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.

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.

E-Mail - Mailing List - Changelog

The most important change this time is, that our user database now works case-insensitive. This means that a different upper/lower-case spelling of the same username now refers to the same account, which makes logging in easier (you don’t have to remember how you spelled your name on signup), and reduces likelihood of confusion. Unfortunately we had to rename some usernames which violated against this new setup. The affected users have been informed.

In the end I would like to spotlight our new FAQ which, like the changelog, could be found in our Google Group. If you are missing any important answers in the FAQ please don’t hesitate to let us know.

• Additional icon methods
• Additional font styling options

The icon additions include the ability to add multiple icons to a node as well as removing them via right click. But we’ve also introduced icon groups. Icon groups are made up of icons which belong to each other, like different colored flags, the different number icons, or the new todo progress icons. When adding such an icon to a node you can easily iterate through the icons of that group by clicking the icon. For the todo icons this for example easily allows you to advance the progress of a node without having to enter any menu.

The new font styling options enhance the already existing node coloring options. Now you can manually set the size and style of nodes.

In addition to the new features there are mainly some reliability improvements as well as performance tunings and optical polishing. A full list of changes, as always can be found at our Google Goup Changelog Page.

By the way: Except image export and printing capabilities this features should have been the last new features for the beta. Of course we’re still working on some server issues and an enhanced homepage, but from a mind map editor feature perspective the current state closely reflects the 1.0 version of Mind42.

Feedback as always appreciated:
mind42@irian.at - Google Group - Comments

Update: Access was restored. Thank you for your patience.

It has been a long time since the last build which is more than a month ago. But we haven’t slept, we’ve just refractored, optimized and polished Mind42 to improve the overall experience of Mind42. Here comes the feature list of the new build:

• Increased UTF8 support (attachments, import, export, …)
• Increased performance (copy/past, drag & drop, deletion, … of branches is much faster now + faster published map view)
• Changed handling of unavailable images (they no longer disappear + now there is a retry button available)
• Added invitation link lookup to the collaborators dialog

But now, before releasing you to explore the new features and give me some feedback, I want to spend some words on the last of the mentioned features. As we keep getting mails of users whose invitations never arrive at their invitees we’ve thought about how to deal with this. Besides optimizing our mail server, we decided to add an “invitation link lookup” to the collaboration dialog. Therefore the list of unredeemed invitations got a new icon with a question mark. If clicked it shows you the link to accept the invitation. This allows you to get the link, and send it to your invitee yourself if the mail got stuck anywhere. We hope this temporary solution for the lost mail problem is acceptable for everybody.

As always: Feedback appreciated!
Comments - mind42@irian.at - Google Group

More detailed:
Yesterday I held a presentation about offline web applications at the AjaxInAction conference in Frankfurt/Germany. It was called “Offline-Webanwendungen mit Google Gears” which translated would be something like “Offline-Web-Applications with Google Gears” and was all about Google Gears, Dojo Offline and a practical example application. For this purpose I was allowed to publish an example application I wrote for my company to test some offline patterns - MUTT.

MUTT stands for MultiUserTodoTable and is a simple implementation of a todo/issue tracker. Simple only, because of the sychronisation and the server part have been kept simple (e.g. you can’t edit anything but the status of an issue - which makes synchronisation easy). But beside its simplified functionality it offers a full blown implementation of a data switch, shows templating with Google Trimpath JavaScript Templates and shows how to deal with Dojo Offline (Events, ActionLog, …).

You can find MUTT in the open.source section of my homepage, or you directly follow this link.

So have fun with the example application - and let me know if anybody liked it

P.S.: The slides of my presentation are available here (german!).

1. A cheaper 40 GB version of the PS3 was anounced
   Only 2 instead of 4 USB ports, no card reader, lesser harddisk capacity, so far so good (specs). But no Playstation 2 emulation? After Removing the Emotion Engine (PS2-CPU) from the PS3 now also the Graphics Synthesizer (PS2-Graphics card) became a victim of savings. Previously, also without the EE, it was possible to emulate PS2 games, now even this became impossible. My simple question: Can the successor of the still most widespread game console succeed without backwards comaptibility? I don’t think so. Like this it’s only interesting for really ambitous gamers and for people without a PS2 (or people who don’t care about the old PS2 stuff). But from my point of view Sony really misses the large rest of us. And for what? Savings of a 100€.

   And as it gets rumored the removal of the GS isn’t event responsible for the savings. It get’s rumored that this is just a strategic step to force customers to buy new games. I don’t really believe that Sony is that crude - but isn’t a little bit of truth in every rumor?

   Ah and by the way. Let’s talk about the long term success of the Playstation 3. As publicly known the consoles current market share isn’t too good (take a look at nexgenwars.com). And some facts heard in the path let me speculate that it also will be hard in the future to gain marekt share. The key to every consoles success are the available games. And now I’ve heard that the UT3 engine based games as well as e.g. the new GTA are delayed because of “technical prpoblems”. I interestingly feel reminded of the Sega Saturn. The Saturn was an extremly powerful device for its time, but with its 2 CPUs and 6 other processors extremly hard to program. Well, I really don’t know or care about the details of the PS3’s Cell processor. But from what I’ve heard and read it consists of one PowerPC Processing Element and 8 Synergistic Processing Elements - Whatever this means, it even sounds hard to develop for! Nowadays, in the starting phase of mainstream multi-trheaded programming, this maybe is a little bit to advanced for the average studio. Well, as I don’t know the facts, this are only speculations. But I bet that developers prefer the Direct X development environment the XBox offers. Just my opinion.

2. HD DVD vs. Blu-ray
   Ok, there is a format war going on - But what the heck? Why do I have the feeling that neither of the participants even wants to win?

   Well, I only can tell how it’s like in Austria. The average household doesn’t have an HD display. If there is an HD display, i’s most probably only HD-ready, meaning 720p. But in my eyes only Full HD - 1080p - is real HD, and every “transitional solution” display sold - being HD “ready” - is a bad joke for the customers. But on the other hand full HD displays aren’t available at a reasonable price yet. So in the end, nobody has a suitabe display in Austria. Why should we buy HD content? Which brings me to my next question:

   Why should we pay twice the price of a DVD for HD content we don’t need? I know that we are currently in the early adaptor phase, and that in this phase everything is more expensive as it will be when established. But during a format war: Shouldn’t there be a price war? Wasn’t it one of the selling points of HD DVD that it’s cheaper to change the production over to HD DVDs than to Blu-rays? But HD DVD and Blu-ray cost the same in the store. Where is this price advantage for the end customer? If it really exists, shouldn’t it be used to gather market share? It would be much easier to convince people to buy the more expensive hardware if the films would cost the same. But like this it feels like feels like I have to pay more for the expensive hardware to be able to buy the more expensive disks. As I don’t have such HD stuff, I don’t know how much the HD experience is worth compared to the price, but for me this all sounds very strange.

   After all, in my eyes none of the two parties really tries to get their stuff to the customers. They are only playing bullshit bingo with each other and shoot new numbers and statistics into press to convince the people. I’m not convinced from numbers floating around in the press. I’m not convinced of anyone because he says me that he thinks he wins. This, and the fact of the Digital Rights Managment paranoia these technologies include, make me think that this is just about everything else that the customer. But who should buy the stuff in the end? Damn bloated industry…

Just my 2 cents…

• 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.

• 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.