My first post about Mind Meister, an online mind mapping tool, was written more than one and a half year ago, and at the time the product was just about to be launched. In the last year Mind Meister has dramatically evolved from an experiment to a mature online collaborative suite. The other day I received an email from them announcing the new 3.0 version. They were sweet enough to call me a “key influencer” in that message and they also told me not to whisper a word before November 3rd, 14:00 UTC. How about that?
Well, it’s been well over November 3rd, the United States has it’s first Afro-American President, Barack Obama, things have settled, so to speak, so we can move on with our tiny little review.
Beforehand, you should know that Mind Meister has its own blog and that some of the new features are already outlined there, so if you are impatient, you can go directly to the related post on their mind mapping blog. But if you care to spend another 3-4 minutes around, here’s a quick list of what impressed me:
- very good support for tasks within mind maps – now tasks can have a priority, a start date, duration and an email reminder. Cool.
- new user interface with what they call “organic lines”, meaning the mind map will look a little more natural when you drag around the nodes
- export enhancements, especially in the export dialog area. Oh, you can export now in the MindManager format, the default format for all the mind mapping I do
- export related also, the ability to print the mind map via PDF integration
- there is an OpenId integration now, although I haven’t been able to sign up with my OpenId, I guess this is a temporary glitch
- new team admin interface (if you go for the business package, see pricing below)
- there is a new embed API, which, from what I could think right now, it would make a huge difference in the future. The ability to “script” my mind mapping is one of those things that make me think, you know…
- there were also a number of significant improvements in sharing – it’s a collaborative suite, after all, but I’ll be honest with you and confess that I haven’t used that feature yet. Although I think there is quite a market for such a feature…
All in all, this version 3.0 seems to bring important enhancements. More important, the price has been adjusted, so that a premium account is now 4 USD / month, and a business account is 6 USD / month. Worthy to note is the fact that there is also an academic package, at only 15 USD / year.
