Mon, 30.07.2007 - 17:56

About Build#15 from July 30th

It was very quiet during the last weeks, but today we release build #15 - a small sign of life.

The most obvious change can be found on our homepage. A new front- and a new about-page including a small screencast. But also the applications itself got some small new features:

  • A collapse/expand all button in the left menu bar
  • New keyboard shortcut (”e”) to collapse/expand nodes
  • An image “load-indicator”
  • The birdview now is resizeable

Image export was delayed a bit - but will be online very soon - promised…

Mon, 09.07.2007 - 16:56

About Build#14 from July 9th

This build is primarily a bug fixing release. We’ve fixed some bugs with IE (import javascript error, getting stuck in map move mode), added some more number icons, support of https:// links (without adding an unnecessary http:// prefix), fixed the bug that hidden children have been selectable using the keyboard and fixed a bug concerning image links.

A new little feature concerning collaboration: Users now can remove shared maps from their map list. If a user got plenty of collaboration invitations the list became longer and longer and the user wasn’t able to do something against it because the mindmap creator was the only one who could reset the collaboration. Now also the invited user can remove the collaboration.

And finally some sweet stuff concerning the node editor:

  • UTF-8 support
  • Implicit apply

UTF-8 support finally enables it to create mindmaps in languages like traditional chinese. And the implicit apply means, that you don’t have to press enter or click “Apply” to save the changed text. The text will be applied implicitly when clicking another node for example. This should fix the minor bug described by lwein in a comment to this blog.

P.S.: PDF & image export coming soon!!

Thu, 28.06.2007 - 13:59

About Build#13 from June 28th

Suprise, suprise! Another day another build!

Generally too many builds in such a short period of time are a bad sign. Normally this would mean that we’ve found a major bug which had to be fixed, which is bad - But not in this case. Ok, of course this build also includes some bugfixes, but nothing serious. The reason for today’s build is easy! Yesterday we’ve just forgotten to add a new feature to the build: The image search.

Mind42 image search

With the image search it became much easier to use images in your mind maps. Instead of manually entering an URL, just enter a search term and search for appropriate images using the Yahoo image search or Flickr. Browse through the results and add your image of choice to the map by simply clicking it. We hope you enjoy it!

Wed, 27.06.2007 - 17:25

About Build#12 from June 27th

Today we’ve updated mind42 to the new build #12. Beside some minor changes we’ve done the following improvements:

  • Increased color picker reliability
  • Ctrl-Z/Y keyboard shortcuts for undo/redo
  • Browser back/forward buttons now coupled with the undo/redo system
  • Preview tooltips for richtext notes
  • Resizeable sidebar → By resizing the sidebar you can increase the available size for the richtext editor. But actually it currently doesn’t work for the gTalk widget.
  • Input field for the del.icio.us tag search to provide custom search terms
  • Removed the node collapse button → Node collapsing now directly works within the map

We hope that we’ve met the needs of some of our users with this changes and are pleased about every feedback.

Mon, 25.06.2007 - 21:11

Personal Stuff

Altough I hadn’t planned to write too much personal stuff into this blog I think it’s time to report some things and to give an additional little summary about the Barcamp Vienna.

