MindMeister wins “Best User Centered Design” Award

2Jul

• award-design
• 1 Comment

We’re rather proud to annouce that MindMeister just won it’s first award - the Best User Centered Design Company of the Year 2007 award by Hasso Plattner Ventures. For those of you who don’t know him, Hasso is one of the founders of SAP. He was also there when we received the prize last week in Berlin at the annual Forum on Entrepreneurship (which incidentally carried the theme “Design IT” this year).

The jury seemed to think that MindMeister had an “outstandingly intuitive and accessible user interface combined with a well thought-out feature set” (we agree completely ;-)), which is why they selected MindMeister from a shortlist of 15 or so nominated tools. . Not bad, eh?

Here’s some more info by HPV themselves (and more praise for MindMeister, hehe).

Introducing: Geistesblitz Tools

21Jun

• geistesblitz
• 9 Comments

GEISTESBLITZ, (noun, m.) ['gæstes blîts]:

literally translated as mind flash, is a sudden insight or idea, often brilliant and unexpected. Consisting of the German words Geist (as in Zeitgeist) and Blitz (as in Blitzen, that lightning-fast reindeer of Santa Claus), it is probably best translated into English as brain wave or flash of genius.

The Geistesblitz Tools allow you to quickly submit your ideas (or Geistesblitzes) to your default map in MindMeister (remember, you can set your default map in the Properties dialog). The ideas will be inserted in a special branch top left of the root and remain there for you to copy to other maps, or move around in the default map.

Geistesblitz tools currently come in two flavours:

	Dashboard Widget / Sidebar Gadget Set up the widget once with your MindMeister username and password, and fire off new ideas at will! Using the widget is fast and intuitive and besides, we think it looks rather dashing…
System Requirements: Mac OS X (10.4+) or Windows Vista Download Now!
	Quicksearch Extensions Submit your ideas to your MindMeister default map directly from the search field in the top right-hand corner of your web browser. If you use the “Remember me” function on the MindMeister login form, you won’t even have to sign in!
System Requirements: Firefox 2.x or Internet Explorer 7 Install Now!

Upcoming Features

21Jun

• No comments

It’s been a quiet few weeks on MindMeister. But although we’re quite proud of them, we haven’t spent all our time on the Geistesblitz tools - they are nice add-ons, but the productivity of our mind mapping users happens elsewhere.

So, over the course of the next two to three weeks we’ll be rolling out a number of new features that should benefit most of you - here’s a short list:

• Links between maps / ideas
• Automatic Layouter
• URL and Mail Links
• Changes view date slider
  
• Reworked, more organic lines

There are two more surprises that we’re currently working on which deserve a more thorough introduction than a mere mentioning in a feature list - stay tuned!

MindMeister talks at RailsConf Europe 2007

21Jun

• 5 Comments

Both Till and I will be talking at RailsConf Europe 2007, which takes place from 17-19 September in Berlin.

Till will be speaking on Browser-based Testing with Selenium, whereas I will present the story of MindMeister in a Development Case Study. Both talks are scheduled for the last day, and we hope some MindMeister users will turn up too!

Updates, and a new server

26May

• No comments

As some of you will have noticed we were offline this morning for an hour or so, when we moved MindMeister onto new server hardware with quite a bit more “oomph”. We’re glad that so many people use MindMeister and want to give everybody a really good user experience.

At the same time we’ve also deployed a couple of new features, some of which people have been requesting for a while. Here’s a small list:

• Ability to assign multiple icons
• Icons groups (click to advance to next in group)
• Copy branch as text outline
• see details…

People have also been asking for more licensing options, so we’ve made a few additions there too, such as the ability to sponsor Premium Memberships for others, and license packages for businesses and resellers.

Also, stay tuned for another update with a few more mapping features, such as links between nodes as well as a solution to the infamous overlapping branch issue!

MindMeister Screencast

5May

• demo
• screencast
• No comments

The lovely Molly McDonald from demogirl.com has recorded an excellent screencast about MindMeister where she talks you through the entire system, starting by building a small map and going on to advanced features such as sharing, notifications and tagging.

The screencast is four and a half minutes long and in high resolution with a voiceover by Molly. It is currently only available in Flash format (yes, there is apparently one part of MindMeister that you need Flash for ;-)) so you will need to download the player from here if you haven’t already done so. We’ll ask demogirl if we can host a version on YouTube as well.

We’ve gone live!

1May

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We are very proud to announce that after a thorough private beta phase MindMeister finally went live today at 11pm CEST!

As you can see we’ve been busy over the last few weeks building in new features that were most frequently requested by our beta testers (thanks to everybody btw for their extremely valuable feedback and suggestions!).

Some of the highlights are:

• Support for font sizes and styles
• Support for notes on ideas
• A completely revised map UI (sidebar)
• Notifications on map changes by email and text message (text alerts via Twitter)
• Copy / paste between maps
• Title, descriptions and tags for maps
• Detailed list view for maps
• and many more…

Check out the online help for an overview of what’s new and let us know via the feedback button (which has been moved to the footer now) what you think of the new MindMeister features!

Oh, and we’ve also counted our 10,000th user these last few days - great to see how many people actually use mind mapping in general, and MindMeister in particular!

Import and collaboration updates

25Mar

• No comments

We have just deployed one more update in the private beta phase to try out a few new features and fix some problems. As we’re running out of version numbers below 1.0, we’ll have to go live soon though anyway ;-). This time we have added things like:

• A new changes view to see who has done what on shared maps (use the button in the palette to switch it on)
• Personal messages when sharing maps
• Recenter map function
• Ability to minimize the palette
• Enhanced node editing and zooming
• Import from Freemind / Mindmanager bugfixes

As always, you can find more details on the update in the changelog.

Thanks once again to everybody for the valuable feedback on the new features. We are working on a few more goodies that have been requested by many of our beta testers, such as notes on nodes and more positioning / formatting options. Above all though we want to make this a tool that is easy and fun to use for everybody, so please let us know if we’re getting there, and where we still need to improve!

Final private beta phase, new features

8Mar

• No comments

After one month online we are nearing the last stage of the private beta phase and wanted to celebrate this with our biggest update yet - new features include:

• Export to MindManager and Freemind
• Auto-layout on import maps
• Zoom in/out
• Overview navigator
• Many more icons and colors

As always, you can find more details on the update in the changelog.

We’d appreciate your feedback on the new features. If something doesn’t work for you, we’ll try and find a better way. We’ve also decided to make the feedback process more collaborative by setting up a discussion forum where our beta testers can discuss feature requests, bugs, and MindMeister in general. We are looking forward to a lively discussion! (for those who prefer to give their feedback in a less public way, the old feedback dialog option remains active)