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

After attending the Barcamp Vienna in June I’ve summed up that it was an re-visitable event. And so I’ve decided to visit the Barcamp Vienna September as well. It seems that this one will much bigger. By now already twice as many people have registered, and so it looks like nearly a hundred people will show up in the Microsoft office Vienna on Saturday and Sunday this week.

I’ve thought about what I could talk about, and since I didn’t want to present Mind42 in Vienna a second time I’ll prepare some slides and examples for a Dojo 0.9 session. Coordinated with the interest of the attendees I could talk about Dojo in general, about the differences between Dojo 0.4 and 0.9 or I could do a tutorial/example sessions, if a free time slot will be available at all :). We’ll see!

No bew builds the last two weeks? No comments activated during the last two weeks? Well I was on vacation and spent two weeks in Egypt. Now I’m back and mind42 will experience some huge changes within the next weeks as we come closer and closer to the end of the beta.

Just a little side note: After a beta-release and some dojo.offline preview releases (including dojo 0.9) in July Dojo 0.9 has finally arrived. For everybody who’s not up to date: Dojo 0.9 completly breaks backward compatibility and tries to break new ground. This should mean:

• Much smaller and therefore faster and more concise
• No more multi-platform support (after realizing that the browser is and will be the most important platform for dojo)
• No more API-magic

I personally appreciate this new direction. Dojo 0.4 really was slow concerning the page load (also with custom builds). Dojo really forced developers to write long names (dojo.event.topic.subscribe). And Dojo was really big and hard to overlook. But has Dojo 0.9 adressed this issues successfully? Continue reading »

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!

A new build for a new month. This builds changelog features:

• New visual style for the menu popups
• Enhanced inline editor
• IE performance enhancement
• Enhanced linking (new: Email addresses and other mind maps)
• Some bug fixes

Hopefully you’ll find the changes usefull

Something else: Rich McIver pointed me to an article called No More Hard Drive! 100 Free Software Apps to Go Online-Only. Many useful browser applications are listed there, and we are honored that mind42 is one of them.