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.

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.

The list of new features, enhancements to existing features and bugfixes for build #36 is even longer than the last one. To directly take a look at the complete list just check out our changelog. Beside this I would like to point out the most obvious changes most users will recognize immediately.

1. The default map list sorting was changed. By default it’s now sorted descending by the last change date. This means that you most current edited maps will always be on top, which makes accessing your current projects much faster.
2. The link system has been enhanced. It’s now possible to add links to any kind of node (root, text and image nodes) and it’s possible to add more than one link to one node. Due to this enhanced functionality also the interface has changed. Now the node menu will always show a dialog to add a new link. To edit or remove existing links you have to click the edit icon in the node bubble or right click the link icon.

But besides this obvious changes a lot of other stuff has been changes. For example: New icons, new JPEG export, new style option, and a lot of bug fixes.

Finally we’ve got moving again towards the user requested features. Hope you enjoy it.

After posting about huge updates in Build#34 last month, I now can show off some of the results. Build#34 was deployed successfully (since there where only a few problems reported I at least I consider it successful), and now with Build#35 we added some new features to the application - for the first time over a long period. But what did the builds actually change?

Build#34:

With Build#34 we’ve updated the base toolkit Mind42 is based on: Dojo. Since we knew that this is no simple update we’ve waited for this quite a long time, and combined it with other refurbishments of the software. So what we released with Build#34 was basically a ~50% rewritten software. Some things (like the accordion in the map open dialog, or the zoom slider) look slightly different, but as said previously I really consider this as a successful launch. Only a very few issues for such a large change really is a success.

BTW: We’ve also added Google image search in this build.

Build#35:

After the new platform (Dojo update) was finished, we finally had time again to concentrate on new features. For this we’ve focused on the list of user requests we’ve collected over the past months and started with some of the smaller but highly demanded features. Namely:

• Mouse-wheel zooming
• Map list sorting/searching to simplify the handling of many maps
• Clickable links in note attachments
• Application “Close” button in the map dialog (to leave Mind42 without an open map)

Also we’ve changed some minor things and of course fixed some bugs of the Build#34 platform change. The full list can be found in our changelog.

We’re already working on the next build which will feature more implemented user requests and will be happy for any further feedback and comments. Feel free to contact us by commenting this post, posting in our Google Group, or using our contact form (or contact e-mail address).

It has been a long time since I did the last post, which was about Mind42 leaving the beta. Since then there were no posts, but this doesn’t reflect the developments arround Mind42 at all. We know were we still have problems and are working hard to fix them. We finished the Beta with Build #29, and now we are at Build #33. So there is still progress, just no time to post about every detail

So if you are interested in what has changed since my last post, check out the Changelog. Otherwise stay tuned for more updates: Currently we work on build #34 and more, which will be huge updates. I’ll post more when the stuff gets ready.

P.S.: One of the new features with Build #33 was the public map browser. Check it out!

After we’ve been in beta for over a year now, the introduction of countless new features, a database crash, a server move, and tons of bug fixes we decided to finish the beta with the now available build 29.

The most visible change is our revised homepage. We now offer a detailed help and we also optimized the sign in/up pages as well as the general homepage navigation. We hope this is at everyones fancy.

On the application side we now have reached a point were the kind and count of support mails (new mail address: info@mind42.com) indicated that the service runs pretty stable. As it is with any software project we probably aren’t bug free, but since this is a web-application we will continue to enhance the application with every build. Going Un-Beta is just a signal that we have reached a certain level of stability.

What does this mean for the users of Mind42? Currently: Nothing changes. We are still working an a paid pro-version of Mind42 - but this doesn’t mean that we’ll quit the free service of Mind42. More infos will be published when this is getting ready. Also we are still interested in adding new features to Mind42, so please just send any feature requests to info@mind42.com.

So welcome everybody to the second beta-free year of Mind42. After this pretty big step, we’ve worked on for months now, we are tensely waiting for feedback. Just comment this post or send us an e-mail to info@mind42.com .

Finally as the lead client developer I want to say thanks to all the folks at Irian who worked on (some more, some less) and made Mind42 possible, as well as all the early users of Mind42, which are still using the application and helped us with their precious feedback. Thanks.

It was a little bit quiet on this blog in the last months. But finally we are on our way to 1.0 with some new features we introduced in the current build #26.

As maybe some of you have noticed, there have been some troubles and infrastructure changes to Mind42 during the last months. We moved our database as well as the webserver. Honestly we didn’t only do this because of we needed the infrastructure for build #26 features, but because we had to due to some failures on the old server. By now all this should be over. New database and webserver - New service monitoring - New features. So here we go:

New map dialog: Our new mind map dialog got much clearer, features a preview of the map (available after saving your mind map), and also the open and delete buttons aren’t so close to each other. We hope you like it.

Image/PDF export: We finally rolled out an image and PDF export option, which was one of the most demanded features overall. Now you can embed mind maps into your documents sing the PNG export, or print them using the PDF export. If the results aren’t as expected just write us a mail so we can optimize this.

The whole rest: Due to the new server Mind42 now should be faster an more reliable than before. As always we’ve also fixed some bugs, and last but not least: We’ve added an offset reset button within the settings dialog. Sometimes moving a nodes offset (dragging the move icon) gets confused with reordering a node (dragging the node). Therefor there have been cases with unusable maps due to immense offsets. If you ever have this problem you now can use the reset offsets button.

With this release we finally are on our way to 1.0, and we would be pleased about every bug report, so that we can finally remove the nearly one year old beta tag of Mind42.

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