragging the node down, a placeholder will be added above the node. The effect of this is, that there will be space between the selected and all above nodes, and that the selected node will move down a little. The same goes for dragging the node up a little, just vice versa. This is exactly the system Freemind uses, so hopefully many users are already familiar with this system. Of course we would be pleased to get some feedback on this!
Finally here’s a list of the rest of enhancements and bug-fixes:
- Fixed collaboration with images
- Fixed wrong rendering of children nodes after drag & drop resorting
- Fixed connection status indicator bug
- Fixed enhanced color picker for IE
- Added “Collapse All” button in the published view
- … and some other minor changes …
Feedback as always appreciated!
I am one of the user of mind42.
it’s really a amazing convenient web application.
Meanwhile,I would like to embed the mindmap into my blog.
But the Blogger shows the message as below
==========================================================
Your HTML is not accepted: Tag is not closed:
==========================================================
could you help me to solve it?
thank you for your great web application.
Comment by eos33 on Fri, 31.08.2007 - 9:42
I’ve just checked that and recognized that blogger doesn’t accepts XHTML like empty nodes. What this means for you? Change the integration code from something like
<iframe width="500" height="200" frameborder="0" src="http://www.mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=%MAP-CODE%" />
to
<iframe width="500" height="200" frameborder="0" src="http://www.mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=%MAP-CODE%"></iframe>
By closing the tag also Blogger will accept the code. This fix also will be integrated in the next release.
Comment by Stefan Schuster on Fri, 31.08.2007 - 9:57
Fantastic piece of software. As a developer myself, I can really appreciate all of the effort that has gone in to this.
Maybe this is somewhere on the site and I just missed it, but how is mind42 free? Where do you get your funding, and will it remain free?
Some of the clients I work with don’t allow their employees to use external tools, but I can see where mind42 would be a great fit for some of what they need to do. Do you offer an enterprise solution as well? (A version of mind42 that can be installed on a closed, internal network, for example.)
Thanks, and keep up the good work!
Comment by Joe K on Mon, 03.09.2007 - 13:33
Hi, I’ve not gone in details of Mind42, but one quick question do you expose any interface for sun portal server to consume ..may be as a mind42 portlet?
thx!Rajesh
Comment by Rajesh on Thu, 06.09.2007 - 20:34
@Joe K: We consider mind42.com to be something like a free community web application and we plan to leave it free. The way we’ll try to get our funding is exactly the enterprise solution you’ve mentioned. After finishing the mind42 community beta we will create an enterprise edition for company intranets which we plan to finish by the end of the year. We think that offering a free community edition is the best posibility to advertise our upcoming enterprise edition.
@Rajesh: We don’t have any plans for something like a mind42 portlet.
Comment by Stefan Schuster on Mon, 17.09.2007 - 18:02
I tried to publish a map, but it opens only in IE and not FF. However I edited it using FF without any problems. Why is that?
http://www.mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=86d49edf-5d7b-4d80-a9c2-006275e0ea27
Comment by bugmenot on Mon, 17.09.2007 - 22:43
Hmm… After many tries it worked in FF… Maybe it was loading too long. Nevermind please.
Comment by bugmenot on Mon, 17.09.2007 - 22:45
Hi,
Was looking for a simple free mindmapping tool and this seems to fill the bill quite nicely, very simple intuitive interface. Even my boss has managed to annotate something..
As it’s beta, I accept its still being refined. Biggest things for me to pay for it would be:
Perhaps a bit easy to move and delete stuff! Using the txteditor, hitting return a couple of times has the potential to be painful. Getting the ‘restore’ function for the revisions would be a big plus - I’m currently exporting my map for safety but that removes an element of collaboration.
Need the export to jpg / picture to interest luddites that it’s worth ‘playing with’ - best if you could print a branch at a time to an image
Depending on the level of zoom, txt can disappear from the ends of branches as the rendering gives up. Makes you think you’ve screwed something up.
Apologies if you know this kind of stuff - don’t have time to read the whole blog comments!
