Development
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The development of FreeMind is coordinated using FreeMind's project page at SourceForge, and also using this wiki. At wiki, we have requests for enhancements page; there is also requests for enhancements (RFEs) page at SourceForge (not preferred). You can browse CVS repository. We also use SourceForge for bugs, and open discussion forum. We do not use the documentation part there as we use this wiki instead. Getting started as a developer or testerTo get the latest beta version of FreeMindHere. Observe, that these versions are not official releases and may admit serious errors. Please, use them only if you urgently need a feature included in such a version or to give us feedback to our development which is highly appreciated.
To compile FreeMind on your ownIf you are a developer, just download the sources, unpack them,
find the folder with the file build.xml, and execute the command
To set up a FreeMind project under EclipseYou download FreeMind to ~/src/freemind say. Then, you have to compile FreeMind on command line using "ant dist". After that you open a new project with working directory ~/src you should find the following settings:
Then finish the project settings and there should be no errors in the project. You can run FreeMind starting the class
Further development wiki pagesFurther reading (still under construction): To use concurrent version repository (CVS) with EclipseCheck out the guide by Bob Alexander. When working with CVS, remember that it is difficult to change directory and file names under CVS. Moreover, it not easy to remove files completely. Therefore, pay attention when checking files in. To become a developerNew developer starts by sending his contributions as patches. Later on, he may get access to CVS repository. The process is approximately as follows.
Development resources
To get latest CVS branchMissing. The latest integration branch is fm_041017_base_integration. The most relevant tag is FM-0-8-0.
Conceptual remarksModular model - view designThe architecture of FreeMind makes it possible that FreeMind becomes general tool for editing tree-structured data, that is mind maps, XML/HTML documents, folder trees etc. in future. All these kinds of data would be presented to the user as a mind map. Model-View-Controller design makes it possible for you only to write so called model of the data structure, without caring for the visual representation. Currently, mind map mode and file mode are implemented.
Original vision of Joerg MuellerJoerg Muller is the original author of FreeMind, developing it up to the version 0.4.0. Here follows what he's got to say on his original vision:
One may think of extending FreeMind to work with networks as opposed to trees only, an example of this being Topic Maps (ISO). Daniel Polansky: Joerg's vision of FreeMind becoming Emacs for tree data is intriguing, but rather far fetched at the time. You would need to provide scripting facility and at least many basic operations, like upcase, downcase, replace and many others. It is even not evident that this goal valuable compared to other goals - there many quite obvious and still missing features.
Why not use OPML for storage instead of FreeMind's native XML formatThe 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.
Why may FreeMind be more relevant than some other open source applicationsThere 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 neverending 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.
MiscTo create a new releaseTo succesfully complete a new release, do the following
Notice that the news cannot be monitored unlike forum, and forum has no RSS feed unlike news.
To create proper copyright noticeA source file may be viewed as a sum b + d1 + d2 + ... dk, where b is the basis and di are deltas (or patches). Each of these have their own copyright holder and the year of copyright. If there is only one autor and one year, then the copyright notice is simple. If there is only one autor and more years, then the copyright notice may look like
which is to be understood as
If there are more authors, then the copyright notice consists of more lines, like
Not all changes are eligible for copyright. If a change is small, then it does not make sense to add a line to the copyright notice for it. Copyright notice is not required for copyright to hold. It makes claiming your right at court easier. The correctness of these instructions is not granted. They are subject to improvement as we see fit. --Danielpolansky 11:29, 3 Jun 2005 (PDT)
All on keyboard mappingsCurrently, each function has at most one key assigned. But, it should be the other way around; the keys should have functions assigned, rather than functions key. For instance, it would be valuable to have both insert and tab assigned to new node function. (Actually on MS Windows it is right now not possible at all to bind anything to tab.)
To translate FreeMind into your languageTake the latest revision of Resources_en.properties. Translate the labels in the text at the right side from = to your language. You can directly create and edit any java property file in any language using propedit. "This editor can directly edit property files written in Unicode reference characters, and saves the time and effort of converting into Unicode through native2ascii. In addition to the usual functions of an editor, the plugin is integrated with Eclipse and JBuilder. Files can be opened in the IDE and saved in Unicode. It can use by intuitive and simple operation. For details, please look at the following pages." Alternatively you can save your property file in UTF-8 encoding; this is possible e.g. using Microsoft Notepad. After that convert the file into \uXXXX Unicode escape notation, using native2ascii tool included with the Java SDK. Example of use (Resources_cs.properties.txt is before conversion): cd C:\j2sdk1.4.2\bin> native2ascii.exe -encoding UTF8 Resources_cs.properties.utf8.txt Resources_cs.properties Ideally, your file's name will be Resources_xx.properties, where xx is the code of the language (e.g. en, de, dk etc.). Send your translation as a patch afterwards. To convert \uXXXX Unicode encoded file back to UTF-8, use a command similar to the following. cd C:\j2sdk1.4.2\bin> native2ascii.exe -reverse -encoding UTF8 Resources_cs.properties Resources_cs.properties.utf8.txt Currently, we have the following languages translated.
FreeMind's xml data format (.mm)FreeMind stores his data in own XML flavor. Up to FreeMind 0.6.5, the xml format has been unchanged. The list of elements and their attributes as of FreeMind 0.7.1 follows.
The actual W3C schema can be found under [[13]].
Libraries and tools used in FreeMind
ImplementationMenu Label Checklist
To implement embedded imagesTo implement embedded images, one would store binary data in a node, like <node TYPE="image" BINARY="x4543edvc...45ert"/> Upon opening the node for viewing, temporary file would be created and HTML viewer would point to that file. Upon editing, external image editor would be opened to edit the temporary file, like Gimp.
Improved HTML editingFreeMind's long node may contain HTML. However, it needs to be edited in its source text form. We can improve upon that by
Rendering of HTML nodes is slowRendering of quite long HTML nodes is slow. If you have a HTML page corresponding to ten paper pages, then the rendering of the node upon unfolding takes several seconds. The related code is in the method setText(nodeText); in the section if (nodeText.startsWith("<html>")) {
// Make it possible to use relative img references in HTML using tag <base>.
if (nodeText.indexOf("<img")>=0 && nodeText.indexOf("<base ") < 0 ) {
try {
nodeText = "<html><base href=\""+
map.getModel().getURL()+"\">"+nodeText.substring(6); }
catch (MalformedURLException e) {} }
setText(nodeText);
This result does not give us much hope of improving the speed easily, as the command just tells Java's JLabel to render the page. A solution would be to find a different HTML rendering Java component. We can also wait until Sun's Java virtual machine improves the speed of JLabel's HTML rendering. -- What about pre-loading nodes which are likely to be expanded, using threading? Keep some relatively small cache of nodes in proximity to the last expanded node, and swap in the expanded node when the unexpanded one is clicked. No?
To obtain focus for selected node in reliable mannerRequesting focus for NodeView using requestFocus() method is unreliable. A reliable way of doing that has been implemented in the method getController().obtainFocusForSelected(); Requesting focus using newSelected.requestFocus(); where
To set the class load path in manifest.mf in jarIn 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.
More development pagesDocumentation efforts
Short patchesSee short patches.
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