P. S.: Post Scriptum

I have been using mindmaps for quite some time. Wherever I go I am known as the mindmap person. My whole website was build using MindManager’s export-to-HTML function. But those where the times of Windows. Now I have moved to Mac and I have left behind MindManager. Now I use Freemind, and iMindMap.

I recently expressed my choise pubblicly on a twitter:

@gtdguy with all respect mindmanager sucks on mac. There I use freemind (4 speed) and imindmap (4 beauty). But neither makes HTML maps good!

I was then contacted by Michael Deutch (“Mindjet Chief Evangelist”), who asked me:

@pietrosperoni Buon giorno Pietro. What features / capabilities are you looking for in MindManager Mac? Thanks for sharing

The answer was too long for a tweet, so instead I decided to blog it, and tweet a link to it.

Dear Michael, thank you for your question.
I was undeniably in a great desire to share what I think about the way mindjet was treating Mac.
I use to use Minmanager many years ago, when I had Mindmanager 2002. Now Mindmanager for Windows runs version 8, Mindmanager for Mac runs version 7, and version 7 for Mac is sensibly worse than version 2002 for windows, from 6 years ago. As you can imagine I am pretty pissed off, and you might have to make a huge work to evangelize me.

Nowhere is the discussion about Mindjet product for Mac more focused than on the Mindjet Forums themselves. So please let us go there. In particular in the MindManager 7 for Mac. And to really pinpoint the issue, I would like you to read the Board: Is Mindjet really serious about the Mac?. It is 45 posts, 16 months long, so far, and is the one place where we frustrated mindmanager users, who were used to have a Windows version vent our anger.
Please read it, I’ll wait. (By the way, the authors “psdf” is me)

The shortest answer to your question is that we need MindManager for Mac to be as good as the Windows version for us to take it seriously.

We need the same functionalities as windows, and we need them at about the same time. A few weeks later is acceptable. Few months is bad, and years after is enough for us not to use your software. But not to implement them, is unacceptable for us to even considering hearing someone speak good about mindmanager without feeling an incredible urge to chip in our experience. Especially from a company that pretends to be Mac friendly.

I personally need to be able to upload my old .mm files, from mindmamager 2002. I need to have an export to html with embedded in the image links as there is in all other versions of mindmanager. I am particularly angry with Mindjet because that functionality, the possibility to have links embedded in the map, is only present from mindjet products. This makes me suspects that you might have patented this functionality, effectively denying any Mac user from being able to have it. I will actually have to restructure my whole website because of this. And this because I refuse to run a Windows system just for a program.

I have deleted MindManager 7 for Mac long time ago so it is now too late for me to make a side by side comparison. Plus I don’t have a Windows computer with a MindManager program running inside. But please, I plead you, you are in Mindjet headquarters, take a laptop with a Windows MindManager 8 on the one side, another with a Mac MindManager 7 on the other and run them side by side. And then, in all honestly, tell me if you are not disgusted by the Mac version. It is a stub. Now run it against MindManager 7 for Windows and see if you do not feel the same way. Run it against MindManager 2002 (I am sure you must still have a copy somwhere), and tell me if you don’t still feel the same way. Run it against freemind. Run it against any other mindmap program for Mac and tell me if you do not feel just the same way: Mindmanager for Mac is a joke!.

On top of all this, it was mindnumbing to see how bad were Mac users being treated on your own website, with mindjet ignoring Mac users requests, pleads, protests; Mindjet employers do not post in the Mindjet Mac forum anymore. Worse than that, if Mac users share with other users outside their forum what is going on they get deleted:

Hi All,
Well, I actually posted on the PC MM7 forum about the poor service that Mindjet have given the MAC community and how in a world of migration from PC to MAC that this is a bad thing for IT managers. It got deleted. Perhaps by posting here I am risking being banned from the the forum altogether but I wanted people to know that things are not all well at Mindjet (I own 3 mindjet licenses + JV Gannt etc) . However, I encourage you to do the same and not lie down and take the fact that Mindjet have taken your money and ran. Perhaps this mail will be deleted before anyone sees it. Poor, disrespectful service to a long time customer.

We are now using that forum to share tips about competing softwares. What else can we do?
We tried to mail for support, and the answer we got were:

Thank you for your interest in MindManager. At this time, we do not have an exact date in place for an upgrade for Mac users. Please check our website http://www.mindjet.com for updates.

Best regards,
Susan

and

Sent: Saturday , August 30, 2008 05:21 am PDT (GMT-07:00)
Subject: What about the new MAC version?

Do you have a general date? Like 4th Quarter 08?? I won’t hold you to it.

September 3, 2008 11:08:19 AM EDT
Update for Case #59656 – “What about the new MAC version?”

Unfortunately, we do not.

