1May
As a company headquartered in Germany and providing their product in English only you almost get used to people questioning your patriotism. Our usual response to questions regarding the availability of a German version included citing some demographic statistics of our user base (which is about 40% native English speaking). Truth is, it’s somewhat embarrassing it took us so long to launch a German version, but at least it’s here now!
At the same time our partner act2 created a Japanese version of MindMeister which also went live last weekend. Japan is great country for mind mapping as the technique is almost universally taught in schools and children get used to visually mapping out their thoughts at a very early age. Thanks to everyone at act2 for their untiring effort in getting the translation out the door in time!
More translations are on the way – next up are French, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese – and if you’re interested in helping us with any additional languages please let us know. Also many thanks to those who have already offered their services, we’ll surely be coming back to you!
Finally we’d like to ask you a favor: if you’re a native speaker of German or Japanese and you find any missing or erratic translations please send us a quick feedback message using the “Found a mistake” link in the menu bar. Sometimes you need to see a word or phrase in context to make sure the translation fits the intended meaning.
4Mar
We’re almost a quarter into the year and it’s time for a short update of what’s coming up in terms of releases and new features in MindMeister. It looks like it will be a busy time until Easter as we’ve been working on quite a few things in parallel at MeisterLabs and we hope there’ll be something here for everyone!
As you might have read we recently acquired the iPhone application MindMaker. We’ve spent a few weeks completing its integration into MindMeister and are now putting the last finishing touches onto a complete UI overhaul, hoping to be ready for a preview release by mid March with the public version to follow a week or so after that. To be honest we did underestimate the effort a bit, talking full-mouthed about an impending release date already weeks back – again, sorry about that!
In terms of the core product, the next release (no I won’t mention a date this time) will again contain lots of small improvements, plus one major new mapping feature: inline images, finally. You’ll be able to visually spice up your maps with resizable images that are displayed directly in the map. Upload images from your local hard disk, select them from the MindMeister image library or use our web wizard to search and embed images from such prominent places as Flickr or Google Images. Of course we’ll also have a WunderBild function (my personal favourite of the new release).
MindMeister users come from all corners of the world, and not all of them have English as their main language. Localization of the user interface was one the most requested additions so we’re quite proud to announce that internationalized versions of MindMeister will be available soon. We’ll start with Japanese and German, hopefully soon to be followed by other languages. Localization is done through partners in the respective countries who manage and own the translated versions, and we offer quite generous (and often exclusive) distribution deals. If you’re interested in becoming a regional partner please contact us.
Finally we’d like to give you a glimpse of a soon to be available new deployment option of MindMeister. Many companies – due to internal policies – simply cannot embrace all aspects of Software-as-a-Service, meaning that they need to host all their software inhouse. For those customers we’ll be offering a virtual MindMeister appliance – a self-contained and full-featured installation of the our server that can be deployed behind a company’s firewall. The first edition will be as a VMware appliance, with other editions to follow on demand. For more details on the MindMeister Virtual Enterprise Appliance please contact us.
27Aug
We’ve just deployed a minor update to fix some small bugs e.g. with the import of mind maps.
Much more importantly for our international users though, we can now correctly display texts in right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew in the image and PDF export, as well as when printing mind maps.
You can see that it works in the “I can eat glass” export above (for more translations of that indispensable traveller’s phrase see here). Of course, if you don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic you will just have to take our word for it…
