Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
Mind42: Collaborative Mind Mapping
<p>Stefan Schuster has created Mind42, a collaborative mind mapping tool.It’s a Dojo powered full JavaScript client with a Java server in the backend for providing a JSON interface. Its a full Drag and Drop enabled graphical mindmap editor including web only features like collaboration, sharing, blog integration and:
- Text nodes with colors, icons, links, …
- Image nodes
- Attachment Panel for every node
- Rich Text Notes
- Collaboration
- Publish a map in your blog
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4.1 rating from 35 votes
Nice showcase and all but I still don’t understand why people don’t use Flex for this sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong, it looks and behaves well, but I would have tackled this development with Flex and saved a few cycles. Am I missing something?
Yes you are missing a lot.
The short answer is some people don’t like making a product which a right click on it pops up a menu about another company. What if Adobe decides to render a monkey face on the right click menu in the next release of Flash player? I really don’t care if it allows adding HTML as well, hell , could they stop people from writing HTML?! I bet they would if they could.
Avoid Flex and Apollo and SilverLight and such unless 1)You do multimedia 2) you work for them.
Hello Garth,
Several companies do use Flex for this sort of thing. Mindomo is very nice. (http://www.mindomo.com/) and also Bubble-mind (http://www.bubble-mind.com/). I haven’t tried the later yet, but both are built with Flex.
This is obviously a hot category these days for start-ups leveraging richer UI technologies :)
-David
“but I still don’t understand why people don’t use Flex” – proprietary aside, not everybody knows Flex as fast as apparently you do
There’s another Flex free one out there with a pretty cool UI and a nice features set: MindMeister (www.mindmeister.com). Pure AJAX as well which I personally prefer, although it’ll be interesting to see what the Flex vs. Silverlight score is in a few months time …
Actually the credits for min42 should belong to the whole IRIAN.at mind42 team, not only to me. I only was in luck to contribute this showcase article :)
good work though..but the mail function seems not working
how good is it compare to mindomo? anybody try both of these ?
“some people don’t like making a product which a right click on it pops up a menu about another company”… heheh.. so sinful, those people. some company was good enough to make a quality product and you’re using it for free – well, guess i’d show some respect and allow their name in the right-click-bottom-of-the-list-left-click popup. there’s so many open source projects that oblige you to mention their name when using their products in your own. fair enough….
Just for everyone’s information – you can override the “right-click” menu in Flash / Flex – most people just don’t bother to do it. I respectfully disagree with the reasoning but forth by “Bono” in a previous comment.
Yes, it is true that Flex / Apollo / Silverlight do those things well, and it is also true that Flash has been overused in the past. However, if a project can utilize some of the great features in Flash / Flex specifically, why not?
And on a side note: The entire AIR (formerly Apollo) development cycle can be either of Flash / Flex or HTML / Javascript. Adobe did a great job with that one.