Best regards,
Susan

Susan Kozak
Customer Service Representative

Mindmanager is being too well treated from Apple. In Apple shops MindManager for Mac is being sold and presented in nice views on stands. That’s where I bought mine, that’s where I brought it back (with my feedbacks) the next day. Eventually we are going to get your products out of Apple stores. It just does not belong there.

Now, the number of Mac users is growing. I come from academia, and I can assure you that almost everybody there is using Mac.

Can Mindjet really afford to have this growing black hole of disaffectionate users grow and erode your base?
I don’t think so.

Best Regards,
Pietro

Pietro Speroni
Ex Mindjet costumer, Ex MindManager user.

P.S. if by any chance the pages in the mindjet forum got deleted (you know, thos damn hackers are everywhere), just mail me, and I will send you a copy of them.

ADDENDUM:
Michael’s Reply:

@pietrosperoni Thanks, will share your feedback with our team! Lots of win users migrated to mac last year!

I have to say that I amvery impressed with Wikka. Wikka is a wiki software that I just installed on my web page. It is simple, yet full of plugins. Open source (or I would not consider it). It also permits to integrate freemind mind map inside it. More than this: for each page the administrator, (ehm, that is me!) can decide who is allowed to read, write and comment. I installed it about one week ago, and I avoided to make it public until I would found a way to deal with wiki spam. I already have too much spam on this blog. Finally I found what I think is the perfect solution:

1. only registered user can comment and modify the wiki. It might not make it very fast, but at least I know who said what.
2. I inserted a plugin such that to register people must write a password in the ‘registration code’. But the password is written on the same log in page.
3. To write spam in the wiki they have to manually register. Which I feel is fair. I have no anger toward those that manually spam. Are the mechanical ones that ought to be stopped.
4. If the spammers write something that automatically register, I will change the registration code.
5. And if they write something that automatically grabs from the page the registration code I change the context (the phrase in which the code appears), making their software useless. I will move from:
   • registration code:”pippo pluto” to
   • registrati0n code:”pippo pluto”

As you cannot code for something that blocks all permutation of the word “Viagra”, so you cannot code for something that codes for all the permutation of the phrase: “Registration Code”. Ah! And this is the revenge of the mass!

I think the idea is so brilliant that I will look if I can find a similar plugin for wordpress.

The next think that impressed me in Wikka was the use of rss. It is actually very easy to integrate an rss in a page. Maybe it is the same in other wiki engines, I don’t know. But on wikka it is absolutely trivial. You just need to write {{rss url=”http://the.rss.net/address.rss” cachetime=”30″}} and the rss gets taken shown, and cached for 30 minutes. Now 30 minutes cache is what del.icio.us requires from you if you are going to connect an rss to your homepage. So now I have started to integrate all sort of rss from delicious to my web page. Check for example my Tag Cloud page. With the rss from my personal bookmarks tagged with tagcloud, rss from the popular page in delicious delicious/popular/tagcloud, and the rss from technorati (i.e. people who have blogged on Tag Clouds).

And all this is in the floating right bar. So I still can use the rest of the page as place for me to write content, and notes…

And as notes taker this wiki is slowly becoming. I started moving my Reading List to the wiki. And I added to the reading list, the rss of popular reading lists. You see, how it all comes together.

But this is not all! Wikka (and they should pay me after a post like this!) gives the possibility to set the privacy for each page. That is for each page you can chose who can read it, who can comment on it and who can change it. In this way I can use this not only as my personal notes but as the notes for project that I might be sharing with other people.

Come and say hello: http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it

Did some more debugging. Now any unicode the user used in the tags should be ok. Still there is a big brick wall in terms of memory usage. And some users are not having any luck just out of the fact that their map is taking so much resources that it goes beyond the ISP limit. I could work hard and distribute the whole calculation so that all variables are stored on disk, so the memory would never be hit, but honestly, it is not my top priority at the moment. I am here to help those users run the program on their own machine. And eventually we might solve that problem too. So, what are my top priorities:

• Add an rss feed.I would like to add an rss feed that every time a new map is done, the feed gets updated. It wouldn’t just tell the name but all sorts of data, like the list of the Main Tags. So the users could see if they might be interested in checking the new buddy’s map
• Insert a way for user to delete their own maps. If I am going to go into hosting business, I am not going to be one of those hosts where you can add info, but you cannot delete it. I am aware that users info ultimately is adding value to my site, as such I want users to be happy in having their map here. Not forced.
• Insert a general log of all the maps that are being started, and ended. Right now such a log is absent, and there are about 200 maps completed, and more than twice maps that have been started. So about 300 have been dropped. I bet many of those users would have success, if they tried right now, after those 3 deubugging session. Still I want something that tells me: Warning warning warning, map dropped. Bug? OutOfMemoryError?
• Add the number of posts inside a tag. Just obvious
• Probably add some of the MainTags as keywords to each single map. The problem is: which? All is too much. All the ones that contain more than x posts, y subtags is not flexible enough. The solution should be: if a MainTag is part of a ParetoFront of Delicious than the keyword should be there. The fact that this means writing a whole program that stores in a database the latest ParetoFront is just a small detail . And before you ask: no, I will not need anybody’s password to do that, and the data will all be public.
• Add a bookmarklet to save a map in your own delicious, with the keywords as tags
• Change the map, so that it can run on a single tag. Useful for big complex maps like mine, and others.
• Make it change the Title of the Map Page, to show the owner of the map. Useful if people want to add the maps to their delicious pages.

