Updated for Apple’s Latest Operating Systems - MindNode 2023.4

This week, we released updates for MindNode on Mac and iOS. The updates primarily focused on enhancing compatibility with macOS Sequoia and iOS 18, including an updated app icon for Home Screen tinting, and brings a brand new Layout Spacing feature.

Layout Spacing

For some time, we have received feedback from users regarding the spacing of our automatic layout. Many users have expressed concerns that the spacing is too narrow and have requested more space between nodes. In response to this feedback, we are pleased to announce the addition of three layout spacings in today’s update: narrow, default, and wide.

Glass Dock Icon

In addition to the updated iOS app icon for Apple’s new home screen customization options, we are introducing a brand-new Dock icon on macOS. This icon named “Glass” features a transparent background, ensuring a visually distinct appearance on different desktops.

Coming Soon: Next and Classic

We are nearing the release of our new MindNode version for Mac and iOS. MindNode Next empowers users to collaborate seamlessly across platforms and enables automatic syncing.With an upcoming update, your current version of MindNode will transition to “MindNode Classic”. “MindNode Next” will ship next month as a new app and it will be included for free with your existing “MindNode Plus” subscription.

Updates for MindNode for Mac and iOS (Classic) are now available on the App Store and you can find the full release notes here.

How To Plan Your Bachelor's Thesis

Would you be so kind to give us a little intro on yourself?

I am Vanessa, the longest standing member of user support at MindNode and I also do quality assurance. I grew up in Bavaria, in a little town near Munich at a very pretty lake.

I live in Vienna for 13 years now and first studied physics and later socioeconomics. Then, I slipped into the IT world with a job at MindNode which I started in my last bachelor semester in socioeconomics because I still had to finish my bachelor thesis. This was like the perfect opportunity.

When and how did you discover mind mapping?

My first experience with mind mapping was when I was 12 or 13. My best friend and I sort of created a mind map of all our friends and their relationships, who’s into whom, and all of that kind of very important stuff when you’re 13. So that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of my first contact with mind mapping. And then, I guess it really was with starting my job at MindNode. And now, they’re omnipresent.

How have you used it ever since?

I use it a lot for taking notes during meetings and for planning workflows. I now also have a packing list for various vacations in the form of a mind map. Also, every big project, like moving houses or starting something new, always starts with a mind map and then ends up as several mind maps.

What kind of workflows do you use mind mapping for?

One that we've documented over time is the onboarding of new customers and new employees, and we use MindNode specifically for support. We outline the different phases of the onboarding process, what tasks people should be able to handle independently by a certain point, and where they can find all the necessary information.

As you said, you’re using mind mapping for business purposes as well as personally. How has it helped you, especially beyond just packing lists for travel?

The biggest help was when I was writing my bachelor’s thesis. I started by outlining the thesis using a mind map, which was really useful because I didn’t have a clear sense of the structure at first. The mind map made it easy to move chapters around and adjust the flow, so I could see what made the most sense logically.

I also used mind maps to organize quotes from the books I was reading, adding notes with references like book titles, page numbers, and so on. Since I’m a big procrastinator, I had gathered all this material but hadn’t written much. As the deadline approached, I ended up writing about three-quarters of the thesis in one weekend. The mind map was a lifesaver—its search feature made it easy to find related quotes and ideas and piece everything together.

In the end, I got an A, and my professor complimented how well-structured the thesis was. I knew the mind map had made all the difference in helping me organize and rearrange my ideas, something that wouldn’t have been possible with a regular document.

You mentioned that search is one of your favorite features. Are there any other particular features in MindNode that you really enjoy?

Yes, absolutely! I would have loved to have the ability to edit the outline back when I was writing my thesis, and now that’s possible, which is great. Another feature I truly enjoy is the ability to add notes. It’s so helpful to have the main idea in the node and then use notes to go deeper without cluttering the mind map. For example, when I was working on my thesis, I could keep the key points in the node and add all the repetitive details — like who wrote the book and page numbers — in the notes. That kept things tidy.

