The last update of the year.

ReleaseNotes

(Update) New Intro dialog.

(Update) Improvements when mirroring nodes.

(Update) Branch colors get darken when a color is already in use.

(Removed) Reconnecting of nodes (watch a future blog entry for announcements).

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Release Notes

(New) Change the node color directly with the color panel.
(New) Completly new selection indicator. Please provide feedback!
(Update) Improvements to the way title editing is displayed.
(Update) Not selected subnodes are no longer deleted.
(Update) Branch Drawing.
(Fix) Reconnecting and branch thickness.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the testing I did with my family over the weekend. They are Windows users and probably touched a Mac for the first time. To be honest, they are not ideal testers for my application. But still, I think it was necessary and it helped me to discover some issues:

1. Although I display a user guide when opening a new document, it’s not very clear for new users that they can drag the “+”. They simple press and release it.
2. Selecting + from the toolbar and hitting + on the canvas behaves very different. Testers didn’t mention it, but I think this is not a very clean solution.
3. When reconnecting a node testers often released the node when mousing over the node. They thought this would reconnect them.
4. When selected, a node and it’s branch are drawn with a blue shadow. Testers thought that they can only move the node when grabbing the branch. This resulted in trying to grap the branch at any point – which doesn’t work – and they didn’t realize that they can also grab the text to select the node.
5. It was also not very clear when the node was in edit mode (editing the node text).
6. When nodes are overlapping it’s not very clear which node got selected.

Possible Fixes (not in the order the issues appear above):

1. I’m thinking about changing the selection indicator to a more Desktop/Finger like approach. I like the way the focus looks when reconnecting nodes. I’ll try to use a similar indicator for selected nodes. This is probably something I have to implement, before I can see if it works.
2. Selected nodes should be drawn over all other nodes. There is also a bug with the drawing hierarchy and reconnected nodes. So I’ll have to rewrite this code anyway.
3. When dragging a node over an other node and connecting is possible, they should connect when the user releases the button. But the subtree shouldn’t stay at the released location. It should move to a more optimized location.
4. I’m thinking about drawing a border around the title to indicate that the text can be edited when in editing mode.
5. Pressing + in the toolbar, pressing + on the canvas and creating a new node via the keyboard will resulte in the same node location.

Starting an application for the first time can be a very busy time:

• Display some kind of end user licence agreement.
• Display a registration or shareware usage restrictions dialog.
• Ask the user if he allows automatic update checking.

I’d prefere to have everything in one, very clean designed window. But I think this is simply too much content for one window. This is the current design of the registration dialog:

I like it so far. When running for the first time the standard sparkle dialog will pop up too, but I think this shouldn’t be much of a problem. The next thing will be to find a suitable place for the EULA.

 This build brings the last major feature of the 1.0 release: reconnecting of nodes.

•  MindNode 0.9.8 beta (350)

 This is subject to change, but to give you the big picture: 

 

0.9.8 Reconnecting of Nodes (will be released today or tomorrow)

0.9.9 Copy & Paste of Nodes

0.9.10 Shareware Support

< I’ll start seeding the app to more users at this stage. > 

0.9.11 Major Bug Fixes

1.0 RC 1 – x Stability and oder Bug Fixes

1.0 Hello World

Designing and developing an application is only the first step when creating a shareware app. I just sat down and wrote a list of items I have to take care of before releasing version 1.0. 

• Website – I used Wordpress in the past, but I’m thinking about moving to a CMS (Drupal and Joomla are on my short list)
• Application Icon – The current icon is only a temporary icon and I’ll have to find a good and hopefully cheap icon designer for this job.
• Payment Processing – Including licence key generation and probably a lost registration lookup system.
• Documentation, FAQs - Creating a good documentation/FAQs helps keeping the amount of support emails down.
• Marketing - Creating entries on Apple Downloads, Versiontracker and MacUpdate is a must, sending out a press release and providing major blogs with free licence keys is probably a good idea.
• Legal Stuff – Founding a company, creating an EULA and so on …

Other things that may become important: bug tracking database, support ticket system, forums, mailinglists

Important Information: I had to update the file format to allow the support of multiple root nodes. Old files should open just fine in this version.New in this version:

• Support for multiple root nodes. Please let me know if you like this feature.
• Completely rewritten undo support that will create a much lower memory footprint.

Download: http://www.mindnode.com/release/MindNode_342.zip

MindNode is no longer only the name of my inactive blog, but it’s also the name of my newest application. It’s a simple, but very intuitive and easy to use software for creating mind maps. The software is still under heavy development, but I’m getting near the end of the development cycle. You can download a pre release version of the software here.