23Dec
Just in time for Christmas we managed to finish our latest release, MindMeister 3.1. Phew. The major new feature in it are graphical connections between ideas - many of you asked for them, and after we could not put this feature off any longer we locked one of our JavaScript gurus in a room with just a notebook and the Encyclopedia of Bezier and B-spline Techniques, and only let him out yesterday.
He said there were many technical difficulties to overcome, so please bear with us if not everything works quite as expected yet - we’re working on it!
We also added a few other new features in this release, please see details below or check out the list in the obligatory What’s New in MindMeister 3 mind map.
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- Graphical cross-connections
You can now add graphical cross-connection between your ideas in your mind maps, which will be displayed as green arrows. This feature is still beta, so please be kind. We’ll add more functionality here in future, such as control points and formatting.
- Mark & nudge inactive users
Collaborators who haven’t visited a mind map yet since it was shared with them are now marked with a coffee cup icon in the Share dialog. Clicking the icon allows you to send another email to those users, reminding them to contribute (”Nudge” feature).
- Alphabetize subnodes
We’ve cleaned up the node context menu a bit and added a function to sort the children of a node alphabetically, at the click of a button. Small but hopefully useful function.
- Select maps to take offline
No longer do you have to wait for endlessly for all your maps to synch when you go to offline mode - a new dialog allows you to choose which maps you want to take offline. Very useful if you have a lot of them!
- Other enhancements
Ability to skip share emails, withdraw from shared maps using the “Delete” function, improved invitation system, and of course the odd bugfix. See all changes since MindMeister 3.0 in the What’s New mind map.
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10Nov
As promised here is the more verbose version of the most recent update of MindMeister. Release 3 contains lots of enhancements to the ease of use and overall consistency of MindMeister, plus some bigger feature blocks. Two important things we just didn’t get done in time though - inline images and connections between ideas. They’re in the making though, expect them before Christmas!
Find some key new features below, or see a comprehensive list in the What’s New in MindMeister 3.0 mind map.
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- Task Management
Many more features for easier task management in MindMeister, including start date and duration, email notifications, iCalendar feeds, WunderTasks and a task overview from all maps.
- Search and filter, better tags
The new map search - you’ll find it in your map list view - makes managing many maps a lot easier. You can search for titles and contents, and even use Find in maps (CTRL-F). Also, managing tags was enhanced with a new overflow dropdown.
- Resize ideas and wrap
Overlong idea labels always created problems. In the new release you can now resize them via drag and drop, and your maps will also keep the wrappings when exported e.g. to PDF or as image.
- History View
We completely revamped the version history to make viewing and replaying the collaborative changes of a mind map a useful and fun experience. Clicking on the coloured bullets starts “replay” mode. See also our tutorial video.
- WikiMaps
You can now turn any public map into a WikiMap. This will make it editable for everybody (well, everybody who has a MindMeister account, to avoid spamming). Quite useful to gather input from many people at once!
- Import text files
In addition to Freemind and MindManagerTM formats, you can now also import plain text files into MindMeister.
- Emailing attachments
Geisesblitz Email now supports attachments which will be inserted as attachments to your ideas into MindMeister.
- Many more key shortcuts
Our users say they love them, so we’ve added quite a few more for common operations. See a complete list.
- Other enhancements
New user interface, revamped “My Account” section, Offline mode for Safari, recommendations in map view, new export dialog and options, better printing (via PDF), clone public maps, larger note previews and much more.
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Well, we hope you benefit from all the work that is put into MindMeister. We strive to make the best online mind mapping experience available and welcome all your feedback on the new stuff.
5Nov
Our development team worked hard these last few days to iron our the last glitches in our new release. The dust has settled now, although there’s still some fine tuning to be done before we feel confident enough to send out the release newsletter.
However, to give you a brief overview on what’s new already now we’ve created a mind map (surprise, surprise) with some advance info on the new stuff: What’s New in MindMeister 3.0.