Comment by DrSnowboard on Tue, 18.09.2007 - 16:24
@DrSnowboard: Thank you for the positive feedback. Actually most of the things you’ve mentioned are already on our roadmap. During the next weeks we will mainly focus on server improvements (like image export and stability) but of course also the client will receive some refinements until the end of the beta.
@bugmenot: The performance of the published mindmap viewer is on our roadmap as well.
Comment by Stefan Schuster on Tue, 18.09.2007 - 17:05
I’ve been playing with Mind42 for the past couple of days and comparing it with other free mapping software that I would like to use for an assignment with my students; I teach high school English. I found the options for adding attachments and notes to different nodes along with the ability to collaborate on projects made this the best option for what I was planning to do. After a few test maps, I began to create a more developed example that would show the students what I expected. After about an hour I was typing a description in the text editor on a third sublevel. I didn’t like how I started the description, so I hit backspace two times, which quickly deleted not only the node I had been working on but also its parent which had about twelve other child nodes coming off of it. In two key strokes I had deleted all the work I had done. After some pounding on my desk and cursing, I began to experiment to see if this was a consistent bug–it appears to be–and if I could have done something differently to restore the work. Originally I had tapped CTRL-Z a few times then tried to load an older version from the revisions menu, both without success. When I repeated the accident I could find no other way to restore the work. Dr. Snowboard above offers a suggestion but as he points out exporting continuously undermines the collaborative usefulness of the tool and when deletions can happen so easily there seems to be no feasible way to avoid the loss of work. I understand this is free software that is still in Beta testing, but this bug makes the software far too risky to invest time in using. I certainly don’t feel comfortable recommending Mind42 to my students or colleagues in its current state. If there is a way to avoid this type of problem–other than being hyper-vigilant when using the text editor–please let me know. If not, good luck in fixing it.
Comment by Dave on Mon, 01.10.2007 - 3:48
Hi Dave,
Some of the things mentioned I really can’t understand/reproduce. Partly the things you describe sound like errors of the software, but I wasn’t able to reproduce the “backspace” problem and also CTRL-Z worked for me.
The concept behind the handling of the editor should be easy enough: If the cursor blinks in the textbox every keystroke will go into the textbox. If the cursor doesn’t blink, the textbox isn’t focused, and the keystrokes will be received by the mindmap. “C/TAB” for a new child, “S/SHIFT-TAB” for a new sibling, “E” to expand/collapse a branch and “BACKSPACE/DEL” to delete a node. I just tested your problem and the software reacted exactly as described in Firefox for Mac and Internet Explorer 6 for WIndows.
If a node gets deleted accidentally the undo/redo function should work (using CTRL-Z/CTRL-Y or the buttons on the left). Again, I’e just tested it with IE6 and FF2 and it worked for me.
So if you experienced problems where the software hasn’t behaved as described, it’s probably a bug, and I would like to know more about it. Otherwise everything was as desired. The best solution I have for the accidental deletion in general, is using another key for deleting nodes, or to completly remove the keyboard shortcut.
Comment by Stefan Schuster on Mon, 01.10.2007 - 10:29
I was using IE7 when I encountered the problem. It does seem to stem from having the text editor box open, but not necessarily being active in that space. I continued working with the program and have paid attention to clicking in the box before typing. Doing so has kept me from accidentally deleting anything again and reduced the number of times that I inadvertently create a new node.
When I deleted nodes though I could not bring them back through CTRL-Z or the UNDO arrow on the sidebar.
Because I do like the program and it has some features that aren’t available other places, I am planning on testing it this week with my students as they complete a project. I’ve found that if I save regularly–after every new node to be safe–I have a comprehensive list of revisions. Though opening an earlier revision is uneditable, I can export that version of the mindmap and reimport it to work with it. This seems like a reasonable way to recover lost data for the time being.
Thanks.
Comment by Dave on Mon, 01.10.2007 - 21:06
Hi,
I agree with Dave’s findings, and I’m also using IE7 (corporate choice, not mine). I can get a new node added by just typing s in the text editor as in ‘this’. Clearly the cursor is focused as returning to the node it has got ‘thi’ as text. Backspace also ’sometimes’ acts as a delete, even with the cursor already over the txt box and blinking. Ctrl-z won’t work with the text box open for me.
