Talk:Development

Setting class load path in manifest.mf in jar

In the source folder tree of FreeMind, there's a file MANIFEST.MF. This file tells what should happen with the freemind.jar when java tries to run the jar archive. The file may look like

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Main-Class: freemind.main.FreeMind
Class-Path:                  silk.jar nanoxml.jar ekit.jar kafenio.jar
            kafenio-config.jar kafenio-icons.jar gnu-regexp-1.1.4.jar
Created-By: Joerg Mueller

A tricky thing about the file is that the length of the lines can be at most 72 characters. That creates difficulties when specifying Class-Path. In the exaple above, the first line of Class-Path is set in such a way that it has 70 chacters. That has been achieved by putting spaces before the actual list of classes. In the freemind.jar, the file can be found in the folder META-INF. Here you can check if the manifest has been created correctly.

Why may FreeMind be more relevant than some other open source applications

A simplistic and personal consideration by Daniel Polansky.

There are many efforts to create new text editors, text processor and the like. While this activity is not without value, it does not fill that big value gap as mind mapping application.

Take, for instance, text editors like JEdit. There are already well estabilished text editors like Emacs or Vim, and there are many others. It's not that these editors would be perfect, far from that, but they're still pretty useful and with some training users can become very efficient with them.

With text processors, the thing is that most users in companies have already Microsoft Office for free. What does that mean? That means that the individual users do not have to pay for the MS Office, and they cannot effectively decide to use other Office platform either because of the value of easy sharing. Furthermore, there are competing free Office platforms like KOffice, OpenOffice or AbiWord.

In mind mapping, the situation is quite different. You do not get commercial alternative granted in companies, unlike office applications. The point here is that most of MS Windows users, the mainstream, do not have a mind mapping application yet. For them, starting to use FreeMind is not a switch from Microsoft product to alternative product. It is a switch from scattered documents in incomparable and hard-to-overview formats to one document with unprecedented order and transparency - FreeMind's mind map.

Therefore, I am expecting a growth of interest of free developers in developing and using this application.

Furthermore, even though Java is quite slow and memory hungry, it solves the never ending quarrel between religious die-hard fans of different computing platforms, which I have first experienced with Atari 800 XL versus Commodore 64 battle, later IBM compatible versus Commodore Amiga battle, and nowadays Windows versus Linux battles.

To translate the wiki pages

A how-to irrelevant to development.

See [1] for a description of how to do that. We don't have such a page yet, so, please, be careful.

To create a new release

Outdated consideration:

To succesfully complete a new release, do the following

• upload the release files into /incoming at ftp:upload.sourceforge.net , use the user anonymous and your e-mail address as a password
• create new release. The files you have uploaded with ftp will be offered to you. Releases have names like "0.6.1", "0.6.5".
• update the home page so that it points to the new version of installation files
• post news, listing the most important changes of the new version
• repost the news to the Announce forum, with basically the same text
• repost the news the mailing list freemind-users@lists.sourceforge.net

Notice that the news cannot be monitored unlike forum, and forum has no RSS feed unlike news.

Why not use OPML for storage instead of FreeMind's native XML format

No longer relevant consideration:

The current version of OPML is not suited for our purposes. It should be easy to create conversion XSLT between FreeMind and OPML. First, if we decided to use OPML, we would have to wait until the owner of OPML changes his standard to fit our needs. Thus, we would be dependent, not being able to act dynamically. Second, already the current version of OPML is insufficient. It does not contain most of what FreeMind already uses: colors, fonts, folded tag, edges and icons. It is not a superset of FreeMind's XML format, even not in a vague sense. Even if I renamed the elements names properly, OPML would still be a subset and not superset of FreeMind's XML. As a result, we have no benefit from using OPML right now.

Summary: 1) we would run into dependence, and 2) OPML is insufficient, loosely speaking it is a subset.

ontology description language

I am wondering if OWL the ontology description language is somehow connected to the XML-dialect of freemind. It would be wonderful to be capable of browsing extensive namespaces (including mindmaps of course) like it is done in Thinkmap or their application The visual thesaurus. I guess freeMind is an intrigius approach to achieve something like the standard browser within wikis and knowledgebases including the whole [www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia]. What seems to be missing are:

• weighted links (logical and/or continuous e.g. [part of], [equivalent to 70%], ..., [not equal 30%])
• dynamic loading of content
• dynamic display and application (also within small areas)
• user interaction and external program control (i.e. switch to next Wiki-page)

Well it might help the Semantic Web to become a reality.

Besides it would be interesting to have something like FreeMind as a browser for any namespaces found in databases, especially those used for programming applications.

need more info on: FreeMind's xml data format (.mm)

How are the

• created
• mofified
• ID

numbers or timestamps created?

I am trying to write a program to automatically create simple mindmaps. --GunterS 09:33, 10 Mar 2007 (PST)

Source for FreeMind Browser?

Where can we find any source code available for the browser application? --Osmcgraw