I spent a lot of time thinking about my application over Christmas and I decided to changed my initial plans a little bit. I’ve already spent so much time developing it and now the time has come to get it into the hands of more people to collect more feedback. I also realized that in it’s current state it’s too early to release it as a commercial product and it’s probably best to start with a freeware application. So this is what I’ll do:

MindNode 1.0 will be released as a freeware application at the end of January. It will contain all the feature that are in the current beta build, except the reconnecting of nodes. Following this release I’ll start improving the core application and incorporate user feedback.

MindNode Pro will be a commercial version of MindNode that will be released a few months after the release of the free version. Both versions will share the same core code and a simple serial key will unlock the pro features. I don’t like buying software that I wasn’t able to test and therefore there will be a 15-30 day trail period of MindNode Pro. After this period MindNode will revert back to the free version and the user will be able to access every mind map he created with the pro version - no user should be punished by being locked out of information because he decided the application isn’t worth the price.

This leaves 2 questions to be answers: how much will the pro version cost and what features am I planing for this version? I haven’t settled on a price, but it will be very competitive. The features will depend on feedback gathered from users of the free version. Reconnecting will be among those features and I’m also thinking about providing new export formats and the ability to drop files and hyperlinks onto the mind map. But as I said before: those features will be based on feedback and so please let me know what you would like to see.