Comment by DrSnowboard on Tue, 02.10.2007 - 10:50
Okay, the use of IE7 was the key here. I’ve just tried it out on found the bug.
With IE7 when the text editor is opened - and a node is clicked, the text editor text cursor starts to blink and you actually can write in the box! This is not the case with any other browser. This kind of “autofocus” of the textbox is an unwanted side-effect! To get back into a valid focus/”who gets the events”-state you wether have to click into the editor to write, or into the map to add/delete nodes. It was intended that when clicking a node the application will stay in the “mindmap has focus”-state and to write text you would have to explicitly click into the editor.
So this is definitley a bug which will be fixed in the future. Thank you for finding it! For the moment it would be best to close/hide the editor if not needed. This minimizes the potential of accidentally deleted nodes.
Comment by Stefan Schuster on Tue, 02.10.2007 - 14:05
Thanks Stefan for your feedback. As I use the program more, I’m running into fewer problems and am very happy with the program in general. My latest obstacle however is publishing. I created a fairly detailed mind map–25-30 nodes with text annotations and colors–but when I visit the address where it should be published, http://www.mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=93831422-03c4-4d5d-b182-4dc60ebd60f0, I only find a box in the center that says Untitled Mindmap. I played around, but only one of the three samples map I had made would publish. I even embedded that one in my website, which is what I’d like to do with the student projects. This is perhaps the best feature of this program. Any ideas on why I can’t publish the others? Right now I’m looking at just editing the one that is published until it looks like the one that I want published. As I do so I’ll keep checking to see if I can find a point where it stops working, but if there is a quicker fix I’d like to know. Again I’m working in IE7, but I might be able to try publishing through FF or IE6.
Thanks again.
Comment by Dave on Tue, 02.10.2007 - 17:59
So I think I have figured out a few problems. I’ve been working on IE7, but trying to publish on IE6 didn’t make a difference. I don’t have access to FF at the moment. I began reproducing the mindmap that I wanted published (herafter, BM for broken map) over the only one of the three that I had created and could publish (WM - working map). I would save and check the published version of WM after each step. WM would stop publishing if I added text in a text box that included a line break. In returning to BM, I tried to remove the breaks from all the text boxes but it still wouldn’t publish. I could however continue adding to WM without any problems. Another thing I noticed when creating BM over the last few days is that when I added italics and spaces to the text boxes, the font size increased. I thought it was a minor problem at first but it seems related to the publishing problem. Even after removing the line breaks the font in BM still remained larger than normal, and this map never published. In WM the font size never changed even after adding and removing line breaks. Hope this helps. You can see my published map at http://www.mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=39c54af5-6491-4ed6-a794-40d0b89bbf20 .
Comment by Dave on Tue, 02.10.2007 - 19:05
Ok, you’ve found out the bug with the newlines that fast that I even hadn’t the time to answer. The newline bug of the texteditor is known, and fixed in our internal development version a week ago or something like that. More precisley it occurs if the character “\r” appears withing the text. This also could happen when the editor inserts format tags like bold and italic - so of course it’s connected with each other.
As we will change our database in the backend with the next release (to have less troubles with UTF8) and at the same time enhanced our server to be prepared for more users we are still testing the new release intensively (so many changes at once have to be tested well!). We hope to be able to release it by the end of this, or at the latest, next week.
Comment by Stefan Schuster on Tue, 02.10.2007 - 21:23
Is the roadmap available to read by the public? I posted about Mind42 in my blog - o44.us
Comment by OmiKami on Sat, 06.10.2007 - 7:06
Well, maybe I’ll post a rough outline about our future plans soon. We’ll see
Comment by Stefan Schuster on Tue, 09.10.2007 - 14:16
I am user of Mind42, and its nice to hear that you trying to make your soft perfect. Hope your make some new updates and fixes!) thx for Stefan!)) great job
Comment by Dmitry on Sun, 18.05.2008 - 16:32
It’s a great idea. Have you considered having a fully-functioning demo, though, that people could try immediately without having to sign up first? That’d probably encourage more people to sign up, once they had a taste of actually using it.
Comment by Ander on Fri, 08.08.2008 - 10:08