MindMup just became 10x more useful | Hacker News Reader

MindMup just became 10x more useful

blog.mindmup.com

29 pointsdeflorda18 comments

Privacy, Team Work and a lot more... MindMup just became 10x more useful

Am I the only one who thinks that mind maps are great to organize ideas but extremely poor at expressing them?

If I do a mind map I always find myself understanding myself and I use them a lot for personal ideas. But trying to express them using mind maps is like giving someone an uncooked meal.

I agree. One of the things we'll do with MindMup is create a story line of ideas, that could be then exported into a slide show for expressing it. I structure my conference presentations using MindMup, but the final version is with slides, not with a map.

Couldn't agree more. The 'notes' field in any decent mind mapping software is a must when you are not just trying to organize your ideas, but actually building a roadmap you'll use in the future.

Sometimes I wish I could find something like a Wiki/Mindmap combination, so that I could see a 'textual' representation (with extra data) for each node in my map. Actually... might as well fork Mindmup and see if I can get something like that started :)

Cool, wasn't even aware of MindMup. I'm using Freemind+local storage but a cloud based solution has some potential advantages. Looks pretty cool, too and there's a Freemind import..nice.

I usually keep programming related stuff in mind maps (how to do X,Y,Z in language A). Cloud+share might be interesting to collaborate when learning a new language etc.

I'll give it a try this week. Good luck :)

p.s.: The logo looks adorable :D

Thanks. We have both import/export from Freemind, so you can take MindMup files offline as well.

Are you using the JS client library to connect to Drive or a server? I'd also recommend an entry in the Chrome Web Store for better integration with the Drive UI.

yes, we're using google's drive client JS library, so things go from the browser directly to Google Drive. Will investigate Chrome Web Store integration, thanks.

Using the JS client directly isn't that easy, as you might have noticed. With the user that is saying the save fails quite often, that's likely to be using IE 9, it seems to have a far worse fail rate than the other browsers.

If you haven't already, add an exponential backoff to the save, i.e. if it fails try again in 1 second, 2 seconds, 4 seconds, etc. Google recommend it here https://developers.google.com/drive/handle-errors#implementi....

Also, if it's useful, we created a formal state machine for using the JS client library, the code is at https://github.com/jgraph/draw.io/blob/master/war/js/diagram.... Turning it into a state machine helped visualize which error cases weren't being dealt with.

thanks. we do retry and backoff with S3 storage, google api seemed more reliable on Chrome. Nice lesson about not forgetting IE when testing :)

Saving to Google drive doesn't seem to be that mature. Fails 3 out of 4 times for me, and when it finally did, it ate my umlauts (encoding issue?).

I'm sorry you're experiencing problems. Would it be possible for you to try again? When it fails just open About MindMup - Talk to Us and send feedback (leave a note on umlauts so we know it's you). This will automatically include all relevant information we need to troubleshoot it.

Love it. It would be even better as an offline chrome app.

that's in the plan and actually wouldn't be that difficult to do, it's just that some other things are higher on the list of priorities. you can make us do it sooner by voting: http://www.mindmup.com/#vote - we tend to work on the stuff with the most votes.

Great! Btw, it isn't dealing very well with unicode characters: http://cl.ly/image/0K2x0X2k1z31

thanks, i'll look into this tonight.

Unicode storage should work now, I just deployed the fix. Tested in Chrome & Firefox on Mac, will do more testing on other browsers later

How does this compare to MindMeister.com ?

I'm a developer working on the site, and a former MindMeister user, so I can give you my biased perspective. It would be nice if someone who is a user of both systems provides an unbiased one.

advantages: it's free, opensource, doesn't hold you ransom for your data, we aim to create a zero-friction interface

disadvantages: less features. mindmup is a month and a half old project, and we develop the stuff we need + the top voted user demands, so MindMeister has many many more features.

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