Greetings from MindManager Product Design! We’d like your input on a proposed change to copying images from within topics.

Scenario 1: Copying resized images

Let’s say you paste a bitmap image into a topic, and then you resize that image to make it fit better in your map. Now let’s say you select that image (by selecting the topic, and then clicking the image to select it within the topic), and choose "Copy".

Scenario 2: Copying images from a zoomed map

Let’s say you paste a bitmap image into a topic, and then you zoom the map to something other than 100%. Now let’s say you select that image (by selecting the topic, and then clicking the image to select it within the topic), and choose "Copy".

In both scenarios, MindManager 6 copies the image to the clipboard at the size that it appears onscreen. There is a proposal to change this behavior such that MindManager would place a full-size copy of the original image into the clipboard, in both scenarios.

Which option do you like better, and why?

Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks (or not) to Brian Friedlander at Assistive Tech, who suggested a "group Skype" to address the issue of what an online Mindjet community might look like, I am now the proud owner of a LogiTech UltraVision camera. Skype me at hobieswan and you will automatically see a live image of me. I had a call with Brian in which he showed up in my Skype window and I thought it was pretty cool.

As to the "or not": This camera seems to add about 20 years to me. It’s rough! Luckily, I’m not too vain, so Skype away. And let me know if you would be interested in a group Skype call. I’ve never done one. Brian says it can handle up to, I think he said 100 users. Wow! That’s a lot of hot air. I guess we should consider global warming before we try this.

We are looking at our positioning here and Mindjet and so have some questions for you, if anyone would care to weigh in on this (if you do, it woudl be great if you could provide me with your name, your title and/or what you do at your company, how long you have used MindManager, how many others you work with and what you use MM for when you do). 

OK, here are the questions (the first two might seem a little like pop psychology. Please bear with use! ): 

1. When you hear the word Mindjet – what do you think about?
2. When you hear the word MindManager – what do you think about?
3. How did you find out about MindManager?
4. Why did you decide to use MindManager?
5. What product do you use…Basic or Pro?
6. Why did you select the edition (Basic or Pro) you did and what do you use it for?
7. Did you evaluate any other applications or Tools?  
8. If you could do one thing to make the product better – what would it be and why?

If any of you subscribe to Hobart’s Mindjet Blog II, you will see the exact same thing there, lazy person that I am…

As many of you may know, Michael over in the Mindjet labs recently released an add-in that enables Word 2007 to act as an editor for MindManager maps–even if the person using Word does not have MindManager.

We are going to be talking more about this in the coming weeks as we try to ride the coattails of Microsoft’s official launch of Office 2007 in New York on Nov. 30th. But this add-in raises an interesting (well, to us, anyway) question about what the effect will be of enabling non-Manager users to edit maps. Do you think that this add-in will:

1. Introduce more users to MindManager since the "ribbon bar" that the add-in creates exposes Word users to a map view of the document AND the ability to add icons, markers and resource info to their text document–kindof a cool thing when you think about it.
2. Or will the add-in keep these same users from taking a closer look at and maybe buying MindManager — since they can now share information directly with map makers without having to buy our software?

We are betting on #1. But what do you think?

Two months ago I blogged to request help in tracking down some rare performance problems with MindManager 6 for Windows.  I want to thank the 22 people who have reported performance cases to our customer support since then. Support have followed-up on these, and we have also held an internal "Performance Review", where we analyzed over 80 cases in detail.  A couple of people sent in technical advice, which is also gratefully received.

Some people have misinterpreted our concern as a statement that performance problems in MindManager are common.  This is not true.  Less than 1% of the issues raised with Customer Support relate to performance.  Since Jan 2005, we have had 250 such cases reported by 200 individuals. We have over 800,000 MindManager users. 

We found 6 general areas where issues had been raised, with a high proportion of the cases were from tablet PC users.  These areas were: handling of big maps, map opening speed, RAM usage, CPU usage when idle, CPU usage when moving the mouse across a map, and drag and drop of large number of topics and/or large attachments.  We mapped aspects of these onto 10 internal areas for specific improvement. We have started working on four of these areas:

• Behavior on and after map opening
  After a map is opened, we spell-check it and validate all the links to files and hyperlinks.  This is done in background so that users can work in the maps as soon as they are opened.  With larger maps this process can take a while, and makes MindManager use a lot of CPU when apparently idle. We will change MindManager to largely avoid this CPU usage.
• CPU usage when truely idle
  As I mentioned in my previous blog, we will reduce CPU usage when truely idle.
• RAM usage
  By using a complex and clever technique for allocation RAM to map topics, we expect to be able to signifiicantly lower our usage of RAM.  This will help particularly with very big maps. 
• Attachment and image handling
  This will help in map opening and drag and drop.

Things to watch out for:

• Tablet PC’s and laptops go into a powersave mode when running on batteries.  They run more slowly, which makes MindManager and other programs take more of the available CPU.  To avoid this, plug into the mains or disable powersave mode.
• Ink handling on tablet PC’s uses extra RAM and CPU.  Coupled with powersave mode, this can make a tablet PC sluggish.
• The SAX BASIC scripting system provided with MindManager is intended for writing small macros. Larger applications and add-ins written in SAX Basic will be slow.  Serious development should instead use an industrial strength development tool.  [The technical reason for this slowness is that SAX BASIC always spawns a new thread to run macros.  The resulting cross-thread COM calls to MindManager are very slow, compared to same-thread calls.]

We regard this as an ongoing investigation, and are keen for anyone with performance issues to contact Customer Support.