A more verbose portrayal will follow here soon.
23Sep
We just published our first user survey. We believe that MindMeister is well so received because we somehow managed to hit a nerve at a certain point in time. To further refine and improve the service, however, we need the input of our community of MindMeisters.
The survey takes about 5 minutes to complete and aims to find out what our users do with MindMeister, how they benefit from it, what we can do better and what is missing completely.
Please click here to access the survey (closed)
For your input you’ll get a much better product incorporating your ideas, plus the chance to win 5 gift certificates for threadless.com T-shirts at a value of US$ 100 each! The winner will be selected by a raffle draw, not by how nice your survey responses are ;-).
22Apr
We appreciate the new release has been a long time in the making - but it’s here now! Last week we’ve deployed a new version of our online mind mapping tool, which we’ve boastingly dubbed MindMeister 2.0.
Our users often tell us that they like MindMeister because of its intuitive interface and overall simplicity. That’s why we try to add only the most necessary features in new releases - and still, this time it turned out to be quite a long list 
Oh, and don’t fret if you can’t find your pet feature below, in spite of all the talk about simplicity some more updates are coming soon!
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- Task information on ideasAs a first step to lightweight project management in MindMeister you can now add task information - priority, completion, due date and owner - to ideas. More to come!
- Attachments on ideasYou can now upload file attachments to ideas and preview images through inline thumbnails. This feature is for Premium users only, but everybody can try it out for 30 days.
- WunderLink and WunderNoteTry out these new functions to magically add links and notes to your ideas, using the wonders of the web. WunderLink gets its link from a little Yahoo! search performed in the background, while WunderNote uses a FreeBase database lookup.
- Automatic text wrapsIdea captions will now automatically wrap at a certain length to avoid overlong nodes (you can keep the old behaviour by adding manual line breaks with Shift-RETURN)
- More Geistesblitz featuresIn our constant quest to improve the Geistesblitz tools we have now added email support and a Geistesblitz Activity for Internet Explorer 8. With email support, you can send single Geistesblitzes or while mind maps just through an email.
- Subsharing for mapsNew option to allow collaborators to invite others when sharing a map - this will also work for already shared maps
- Print and exportNew option to center map on printout, PDF export of mind map now includes notes
- Formatting and navigationApply text styles selectively to child ideas, nicer formatting of first level branches, ability to expand and collapse levels
- Notes and linksAdvanced and larger note editor with more formatting options, new links widget in sidebar, “Show popular links” for idea
- OpenID and Paypal supportSupport for signup and login through OpenIDs and Paypal support when upgrading to commercial licenses.
- Other enhancementsNicer invitation and sharing emails, new user options, improved support for Safari and Opera, performance improvements through better script and image loading.
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14Nov
We’ve so far only talked about the new Offline feature with Google Gears that we launched with the latest release. And while most of the energy went into that, we also added some other new features and enhancements. Here’s a short list:
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- Passwords for public maps
You can now set passwords for public maps for secure linking and embedding and to hide them from the public maps list
- Blog embedding for everybody
Now you don’t need to be Premium user anymore to embed maps into websites or blogs
- Embed API
A new embed API allows you to seamlessly integrate our map editor in virtually any other web application
- Improved performance
Vastly reduced the number of requests when loading a map by combining icons and other tuning measures
- Reseller Scheme
If you’re interested in reselling MindMeister to other users just sign up for an account here and get 20% on every license sold!
- Other enhancements
Easy enable notifications when first sharing a map - tag auto completion - reworked publish dialog with easy copy buttons - view invoices and export as PDF - and many more…
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Right now we’re working on a few fixes to some editing problems that some people have been having, as well as on a number of new features. They are things that have been requested frequently and that we think we need to complete our mind mapping offering, such as attachments and images, connections between nodes, possibly some project management things (e.g. task info) as well as Geistesblitz enhancements.