The outline view is another feature I love. It’s super helpful to switch between the mind map and outline view, letting me scroll through the content and see how it would flow as a text. It’s great for organizing ideas and figuring out the right structure.

Oh, and keyboard shortcuts! They might not be a “feature” in the traditional sense, but once I started using them, everything became so much faster and more efficient.

What’s your favorite shortcut?

I think my favorite is the shortcut for notes, and I’m laughing because we’ve changed it two or three times since I’ve been here! I actually forgot it after the last update, but we recently brought it back to the original, which is Shift-Command-K.

It’s funny because even though the logic behind the shortcut could be different, a lot of users had developed muscle memory for the original one. We got so many emails from people saying they couldn’t open notes because they were so used to the old shortcut. So, eventually, we went back to it to keep our users happy!

On which device do you use MindNode the most on, and why?

I most like to use it on the iPad, which is such a common answer, but for a good reason! Every time I do, I think, “Oh, this is great!” But since I spend so much time on my MacBook, I mostly end up using it there. On the iPad, the ability to tap directly on the screen and interact with the mind map makes it feel more alive and engaging.

Final question, Vanessa: What makes your creativity spark?

Having enough time and not feeling under pressure really helps me. When I can focus without being overwhelmed by responsibilities, creativity flows more easily. I try to carve out dedicated time, which creates the mental space needed for creative thinking.

Being in nature is another big inspiration for me. It helps me stay present and clear my mind of distractions. The beauty and complexity of the natural world often spark my creativity and lead to new ideas.

Download Vanessa's mind map

Download "Gliederung Arbeitswelt.mindnode"

Notes, Links, and Trash – Now on visionOS

Yesterday, we released our first major update of MindNode for Apple Vision Pro. With MindNode 2024.2 we are adding beloved features from MindNode Classic like Notes and Text Links. We are further enhancing MindNode Next with Improved Text Collaboration and a Trash folder.

Notes

Notes allow you to add more context and detailed information to your ideas, without cluttering the mind map. You can even make them bold or underline them, and several people can edit them simultaneously – more about this later in this update.

Text Links

You can now link directly to websites and other apps from your ideas, helping you keep track of all your sources and inspirations. Links can be edited in a popover and when selected, they open right in the browser.

Trash Folder

This update also adds important document management features like a Trash folder. Instead of immediately deleting documents, they are now moved to a Trash folder that can be emptied manually.

For shared documents, only the document owner is allowed to move documents to the Trash. In this case, the document is unshared and access for other participants is removed. If you are not the owner of a document, you are now allowed to move it to the Trash. Instead, you are offered to leave the document, which will also remove it from your Document Browser.

Improved Text Management

Previously, when two participants modified a node title, only the most recent change was displayed. We knew this would be an issue for Notes, so we had to make some extensive changes to how we handle text in MindNode Next.

With this update, we do so much more gracefully. Instead of solely retaining the last change, multiple participants can make changes at the same time, and they are merged automatically. 🫲 Magic 🫱

Those extensive changes to text handling mean documents created and edited with this new version are no longer supported on older versions of MindNode Next, so please ensure you update all your devices.

Coming Really Soon

We are now getting very close to wrapping up the initial release phase of MindNode Next. The next major update is right around the corner, and it will add revamped Tag Management and Live Collaboration. A version with tag support is already available in our public beta for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. So, please try the beta and share your thoughts with us.

To wrap up, MindNode 2024.2 is now available on the App Store for Apple Vision Pro and adds some exciting new tools to your creative workflow. The next major update is already available on our public TestFlight. MindNode Next is on track to ship on the App Store for Mac, iPhone, and iPad this later year. It will be available at no additional cost to all MindNode Plus subscribers.

How to Run Seminars for Lamborghini and Ferrari with Phil Taylor

Can you give us a little intro on yourself, please?

Yeah, well, I'm English, but I've worked in Italy for 42 years, and it's always been an alternation between being a consultant and being a CEO. For example, I was the CEO of Italy's number one Fashion Institute. I'm actually not a fashion guy at all. I'm an engineer from Yorkshire, but they needed someone to rebuild the place. Which we did over the course of 8 years. And it's now one of the best 10 in the world.