And then there are some tests I would like to make, like:

• Check if it would make sense to show all the tags that appear with a single tag, and not the subtags.

There is more? If you can think of other modifications , please drop a line in the comment section. Also if you tried to run the map maker and it is not giving you satisfaction let me know. I’ll whip it appropriatly. HarHarHar. (I’ve always wanted to say that!)

Some people (few) were in the unfortunate situation that the tool would calculate their map, and would correctly add it to the make map page, but then the map could not be open. If you were one of those people, I have good news. I tracked down the bug (this time only derived by my stupidity) and nailed it. So, please try again. Insert again your data, calculate it again, and then open it. With this I ended debugging the obvious big errors. If you try now and the tool does not work, please drop me a line with your username, maybe send me by email (available via my homepage) your complete list of all the posts. And I will see what I can do for you. If you don’t contact me I have no way to know that the tool failed, and I will not be able to help you.

Things are progressing, more and more people are using the tool. Unfortunately not for all was a succesful experience. I could spot two separate bugs. In the first case the map would not be created at all, and the program would stop just after making the poststotag dictionary. In the second the map would be created but it was unreadable from the user. Yesterday evening (in my camper van!) I debugged the first issue. Essentially the program was downloading from delicious two different files, the (don’t click on it) list of all posts, and the list of all tags. Well, the two files were not coherent one with the other, and the list of all tags would in some rare cases list tags that had no post associated with them. Of course as soon as the dictionary would start being created the program would protest, and quite correctly so. I think the problem has something to do with how del.icio.us is at the moment handling the change tag name function. Maybe the problem has been solved by now, and what I got into were some users that had used the function while it was still not completely bug free.

In any case I circumvented the problem by not downloading the tag list file at all, but recovering the list of tags directly from the posts/all page. It is obviously slower (by big map moved from 377 sec to 460 sec.) but more secure.

So, if you tried to use the map before, and you did not had luch luck. If it did not create the map at all, then try again, and now it should work. And if it doesn’t please contact me, and maybe send me an email with your all.xml file.

If instead the map was created, your name was added but the map wan unopenable, then keep having patience, and this evening I hopefully will kill that bug too.

And thanks to all who are using the tool, is such an interesting project for me!
Pietro

The first person to use the tool (presented here) was Mike Harris, for his delicious entries. Note immediatly how the time needed to compute the map has little to do with the number of posts, and much to do with the number of tags.

• WCityMike: 2029 Posts, 87 Tags and 81 Main Tags, calculated in 86.85 seconds.
• p.s.blog: 21 Posts, 43 Tags and 17 Main Tags, calculated in 0.23 seconds.
• pietrosperoni: 372 Posts, 400 Tags and 152 Main Tags, calculated in 377.40 seconds.

The Main Tags, are the tags that will appear as main branches. And we can also see a difference between Mike maps, and mine. In mine I tend to have about 0.4 of the tags as Main Tags, while Mike tends to have something more near 0.9. This is probably due to the fact that I tend to apply many tags to each post (four or five are common, but sometimes more), while Mike tends to use an average of one or two.

If we look at the map we can also see that there are less clusters than in my map. Note for example how in the small blog map nearly everything is clustered… and those are only 20 posts and 17 Main Tags.

If we look at the source code we can see that, on the 9th line some constants are set:

distances_constant= [0.333333,0.4,0.5,1]

Those constants define the minimum distance for entries to be in the same cluster.
The 1/3 means that if one third of the posts between two tags are in common then the tags should be in the same cluster. And so on. Tags that are farther apart, but have a path of tags between them such that you can go from one to the next without never going above that distance are in the same cluster, too. A process that in the log is referred to as making the distances tables transitive.

Those number have been specifically tweaked for my delicious posts (and generally my style of bookmarking). It seem obvious that for Mark the numbers should be different. Since it is more uncommon for him for posts to share a tag, probably the numbers should be lower. Something like:

distances_constant= [0.1,0.333333,0.25,0.4,1]

The last 1 is just to make sure that tags that are synonimes are shown together.

I think eventually I will modify the program so that it is possible to insert your own constants from outside. But for now I am just grateful to Mike for giving me the material to understand better how to enhance the program.