Ok, now for something unusual for this blog. Herewith I’ll publish some of my thoughts about the Playstation 3 as well as the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Why? Because within the last weeks I really was afflicted by a lack of understanding about some decision made.

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After the transition last week mostly everything ran fine, except some smaller bugs (and one bigger bug were all attachments have been missing) which got fixed with this release. Namely:

• Fixed missing attachments
• Fixed certain cases where map couldn’t be loaded with an error
• Repaired link preview bubble within published maps
• Fixed missing updates for the birdview
• Added missing link preview thumbnail in Safari 2
• Fixed note attachment textbox within IE7

But there also have been general improvements. We’ve enhanced our Import/Export capabilities and changed the system images get loaded. Like this mindmaps containing many images should feel significantly faster. Also for scaled down images it’s now possible to see a full screen view of the image by clicking on the magnifying glass above the image.

Feedback as always appreciated! Either as a comment to this blog post, or in our Google Group.

As announced two days ago we’ve had a short maintenance downtime today. And as promised, a load of new features and Bugfixes. Here a list of the new features:

• Cut/Copy/Paste
• Autosave
• Added warning on page-leave with unsaved changes
• Added shortcut Ctrl-S to save mindmap
• New configuration dialog for autosave-interval and skype-name
• Revision restore (experimental)
• HTML code view for node text editor
• Link preview-bubble now stretches to the width of the link

The whole changelog of the last 3 builds can be found here, in our brand new Google Group - a mixture between a mailing list and a user forum.

Beside these client-side changes, we’ve had some radical changes in the backend. Our server now is prepared for load balancing and we’re using a new database. Especially the database should benefit us with much less “system errors” and less troubles with UTF8 and other special characters.

Feedback is, as always, appreciated - wether using the comment function in this blog, our e-mail adress mind42@irian.at, or our new Google Group mailing list.

Mind42 will be down for maintenance for at least an hour on thursday morning, 10/11/2007 = 11.10.2007 (starting ~08:30 CET). During this maintenance we’ll try to finally switch to another database in the backend, and to deploy a new version of Mind42. Since we haven’t made build 18 and 19 publicly available the new version (build 20) contains tons of bug fixes, for both client and server. The server will then use a new database in the backend which should make much less troubles with UTF8 and other special characters. The client contains various fixes which solve rare rendering errors and other bugs, but also contains new features - like autosave and skype “integration”.

If everything finally worked (this is our second try to convert the database) I’ll post details about the new features and bug-fixes.

Here the promised review of the third Barcamp Vienna which took place this weekend. A short summary: It was great.

The whole event took place in the office of Microsoft Austria - which was a really nice location! Many fully equiped meeting rooms for the sessions, and a nice cafeteria and courtyard with seating-accommodation for before-, between- and after-session talks.

Day 1

So what have I taken along with me from my second barcamp? Well, the first day started with a presentation of Mind42 I held (again), because nobody wanted the first presentation slot. I hope I was able to win some new users for the application but overall I think the application gets accepted very well. The rest of the day I joined the sessions about Microformats by Eric Eggert, about Accessibility (A11Y) by Martin Ladstätter & Robert Lender and a session about codecs and possibilities for video-streaming within the web-browser by Fabian Topfstedt (Flash) and Max Knor (Silverlight) which all have been done very good.

It was the first time that I’ve seen microformats in action - allthough I think that was not without reason ;). Nevertheless I’ve installed the Microformats Firefox plugin “Operator” afterwards. Also the A11Y session was very interesting and enlightening as I’ve never had something todo with this before, but I fear that this won’t have very much practical relevence for me in the near future. For example: One of the rules, so that screenreaders work is to use the markup what it was designed for. As I’m squeezing everything out of the browser possible to realize applications like Mind42 I ultimately break this rule.

The rest of the day I’ve spent to team up with Horst Gutmann to plan something like a Web-Framework afternoon for Sunday and to create the Dojo 0.9 Barcamp Blog example for my Dojo 0.9 presentation. In the evening I even got unexpected support for my Dojo 0.9 Session by Fabian Bartsch from Knallgrau. He spontaneously decided to enrich my planned Dojo only session with a section about EXT, another great JavaScript library.

Day 2

The second day feeled much more developer biased, in a positive way ;). In the morning I attended a discussion about different open source CMS systems (Tip: http://www.opensourcecms.com/) leaded by Michael Schuster as well as a short excursion about game development with Microsofts XNA Framework by Max Knor and Andreas Schabus. Well, game development still appeals me, but without time and a good idea this probably will never happen ;).

As mentioned on day 1, on Sunday afternoon we’ve started a Web-Development session marathon. I’ve kicked it off with Dojo 0.9, followed by Fabian Bartsch with EXT, followed by Horst with Django, followed by Max with Astoria (a REST-based database-access-layer) and finally finished by Fabian Topfstedt with a session about Grails. Very nice experience, but because of the feedback-round (whith mostly positive feedback - excellent organization!) and the slow end of the barcamp there sadly was no chance for Web-Development discussions after the sessions. Maybe next time

Overall a very good organized and nice barcamp with many interesting people. Thanks to Rolf Mistelbacher from Microsoft and the rest of the orga-team that made this event possible. At the end of my review I would like point to some nice photos of the event:

• 360° group photo by Christian Lendl
• Horst’s photos
• Flickr tag search

As mentioned in my previous post I attended the Barcamp Vienna 09.2007. It was a nice event and a resume-post will follow this evening. For now I just wanted to quickly post the slides and the downloadable example application of my Dojo 0.9 session yesterday. So here we go:

Slides: Download
Example Application: Download