Then in 2013 I opened my own little consulting company. It's called Phil Taylor Consultants, which is a boutique consultancy. Now, Lamborghini is the oldest client we have. But we also work with Ferrari, Ducati, Caterpillar, and other Motor brands besides the many universities like those in Naples or Bologna.

Our company is known for highly engaging, involving and interactive seminars. We have the audience participate in almost every step of the way. A crucial element of our workshops is the way we present information and exercises. While other consultants go with decks of 100+ slides per meeting, we only work with a single MindNode file per project.

When and how did you discover mind mapping?

That must have been around 2014. Back then, I tried a few mind mapping apps, but most of them were a too heavy. I was looking for something intuitive and fast. And that's when I discovered MindNode and stuck with it ever since. There, customer experience always comes first.

And how have you used it?

Our consulting projects are often about restructuring organizations, breaking down silos or implementing innovative topics like Artificial Intelligence into everyday business. Every project consists of multiple workshops and seminars, which are supported to 95% by MindNode. We also use survey tools in addition, but no other presentation apps.

Initially, I had the core topic in a main node and all sub topics in child nodes. But these days I rather use multiple main nodes that I spread out on the infinite canvas that MindNode offers me. I navigate the canvas from top to bottom and have a main node as a label for each section. Within each section, there are multiple other main nodes and mind maps.

The great thing is that I can have backup content that I simply pull into view when needed or push out less important nodes if we run out of time.

How has it helped you, personally or professionally?

Mostly for business purposes but also a bit personally. For example, I do holiday lists or dinner organization. And quite recently I planned my pool with MindNode. I designed the pool from scratch and had to consider things like the excavation process, or the filtering.

So for organizing my thoughts in that project, I find MindNode a lot more attractive, and incentivizing than just a boring black and white list. With colored elements that make certain information stand, you get what's important in one glimpse.

Which device do you like to use MindNode on and why?

The iPad is my device of choice 99% of the time. This even stuns my clients because it is often snappier and more interactive than a regular PC. You can even make changes in a presentation in real time without leaving some sort of presentation mode, making changes and going back in.

Do you have any MindNode features that you particularly enjoy?

The thing I really like are the multiple shapes a node can have. To me, that's a real value added. Through these shapes we encode whether information is an interactive exercise, a video, a voting, or information presented by me. For example, fluffy clouds mean that the audience will be working. Thereby, I can also apply our so-called cloud test:

Have you got around 70% fluffy clouds? — If not, it means that I'll be talking too much.

And I can do that test just by looking at the canvas.

What makes your creativity spark?

One aspect is not being overloaded. I'll make sure that my brain hasn't got a million other things to do. I clear out my brain, delegate everything, and then start working on creative tasks. Otherwise, the preconscious level is blocking the creativity.

The second element is the time of the day. I'll never try to design an important workshop at two o'clock in the afternoon because that is not my time to be creative. There is also an exercise during our seminars regarding this topic where we map all the groups members' creativity curve. Only then they can see that they might all function different. So, if you are having a meeting at 3pm, some people will be firing on 10 cylinders. Other people will be dead. This is an essential learning.

Download

workshop-by-phil-taylor.mindnode

ADHD: How Mind Maps Bring Clarity & Calm

Understanding Neurodiversity

What is ADHD?

ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. It is a condition that affects how people behave. People with ADHD can seem restless, may be easily distracted, and may act impulsively. This can make it challenging to keep track of thoughts, which can often seem to come all at once — leading to difficulties in sticking to tasks and goals.

It is important to understand that ADHD is not a reflection of a person's intelligence or abilities, but rather a unique way their brain functions.

This is called neurodiversity.

An umbrella term that covers all individuals whose brains work differently, including autistic or dyslexic individuals. It's estimated that 15-20% of the world population (Source: Zurich Insurance 2023) fall under this category, yet this group faces a lot of stigma and accessibility barriers.

Understanding the different ways how people think, and process information is the first step in creating more accessible and inclusive tools.

