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.
Hi you
I found your site by accidentally, but thank God, it’s so cool. I was searching for web-based mindmapping tools for year. But with your website, my problem was solved.
But I think your Share or invite friend of your tool is not easy and good enough. I think you should :
- Allow members to add their friends by Mindmeister nickname ( because not everybody has OpenID account )
- Can create groups and assign each their friend to group they want. So when they want to use Share feature, when add collaborator, they only need to click on which group they want to share. Remember collaborator’s email address for me is a disaster.
But the link topic, add url or task features are great. I like them so much. Good job.
Thanks for the input and glad you like MindMeister! We’re looking into the nickname sharing thing. You just need the email address for sharing though, no OpenID. Groups are also on our roadmap (for the Business account).
The concept of having inline images will be quite useful to make the maps more visually appealing. I can see them being put to even more good use. The iPhone application sure does fit into current interests that users of said phone may have.
Also, I was not able to contact through a contact form, since I couldn’t locate one, but in the public maps section on MindMeister, organized by Most Viewed, there is 2 extra copies of Robin Good’s mind map that showed up a couple of weeks ago as created by other people, and they showed up with as many views and ratings as the real one, so there may have been a glitch that occurred. It would probably be good to remove the other two so Robin’s is the one people see.
Armen, thanks for the hint re the view counters. We’ve fixed this bug a while ago and have now also reset the count on these maps.
Glad to hear that portable Mindmeister is in the works, but I sure hope that it includes the ability to edit annotations for a topic. i make most of my notes that way.
Any news on the iPhone App?
I’m just about to buy either iThoughts or iBlueSky – but you keep promising…
Release early and often… ?
Also interested in the iphone app progress. I bought MindMaker….
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Hi everybody – just a quick update re the expected release date for the iPhone app: after long and unexpected delays we’re hoping to release mid May now. Sorry again for the bad planning!
Any updates on release dates yet?
Mid-May I said in that last post? Aww that’s embarrassing… we we just launched the private beta so I hope the final release is only a few weeks away.