  1. On Monday June 11th I successfully completed my studies by passing my diploma examination. For my diploma thesis I’ve researched and implemented a prototype for graphical modeling using JavaScript. The results of this work already can be seen at mind42.com :)
    By completing the educational part of my life (at least for now) I’m fully motivated looking forward into my bright and hopefully successful and glorious future.
  2. To celebrate #1 I’ve took the last 10 days off. I didn’t work anything, I rarely used the computer (ok, that’s a lie :). I’ve got my new Mac Pro last week) and enjoyed my last vacations aka my first paid holidays.
  3. Shame on me. Because of #1 and #2 which was exactly after the Barcamp I barely wrote about it. As already reported previously I held a session about mind42. Although only 1/4 of the people attended my session (the other 3/4 joined the Tag Your City session) I’ve got plenty of very constructive feedback. Also I had some interesting talks about mind42 and other stuff after my session which definitely makes the Barcamp a commendable revisit-able event.I’ve even seen that Hannes used mind42 to share his paper based mindmap from the flip chart in the web (1, 2). And also Heinz wrote in his blog Lost and Found about mind42 (The slides to my Webinale session he mentiond can be found here). I’m really happy with all the overwhelming and constructive feedback from the Barcamp or as comments in this blog and in the form of emails and so on…Unfortunately also because of #1 and #2 I already had to leave the Barcamp very early (going home learning and shivering of nerviness). Because of that and because of all the interesting talks, I really wasn’t able to attend very much of the other sessions. I watched the presentations and discussions about “High Tech Finanzierung” and “Medien, Telcos and Brands” but missed all the other stuff. It’s a pity, as I really wanted to get an insight into Processing (which I know have to do on my own) and waste some time with Shitter.Hope to see all the Barcampers again in September if the date doesn’t collide with my summer holidays.

So much for that - hopefully some more mind42 news in the near future :)

Sun, 10.06.2007 - 13:15

Barcamp Vienna

Just finished my software demo about mind42.com on the Barcamp Vienna (10.06.2007). Some Feature requests and fresh ideas for the project came in, but as I didn’t wrote them down the risk is high that I already forgot most of them :)

Check out the barcamp wiki to help me out remembering all the inputs! Go to the wiki.

First impressions:

SessionsMedienschelte.at Session

Sat, 09.06.2007 - 0:06

Yahoo Pipes - enabling client side RSS mashups

Before starting with the real article I want to mention two things:

  1. Actually I wanted to do a Google Gears roundup as my first non mind42 javascript article. But actually I’m still not finished with playing around with the possibilities myself. Article will have to wait :)
  2. I’m really unsure about the knowledge level I assume. Personally I would like to target a pretty high javascript knowledge level. But as I’m unsure this article will be something like a tryout and therefore the assumed level will fluctuate a bit (medium to high level knowledge).

You may have heard about Yahoo Pipes previously. It’s a real neat service from Yahoo which enables everybody to play around with RSS feeds and create mashups. Here’s what they say:

“Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources.”

Continue reading »

Fri, 08.06.2007 - 12:58

New mail server

Hi folks!

Just a quick update concerning our mind42.com mail server. As more and more people had troubles signing up because of missing activation emails we’ve changed to a new mail server. When we’ve recognized the problems we’ve started to activate the accounts manually, but if we’ve missed somebody who still waits please don’t hesitate to contact us under mind42@irian.at.

We hope that from now on missing emails will be a thing of the past.

Yours,
Stefan Schuster

Mon, 04.06.2007 - 18:49

About Build#11 from June 4th

And here the first of many promised news articles about mind42. As of today, a new build of mind42 has gone online featuring the following improvements:

  • Fixed JavaScript error when including mind map into a blog
  • Performance boost when loading big maps
  • New help texts for the publish dialog
  • New prompts when leaving map with unsaved changes

And of course some minor bug fixes have gone into this release too, as they always will in future builds as well. But we’ve also changed something in the Terms of Use! As a reaction to a comment on mind-mapping.org we’ve changed our terms of use concerning the rights of user generated content.

Hopefully you’ve also recognized one of the biggest changes of the last build #10: The Todo Attachment.
Just open the attachment panel of any node and check out the new todo attachment which allows you to manage a todo list for every node.

Mon, 04.06.2007 - 14:32

The official unofficial mind42 blog

Welcome to the official unofficial blog to mind42.com

My name is Stefan Schuster and I’m the mind42 client lead developer and designer. With this blog I’ve the honor to be the official unofficial contact point for all mind42 community related issues. So what will it be about? Let me answer the question with a mindmap :)

Continue reading »