Talk:FreeMind 0.9.0: The New Features

From FreeMind
Revision as of 17:00, 30 April 2007 by Niewiap (talk | contribs) (Documentation is missing)
Jump to navigationJump to search

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)

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 objects 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 a mess 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