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MindJet Releases MindManager 8

By on November 11, 2008 in Software Reviews

Today, MindJet has released two new prod­ucts: MindManager 8 for Windows and MindManager Web.

What's new in MindManager 8

I’ve blogged about MindManager before as it is one of the main tools in my cre­ative arse­nal. If you haven’t tried MindManager before or have been curi­ous about it, now is the best time to try it and dive into mind map­ping. Here’s a few of the main new fea­tures in the new version.

What’s New in MindManager 8

Maps shar­ing: One of the main lim­i­ta­tions of using MindManager before was that it was dif­fi­ult to share those maps with peo­ple who did not have it. Exporting to Word and other for­mats could only go so far and, for me at least, my MindManager maps did not cre­ate good client deliv­er­ables even if they were very use­ful to me internally.

With MindManager 8, we can now export maps directly to PDF with embed­ded inter­ac­tive maps (a Flash movie from the map is embed­ded in the PDF). This is huge for me. We now can share our maps in a self con­tained and secure file for­mat and email them to any­one or make them eas­ily down­load­able from any Web site. Secondly, MindManager 8 also export directly to Flash itself so we can add inter­ac­tive maps to our Web sites. You can check out how that feels by look­ing at the map on the MindManager 8 prod­uct page on MindJet’s Web site.

Integrated Microsoft Office File Editing & Embedded Web Browser: MindManager 8 can now dis­play Web pages or edit MS Office doc­u­ments right from within MindManager’s inter­face. For me this is a very wel­come addi­tion as I often want to add links to Web pages to map top­ics. Now I don’t have to copy paste as there’s an “Add to Map” but­ton right in the embed­ded browser.

Integrated Content & ser­vices: It is now pos­si­ble to add search top­ics, RSS feeds or con­nec­tions to data­bases directly in maps by using what MindJet calls “Map Parts” that con­nect to search engines and other ser­vices or data stores. That way, top­ics in map can be kept fresh and rel­e­vant with updated data instead of being static.

Web ser­vices Map Parts included in MindManager 8 include Google, Yahoo and Windows Live (Search); MySpace and Facebook (social net­work­ing) and Amazon, eBay and StrikeIron D&B (eCom­merce). Database link­ers include Access, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, Excel and text files.

These are just a few of the new fea­tures included in MindManager 8. I will post again on why you would want to use an appli­ca­tion like MindManager but, in the mean­time, you can read my pre­vi­ous posts on mind map­ping from last year when I started using MindManager 7:

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What About that Fireworks CS4?

By on September 12, 2008 in Adobe, Design & Development, Fireworks

Although the new ver­sion of Fireworks has been in pub­lic beta for a while now, I haven’t talked much about it here yet. Not because it’s not an excit­ing release, quite the oppo­site, but only because until a month ago I was basi­cally work­ing 2 full time jobs and since I turned a full time free­lancer, I’ve worked hard at set­ting up my new busi­ness, re-​branding its image and get­ting into my free­lance groove. I’ll talk about all that later but I’m just say­ing that I just did not have the time to write any­thing mean­ing­ful about Fireworks CS4. This post is just a start.

Anyone who’s read this blog before or had to “endure” some of my long winded tirades about Fireworks’s devel­op­ment and direc­tion in the last few years knows that I just haven’t been happy at all about a lot of what hap­pened and a lot of the deci­sions that have been made dur­ing the devel­op­ment of the last 3 ver­sions. On one hand, I have been a long time evan­ge­list of the prod­uct but, on the other hand, one of its harsh­est crit­ics as well. That’s because I care about it… a lot. Fireworks is one of the rea­sons I was able to build a nice Web design busi­ness for myself on the side while work­ing a full time job in the print­ing indus­try. It enabled me to work faster and get ideas into con­crete form eas­ier than with any other graphic appli­ca­tion I’ve used before or since. So it has long been a key part of my tool-​set and now that I do this full time, it’s becom­ing even more impor­tant to me.

But there is a lot to be happy about in the new CS4 ver­sion. It still misses some long requested fea­tures but it has finally started mov­ing in the right direc­tion again and actu­ally made a huge leap forward.

If you do not want to down­load and install beta soft­ware and are not inter­ested in read­ing lengthy new fea­tures descrip­tions, please just take a few min­utes to watch this video on Adobe TV that fea­tures Alan Musselman (who is an appli­ca­tion archi­tect from the Fireworks team) demon­strat­ing some of the key new fea­tures and improve­ments in Fireworks 4.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been this excited about a new Fireworks release but this one really is a fan­tas­tic and worth­while upgrade. Beyond the UI changes, most of the new fea­tures go to work flow effi­ciency and ease of use which have been Fireworks’ main strengths from the begin­ning. With this release, it’s really start­ing to shape up like the cre­ative pow­er­house appli­ca­tion it was always promised to become. I can’t wait to see how much fur­ther Fireworks will jump with the CS5 version…

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