3 Things Users Really Need

Every person has different abilities that impact how they interact with an app or a website. During the design process we can influence user experience heavily by focusing on their needs.

When it comes to individuals with ADHD, there are 3 main things that they need:

1. An interface that is understandable and user-friendly, with clear interactions, consistent layouts, and logical structure.
2. A distraction-free zone where they can fully focus on their thoughts, without autoplay videos or pop-ups that disrupt focus.
3. Clear guidelines on what to do next and support when errors occur.

By creating an interface that includes all that, we not only empower individuals with ADHD, but create an experience that works well for everyone.

MindNode: Your Tool for Focused Thought

Designing for Accessibility

From the very beginning, accessibility has been a core principle in our work on MindNode. We believe that capturing your thoughts should be quick, effortless, and beautiful — no matter your abilities. The result is a visual mind mapping tool that is intuitive, distraction-free, and highly customizable.

MindNode allows you to structure your thoughts in a way that mirrors your unique thinking process. Whether that’s linear or non-linear. It’s equipped with various features that support focus and attention:

• The infinite canvas provides an unrestricted space for the mind to roam freely.
• The Quick Entry feature ensures that every idea is captured as it strikes, preventing them from slipping away. The idea is to capture first, organize later. No need to worry about where to place them first.
• The optional Focus Mode, Tags, and Folding help in narrowing down attention to a single branch or even node when needed — putting a spotlight on the details that matter the most.

By reducing the friction in capturing thoughts, we enable you to concentrate more on your ideas and less on the process of recording them.

Structuring the Unstructured

MindNode was designed with the understanding that not everyone thinks in straight lines. Which is why MindNode offers full flexibility to visualize your thoughts the way you want them to:

Features like Visual Tags also add more context to your thoughts. At the same time, Themes instantly style them, making them easy to differentiate and understand.

By being able to create, connect, and rearrange nodes freely, you can capture your ideas as they arise — without the pressure of structuring them immediately. We’ve heard from our community, particularly from users with ADHD, that this was one of their most loved things about MindNode.

In essence, MindNode functions like an extension of your brain, accommodating its uniqueness and turning potential challenges into strengths. All while being easy-to-use and looking beautiful.

Our journey does not end here. We continue to improve MindNode, with the goal of being effective and accessible for everyone. For more on that, you can check out our accessibility page, where we talk about our accessibility features and improvements.

Welcome to the All New MindNode Next for Apple Vision Pro

I’m delighted to share that we are shipping MindNode Next for Apple Vision Pro today. MindNode Next is a brand new MindNode app, that builds on a new foundation – optimized for the age of spatial computing and collaboration. MindNode Next is the future of MindNode. It ships for Apple Vision Pro today and later this year for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Immersive Brainstorming

Immersive Brainstorming allows you to collect all your thoughts as colorful pills that float freely in the space around you. You can literally grab your thoughts, move them around, and even group related thoughts by attaching them to one another. When you are ready, convert everything into a mind map and start exploring all aspects of your original idea.

Pure Mind Mapping

MindNode Next on Apple Vision Pro supports all essential aspects of mind mapping. Create new ideas using our unique node-well, attach one of our hand-crafted stickers, fold ideas, or turn them into tasks.
A new inspector opens right next to your nodes, directly on the canvas. You can quickly change the styling right where you are without losing context.

Built for the Future

With MindNode Next all documents are now stored directly in iCloud. We sync your documents with all your devices, and you can make changes on different devices without running into conflicts. You can even start collaborating on your mind maps with friends, family, and colleagues.

Availability

MindNode Next is now available on the App Store for Apple Vision Pro. You can explore immersive brainstorming and view documents for free. All other features are part of a subscription that comes with a free 30-day trial. There are options for a monthly ($2.99) and a yearly ($24.99) subscription.

What's Next

MindNode Next is now available for Apple Vision Pro. In just a few weeks, we will begin opening up our public betas for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Currently, our classic MindNode Plus subscription and the MindNode Next subscription are separate subscriptions, which will be merged shortly. So, using your existing MindNode Plus App Store subscription, you will soon be able to also use MindNode Next on Apple Vision Pro (and vice versa). Check out our FAQ if you have more questions.

