Planned changes for Pocket Freemind

by Chuck June 9, 2008

Here are the things I'm thinking about tackling next:

  • Adding an editing form for custom attributes. I have this done in my local copy of the application, I'm just waiting for Peter to release the 0.3 version of the app before I check it in.
  • Adding a context menu to the tree view so that it's easier to add, move and edit nodes.
  • Updating the editing form so that it follows the UI guidelines.
  • Adding pages that enable color changes to item backgrounds and text.

That will keep me busy for a while, I think.

Tags:

Programming

First changes

by Chuck March 10, 2008

The first set of changes that I submitted to the Pocket Freemind source were some clean up work and adding an editing form for notes and HTML content for the node.

I re-factored the source code for the base class (MindMapItemBase) and moved some redundant code from the other node types into the base class. Now nodes that only have attributes, like >link< and >attribute< don't have to have any changes made to the ToXml and FromXml methods, the base class versions do all the work.

My other big change was to add an editing form so that you can edit >richcontent< nodes. These nodes contain free-from text or HTML that makes up the nodes content. I've got some ideas in my head about how to create Web pages from the contents of a mind map's content nodes, and I want to be able to edit the mind maps on my PDA while I'm riding back and forth to work.

Tags:

Programming

Pocket Freemind

by Chuck March 10, 2008

One of the things that I do often as a writer is brainstorm a set of content, whether it's a documentation set at work or a set of pages that I'd like to upload to this Web site. One of the tools that I use when I'm brainstorming is a program called FreeMind, an open source mind mapping tool that you can find on SourceForge.

One of the things that I'm trying to do with FreeMind is use the XML that I create on the mind map to drive other projects. For example, at work I use a FreeMind mind map to structure the table of contents of my documentation set. I have a XSL transform that I run against the mind map XML to create a sign-off worksheet for each release of the docs. I want to try to use the mind map to actually construct the TOC and run a tool against the XML to create a set of DocBook files that 'XInclude' the appropriate documentation files.

Anyway, I use FreeMind on my desktop PCs, but I wanted a tool that I could use on my Pocket PC as well. There are a couple of tools out there that people have created, but the one that uses the .NET Framework is called "Pocket FreeMind." It's a project started by Peter Carroll, with some help from a few other developers.

And now I'm one too.

Peter accepted some patches that I created to edit notes on the mind map nodes and added them to the project, and asked me if I wanted to be a part of the development team.

Tags:

Programming

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