Wednesday, August 4, 2010

How to update to the latest version of Mindomo Desktop

Today we have published a new update of Mindomo Desktop. Unfortunately because we had to renew our code signing certificate, the automatic update function won't work.

In order to install the latest version of Mindomo Desktop please do the following steps:

1) Uninstall your existing (old) version of Mindomo Desktop
2) Go to http://www.mindomo.com/desktop and install the new version.

We apologize for this inconvenience.

The Mindomo Team.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Real-Time Collaboration Public Beta is Available!

We are excited to announce that one of the most requested Mindomo functionality has arrived: Real-Time Collaboration.

Today we finally released the new Public Beta version of Mindomo and we encourage you, your friends and collaborators to try it, test it and tell us what you think. In order to participate in the beta, after you are logged in, you have to manually switch to the beta version. You can do it from the Mindomo Dashboard page, see the screenshot below:


Important notes about the beta version:
- Requires Flash Player 10 (we recommend Flash Player 10.1)
- Maps created with the beta version can't be opened with the old versions
- Old maps need to be converted, which you can do when you open a map the first time. Beware: once a map is converted, it can't be opened with the old versions anymore
- Old maps can still be opened without conversion, but only in read-only mode, in the new beta version

So what are the new features ?
- Simultaneous collaboration with as many users as you like
- Autosaving
- Versioning of maps (every change is recorded and you can undo/redo changes), visualization of changes will be available at the end of the beta period.
- Topic titles will auto-wrap at a certain width, you can change the default width for the whole map from the map properties, or you can individually resize topics.
- You can detach and re-attach floating topics to the main tree.

Many other bugs and issues were solved in this release, we will provide more details about them in the upcoming weeks.

Have fun and we are looking forward to your feedback!

The Mindomo Team

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Scheduled downtime on Monday 21st of June

We will launch the beta version of the real-time collaboration features on Monday. We will do a major upgrade to our servers which could take several hours, please make sure you save your maps.

We will stop our servers Monday 21st of June 5 AM (GMT).

Thank you for your understanding.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Real-time collaboration coming soon!

We're excited to announce you that Mindomo is about to undergo a major enhancement in the upcoming weeks.

Since our last update in January we quietly deployed a number of updates, however our complete focus is on the next major release of Mindomo, which will contain the following features:

- Real-Time collaboration,
- Versioning,
- Auto-Save.

If you followed our forums or you are one of the many with whom we've been in contact during the last months, you probably expected this.
Most of the functionalities are already implemented and we will most likely release a beta version first.
Beside the above mentioned features, we will include a number of other improvements as well.
The new version will require Flash Player 10, so make sure you update, if you didn't do so up until now.

Stay tuned for more info in the next couple of weeks!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Improved sharing dialog, better chat notification

We just deployed a small update, with improved sharing dialog and better chat notification.
The sharing dialog:
The new dialog has a prefiled combobox (with autocomplete) for the known resources/colleauges. It also shows a simpler way of choosing rights.
If you need to share with multiple users on the same time you still have the "Resources" button on the bottom which will allow the selection and addition of more then one collaborator.

We also updated the chatting functionality. When multiple users open the same map in the same time and one of the collaborators sends a chat message to the others, the chat window will automatically open up, in order to notify the collaborators about the message.

More features are in the work...

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

New improvements and Mindomo Business/Education update

Just before going to our company's Christmas party, we did the last update of this year.

This time we added the following improvements:
  • PDF Export works with CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters

  • Resizing images preserves the aspect ratio (press the Shift key for not to preserve the aspect ratio)

  • Google Image search was added

  • During invitation sending, it is possible to check/uncheck people to whom to send the invitation

  • Searching in the dashboard will search in the complete map, we search in the following fields: map title, map description, map tags, topics title and topics description.

  • Bug-fix: Do you want to save? message is correctly handled during closing and creating new maps.

  • Bug-fix: Gender was not correctly shown in public pages

  • Several other bug fixes.
We also released version 4 of Mindomo Business and Mindomo Education. Additionally to the standard features starting from this version Mindomo Desktop is also included into this packages. Please check out the details at the following link

We wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The Mindomo Team.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Mindomo 4 Now Available !

We finally did it! The new version of Mindomo is released. It comes with many improvements and innovations. Big thanks to our community, who provided us with feedback and made this release possible.

In this release we focused on the following: project and task management, content integration, GUI design and aesthetics and team work.

