Show HN: MindIT – A web based Freemind alternative built in Meteor | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MindIT – A web based Freemind alternative built in Meteor

mindit.xyz

35 pointssidcool34 comments

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The next release has the following features upcoming.

1. A better and snappy UI.

2. Closer resemblance to FreeMind in terms of working with multiple nodes, look and feel etc.

3. Log in system to save and share mind-maps.

4. Dashboard for logged in users with cool features.

5. Android and iOS apps.

6. Cool animations.

The team is very excited about the feedback and response. Keep it coming!

Heya!

1) How does it work? When I click on "Create Mindmap", I get an empty page with a grey elipse on it with the words "New Mindmap". When I click that, I can change the text. Thats all. How do I create a Mindmap?

2) Who are you? What is your background? What do the 20 people on the "About Us" page do? It seems like a pretty big team.

3) How will you monetize it?

Howdy 3dfan,

1. It uses keyboard shortcuts for now. TAB will add a child, while ENTER will add a sibling. For the complete list of shortcuts click on the 'Help' link on top right.

2. We are developers and it is being developed by freshers as a passion project. We really love creating things. It's a big team, righto, but many work on the product part time.

3. We have no plans monetizing it in the near future. We created http://ideaboardz.com earlier for the fun of it, and it's been received quite well. That's our reward.

I rely on Freeplane (leading fork of Freemind) to store almost all my notes and knowledge, it's really great for my purposes (better than having hundreds of text files). A diffing, web version of Freeplane would be great, because I really miss multi-client syncing and access-on-the-go features.

I'm guessing this app, while cool, won't really fill that need, since it's merely compatible with Freemind. Unless it grows into a full platform to essentially replace Freemind (which is a possible way to go).

Still, good job on building a Freemind-compatible app!

mindmup does diffing and version control nicely (the format is JSON) and it's web based, multi-client. http://discover.mindmup.com/geeks

An awesome feature idea. Added to backlog! Thanks.

Thanks for your feedback! With time we plan on adding more feature and give it a desktop like experience. Stay tuned!

One feature I've looked for is "completely" nested mind-maps. What I mean is that when I click on a node, I want the outer mind map to completely disappear as I zoom into the clicked node as an entirely new, nested mind-map. Even with collapsing, traditional mind-maps have too much information overload for me.

I was once a fan of mind maps but then stoped using them. I guess my mind evolved to some other way of organization but I always tought this kind of tool could be interesting. One thing though mind maps almost always make me grind my teeth is how most applications Have such poor defaults in terms of aestethics.

I agree with you that the look and feel are not the best, but the app is under heavy development and the UI is going to improve in leaps and bounds. Stay tuned!

Seems to say "Loading.." indefinitely. (Probably because I'm behind a corp firewall/proxy)

I think that's coz of the load of being on HN front page.

A new release just made. Features:

1. Undo/Redo 2. Actions on multiple nodes.

A bit minimal for my needs but a cool start.

Unless I missed it, there doesn't seem to be a way to drag items around - I tend to use visual arrangement in my mindmaps quite a bit.

It's scrollable both vertically and horizontally (as your mindmap expands)

But adding draggable elements makes sense. Noted.

Thanks for your feedback.

I like the fact that it's online, but I won't ditch Freemind until you replicate their notes feature. Also, does it support simultaneous editing?

It does! Meteor gives that out of the box.

Nice, I am developing some stuff to learn Meteor as well. What would you say be the biggest challenge you had while developing this was and how did you solve it?

A core dev team member will answer that shortly.

In fact, that warrants a dedicated blog posts on the team's experience with Meteor. Will post it soon.

Congratulations on shipping your app. Did you consider developing smartphone-friendly version.

I dream about usable mindmapping app for ~5" touchscreens :)

An Android and iOS app is being built right now as we speak. Will post an update.

Any feedback will help the team make it better. I have listed high level features in another comment here.

The lack of 'fork me on GitHub' button is unfortunete. Will this be open sourced?

You bet it will be open sourced once we are in a good shape. We also created an app a while ago called http://ideaboardz.com the source code of which is open.

Meteor fan here (new convert). Why build something that already exists, just by curiosity?

Not the author, but a couple of reasons that seem likely:

1.) To learn how to build a non-toy application in Meteor

2.) Freemind is a desktop Java application, so having this be web based means it's available to more platforms.

Very accurate, these and some more reasons stated above.

In my view, following reasons:

1. There are few web based mind mapping tools that are really good.

2. Learning new technology by making things (Meteor in this case)

3. Putting what you make in public for feedback.

4. Improving it iteratively to match the best in the market. Desktop or web-based.

5. Test the boundaries of the platform (Web in this case)

6. Feel good about it as a dev. :)

Start again with a new product. Keep learning and feeling good eternally. :)

Features:

1. Supports all shortcuts of Freemind.

2. Can import Freemind created Mind Maps.

3. Can export Freemind supported Mind Maps.

4. Cool tool.

Would you like a foot-rub with that sir? :)

If that pleases the users ;)

Nice, the help image could be smaller to fit on the screen.

Noted, will relay the information to the dev team.

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