We hope you are as excited to enter this new realm of spacial computing and collaboration together with us, and we cannot wait to see how you will use MindNode Next to bring your ideas to life. Download MindNode Next now.

Optimized for macOS 14 Sonoma, iOS 17 & watchOS 10

This week, we released MindNode 2023.3, our third major update of the year with optimizations for macOS 14 Sonoma, iOS 17, and iPadOS 17 as well as a fresh look for our Apple Watch app, full-text Spotlight search, and several new stickers.

Fresh Look for Apple Watch

The update brings a fresh, modernized design to the Apple Watch, seamlessly blending with the aesthetics of watchOS 10.

Full-Text Search from Spotlight

On the Mac, we always supported searching the contents of your MindNode files from Spotlight. We are finally bringing this feature to iPhone and iPad. Use Spotlight directly on your Home Screen to search the contents of your documents. It's now easier than ever to locate and access the information you need.

Cat, Shark & Vision Pro: Stickers Galore

We have expanded our sticker collection across various categories based on user feedback. Nature & People, Symbols, and Work & Education now feature over 40 new stickers. The added stickers include cat, ambulance, desk, vineyard (Sonoma), Desert (Mojave), division symbol, and Apple Vision Pro.

With this update, we also dropped support for older operations systems. MindNode now requires macOS 13, iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and watchOS 9.

MindNode 2023.3 is now available on the App Store, Mac App Store, and Setapp. Learn more about all changes in our release notes. Happy mind mapping!

MindNode 2023.2: Enhanced Sticker Picker, Links in Outline, and more

Our latest feature update, MindNode 2023.2, is now available. The update greatly improves our sticker picker, adds link support to Outline, and a new variant of the app icon.

New Sticker Picker

With the new Sticker Picker, finding the perfect graphic to enhance your mind maps visually is now easier than ever. The new picker introduces categorized stickers, allowing you to browse and discover stickers more easily. We are also continuing to expand the range of available stickers in this release. With 2023.2 we added organigram, spider, new arrows and others. And we are already working on new animal stickers to add in an upcoming update.

Links in Outline

In our continued effort to enhance outline mode in MindNode, we added link support. You can now add, edit, and open web links directly in the Outline. We used this opportunity also to enhance support for links on the mind map and unify the interaction in both views. This makes jumping between Mind Map and Outline even more seamless.

Dark App Icon

With this update, we are shipping our app icon in a new Dark Mode variant. On macOS, a new setting allows the Dock icon to adapt to Dark Mode automatically. So, when your system switches to Dark Mode, MindNode’s dock icon will automatically get dark too.

On iOS, you can change the app icon to our dark or a new, more colorful variant. This feature is available in MindNode’s settings and will also change the icon on your device’s Home Screen.

MindNode 2023.2 contains many other minor improvements and bug fixes. You can learn about all the changes in our release notes. The update is now available on the App Store, Mac App Store, and Setapp.

Productivity Stickers, Hierarchical Themes, and more – MindNode 2023.1

Our first major update of this year is now available. MindNode 2023.1 adds productivity stickers, hierarchical themes, dynamic reordering, and many other improvements.

Productivity Stickers

An ongoing topic in our support emails is the request for new stickers. We collected your most requested ideas and created a new productivity pack with 35 new stickers. It includes tasks, notes, priority, and even a MindNode logo sticker. We hope they will help your document stand out. Let us know what stickers we should add next!

Hierarchical Themes

Today, we are also shipping the most significant styling improvement since we launched themes. Hierarchical Themes apply different styles to different levels of your mind map. They make it easier to visualize your mind map's structure and help you stay organized. With the update, we are shipping six new themes, including "Beach Day," "Retro," & "Neon."

Dynamic Reordering

Last year we introduced a new node-well with dynamic insertion behavior. We are now bringing the same behavior to existing nodes. When you drag a node, siblings will move to the side, making it easier to find the right spot to drop your node. This will help you to reorganize your mind maps quickly and efficiently.