Let's jump directly into the list of new features:


Mindomo Team

A new offer called “Mindomo Team” was added to our portfolio. Mindomo Team comes to the help of those who work together with their colleagues or clients, and need an easier way of sharing maps, tasks and resources. The Team version comes with a custom subdomain, a common root folder (where other subfolders can be added) and a common user management interface. It also contains all Mindomo Premium features like: upload documents, autocalculate task info, filter tasks and topics, recycle bin functionality and many more. Mindomo Team makes your team work a breeze.

Project and Task Management

Our target was to allow easy management of projects and todo lists for teams and individuals. In order to achieve this we added the following new features and changes:

Task info is automatically calculated, which means:
  • Start date of a parent topic is calculated as the minimum of the start dates of its child topics
  • End date of a parent topic is calculated as the maximum of the end dates of its child topics
  • Duration of a parent topic is calculated as the maximum of the duration of its child topics
  • If the “Autocalculate priority” is activated, the priority of a parent topic is calculated as the minimum of the priority of its children
When the “Autocalculate task info” is checked on a topic, all topics beneath will be auto calculated from the values of the leaf topics.
Clicking on priority, completion will jump to the next value on the list
You can specify workdays per week, hours per day, days per month
You can specify the date format to use for start and due dates
Completion can take any value between 0 and 100
You can create your list of Resources to whom to assign your tasks

Topic and Task Filters

In order for you to be able to have an overview of the status of your projects, we created the Filtering Functionality which allows you to select topics from multiple maps depending on the criteria defined by you.

Building a filter for topics is similar to building a filter for e-mails. You can create multiple criteria and specify the logical operator between them. The logical operator can be an “AND” or an “OR”.

At this moment the filters are available at your dashboard, but we intend to add this functionality also inside maps.


Recycle Bin

In older versions of Mindomo, once you deleted a map there was no way to restore it (without our intervention). Now all maps deleted first will go to your recycle bin, where they will stay until you will restore or erase them definitively.

The maps of the Free Users are also first put into the recycle bin, but in order to restore them, the users will first have to upgrade their accounts.


Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia integration

When creating maps, there is a need for adding images which are related to your topic. In order to make this easier, we integrated YouTube for searching videos, Flickr and Wikipedia to search images.

Searching images on Wikipedia can prove useful because you may actually find an image that represents exactly what you are looking for, as opposed to searching on Flickr, where you have no guarantee that the pictures’ names are relevant to their actual content.



Sign in using Google or Yahoo

The signup process was the most troublesome part of getting started with Mindomo. Many users try to use fake e-mails, which prompted us to implement a fairly complex validation system. The drawback was that this system sometimes would rule out honest users as well. In order to make this process easier, we integrated Google and Yahoo OpenID authentication, which allows new or existing users to sign up with just a few mouse clicks, without validating their emails and going through a time consuming process.

Protect and/or Encrypt Maps

In our previous version, we have already integrated a map encryption mechanism. However, in order to maintain a high standard of security, we do not store passwords, so if you lose your password we won’t be able to restore your map. Therefore, in this version we introduced an additional way of protecting maps with a password, but without encrypting it. We also made these protected maps readable with the Mindomo Viewer.


Split and Merge Topics

Many times you create a topic with several lines and then you realize that these should be subtopics. In order to make this easier, we created the Split and Merge functionalities, which will allow you to split an existing topic into subtopics or to merge subtopics into one single topic.

Integrated Browser Pane (Mindomo Desktop)

Mind Maps are often used for brainstorming or for doing a research about a certain topic. This process involves searching on the web and getting the results which may be text, image or link into the mind map.

With the new browser pane you can go to a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc), perform your search, navigate to the search results, and when you found what you were looking for, you can add it directly to your map. You can add text, images or web links. To add them to your map, just right-click with your mouse to show the context menu and then add it to your map.

New Map Styles

Our designer created a library of new map styles, where colors and fonts are carefully chosen to give you nicer looking maps.

New Image Library

We added several new images, in order to make the map creation process smoother and nicer.

Reworked Dashboard

We reworked the Mindomo Dashboard (the main page after the users logs in). In the new dashboard we highlighted the two most important operations: creating a new map and importing an existing map. We also added there the Topic Filters pane, which we described above.

Reworked My Account Pages

The My Account pages were redesigned to give a nicer and more intuitive look.

We hope you like the new release, feedback is always welcome.