Talk:FreeMind 0.9.0: The New Features

This page is protected. Please post any suggestions and questions related to this page and to FreeMind to Open Discussion forum.

Helpfulness of this page

I'm finding most of the page rather unhelpful. The documentation jumps straight into explaining which buttons to press, without really explaining or even hinting why would I want to do that in the first place.

It would be a good idea to describe what the new features mean in practice, what can you do with them, what's the value for end users? Basically explaining why would I care? As I've vaguely understood, attributes are one of the main new features in 0.9.0 so you'll probably want to describe the feature in a way that'll make users understand it and want it, passionately. Filter and WYSIWYG editor are similar, it's unclear what they mean in practire, how will it look and affect the end user. (Though the editor is easier to guess, but guessing shouldn't be necessary.)

Scripting_via_Groovy and TaskJuggler_Integration are doing a little bit better here.

--Tko 05:02, 1 Jan 2007 (PST)

Hi Tko, with respect to your question on attributes: As an example consider you that you had tasks associated with nodes. You may want to add attributes like: 'assigned to', which would have a name as a value, 'status', lets say with a value 'in progress', 'resource': 'needs 10 Mio.USD', etc..

--Uli 02:48, 13 Feb 2007 (PST)

Deleting attributes

Thanks to Dimitri for indicating/recalling the correct way to delete attributes. I have added in the original section "deleting attributes" the full sequence to achieve this goal, as this was not obvious from the original doc for several reasons :

• the delete button is placed in a somewhat unexpected place (line All Attributes, instead of a Delete button in the panel associated to the line of the attribute)
• the titles of sections and subsections in the wiki are not numbered, in the body of the text, so it is not obvious a priori to realize that reading section "Delete attribute" presupposes reading text preceding this section.

This results in a "heavier" presentation, but I think it might be easier to grasp for the beginner since it is more self-contained.--Miclav 08:43, 9 Sep 2007 (PDT)

Filter

I do not find the filter selection, I don't see any funnel at all. (Hope it is OK to write that here).

    Answer: The "Funnel" location is by default the fourth item from the left on the Freemind toolbar.  It is located directly to the right of the printer button and to the left of the Display %.  On my screen it is directly under the "View" Dropdown menu.  Hope this helps. ~Matt

Documentation is missing

I have been waiting for scripting in Freemind for a long, long time. I love the program, but would like to automate some repetitive tasks. However, I am a little disappointed with scripting in beta 9. The reasons are as following:
1. The documentation is very scant. At least a short list of object classes and methods would be helpful. I really don't want to dig into the source code to write a simple script and if you want people to really beta test this feature, you should provide more than a few examples on the website.
2. The script editor is virtually non-existent.
3. Putting scripts as attributes is confusing and non-intuitive, and it doesn't allow you to view the whole script without the tedious copy and paste to notepad or other editors.
4. Maybe I am missing something, but it seems like there is no way to execute a single script associated with one node without launching all the scripts on the map (Alt-F8).
5. Again, maybe I don't know about something, but there doesn't seem to be a way to define your classes and general methods for the whole map instead of individual nodes.
6. VBA-like model would be nice, where you can associate scripts with certain events (such as changing an attribute of a specific node, or unfolding a branch), but again it would require global code for the whole map instead of individual nodes.
As for attributes, the Attribute editor is very unintuitive and it takes forever to figure out exactly what's going on and why one may want to use specific features. Also the View menu is missing a dot by any of the options regarding attributes in the beginning, so you don't know what view you are currently at.
There should also be an indication of what mode is currently active in the Format menu (plain text or formatted text). Here, also you should probably consider making notes editor plain text if the general setting is for plain text editing.
Hope this helps.
Sincerely,
Beta tester

Documentation for Notes is missing

I have been waiting for a notes capability in Freemind for a long time. I like the program, but it seems limited in the way I wanted to use it. I wanted to use it as a glorified outliner where each node represents the header of an item in the outline and the level of the node equates to the level of the outline header. Once I had the outline, I wanted to flesh it out into a full paper. In the past, the way I would've had to do that was add paragraphs directly to the pertinent node or as a child node of that node, but that ruined the ability to look at the whole outline as just headers. With notes, I can add information to a node and not have it change the view of the outline. There are many problems, though.

1. There is no obvious way to output the full document in a paper form (ie. like something you would get from Microsoft Word).
2. There are no options for setting how you want to display the notes (ie. as a popup or as an inline).
3. There is no obvious way to output the mindmap as a basic (ASCII?) text outline.

Is there a big example of how Freemind has been used by others? It would be great to see full examples of Freemind used for the following purposes:

• Development of a paper for publication.
• Development of a web-page documenting something interesting.
• An ASCII text outline that can be output to printer.

-- DavidMasterson, 5/26/07

Well, Freemind is presented as a challenger to MindManager, but we are far from the same functional coverage, I think. In MM, you can actually assign PEOPLE to DECISIONS and TASKS, where freemind seems just to be a toy for helping brainstorm and adding pretty smileys.

Or the documentation is not complete.

---

Hello. When will the new version be available? -- BishKopt, 11/03/09

Shorter release cycles

Hi there

I wonder why you don't go for shorter release cycles, say 2 to 3 month cycles? This would help you to get good features implemented faster as you don't have to wait until your 'big package/release' is ready. Another good argument would be community building as people would recognize that project as being very active and therefore return to your site more often. You could also use RSS feeds and email notifications services to inform users of Freemind about new development. I'm not talking about the development process, but rather the 'normal' Freemind users waiting for stable releases.

I'm not sure whether this post is at the correct place, but the whole FreeMind Wiki is rather difficult to catch on.

Keep up the good work.

Marco

FreeMind rocks!

FreeMind is very useful.. One of the most useful productive software ever! Thanks!

--Ceefour 05:08, 23 Jun 2009 (UTC)

Yes, Freemind definitely rocks. It's so speedy, I'm surprised to find that it uses Java!

Now, down to business. I s'pose the html set will find "attributes" a reasonable and understandable term. But, even as a member, more of that set than the social media set -- wouldn't the social media term "tags" (or the gmail concept "labels") fit better and be more quickly understandable?

MarktersGeek

Incremental "What's New" Page?

It seems like it might be a good idea to list the new features of each version.

My general suggestion is to have an overview page (showing all the different releases, and maybe a little information about each), and then a page regarding a specific version.

For instance, on the version overview page you would have .8 (and any subsequent versions, if applicable) .9, and the subsequent RC versions (rc 1-7) and perhaps a little information about each subversion (such as major features added/bug fixes). Then the label for the subversion would link to the subversion page, and this page would detail the current version. This would primarily consist of details of all bug fixes, features added, etc.

Just a thought. I actually came to the wiki after downloading rc7 to see what was new compared to rc6, and couldn't see any apparent answers, so I thought I would throw out the suggestion.