More Improvement

There is even more:

• We added a new action to easily switch from tinted to non-tinted stickers and back
• Dragging multiple nodes now groups them together
• On iOS, you can zoom the canvas using a double-tap & drag-up/down gesture like in the Apple Maps app
• On macOS, we added an overlay when resizing nodes

As usual, you can find all the changes in our detailed release notes, and we can't wait to hear your feedback on the improvements we shipped this week.

15 Years of MindNode, What’s Next?

Today, 15 years ago, I released MindNode 1.0. Initially a free app, it quickly found an engaging user base that has allowed me to build a small business around it. This wouldn't have been possible without all of your contributions, and I'm very thankful that you have supported us for such a long time.

In today's update, I want to give you an outlook on our plans for MindNode's future. If you are interested in MindNode's history, I'd recommend you read the following blog posts:

• The Road to MindNode 1.0
• Happy 10th Birthday, MindNode

Collaboration Mode & CloudKit

In last week's blog post, "Why We Never Shipped Collaboration," I wrote about our plans to add collaboration to MindNode and why our initial plans didn't work out. Of course, collaboration is still an essential part of our future roadmap, but we realized that bringing it to MindNode will require considerably more changes than we initially anticipated.

One of our significant takeaways was that building collaboration on top of a file-base syncing service has its challenges, as we need more control over the syncing technology to achieve the features we want to support. While iCloud Drive didn't work out, we still wanted to be tightly integrated with the Apple ecosystem. This is where CloudKit comes into the picture.

CloudKit is a deeply integrated data storage solution on all Apple platforms that powers many of Apple's own services. Apps like Notes, Reminders and Freeform use CloudKit, and many third-party apps also adopt it. Using it also allows us to implement collaboration without storing your data on our servers. Instead, your data is securely stored with Apple.

Everything is Changing

Because of how CloudKit works, we have to change one fundamental aspect of how MindNode works. Documents are no longer represented as files in the Finder or Files app but are managed directly in MindNode. We initially tried to retain the current file-based document behavior for non-collaboration documents, but it introduced a new level of complexity. It was unclear where a document was stored and what picker should be used. Providing a single document management experience is a better fit for an app like MindNode. As a user, you can focus on your idea instead of thinking about document management.

Switching to this new document management also allows us to potentially add features that were only possible with restrictions in the past: full-text search on iOS for all documents, a stand-alone Apple Watch with the ability to add content or check tasks, linking to individual nodes in other MindNode documents, live updating Widgets, a list of all open tasks across documents and (hopefully) a version for Apple's upcoming AR headset.

A New App

As we don't want to force those document management changes onto all existing users, we are not bringing them to the current version of MindNode. Instead, we will introduce them in a brand new MindNode app. This new app will only support some existing features in its first version, and we will use this opportunity to rethink some of our existing functionality. As a MindNode Plus subscriber, you will be able to unlock both versions of MindNode, so you can pick whatever works best for you.

You Can Help

We are still early in the development phase of this new app but want to develop it together with you. Later this spring, we will open an early access beta to all interested MindNode Plus subscribers. At the same time, we will launch a new Discourse forum where we can have an active discussion with our beta users.

I hope you are as excited as we are for MindNode's future. Our new MindNode app will launch this Fall on the App Store. We also have several new enhancements - including a new grouping feature - coming to MindNode later this year.

Why We Never Shipped Collaboration

As a developer, you need to be a prime user of your app. If you actively use your app all the time, you understand its ins and outs best and can design the smoothest experience for all of your users.

As our company grew in the last few years, we kept running into situations where we wanted to use MindNode for specific tasks, but the app needed to be more adapted to our needs. If you’ve tried using MindNode as a team, I’m sure you have encountered the same problems. For example, it’s impossible to simultaneously work on a document stored on iCloud Drive without running into merge conflicts.

Seven years ago, we started actively thinking about adding a collaboration feature to MindNode. We explored collaboration technologies, did hack weeks to write prototypes, and began to adapt our codebase. When we started working on our new outline mode we designed it with collaboration in mind, and we have been using it to collaborate on the same document for some time now.

However, taking a prototype that is good for internal use, to shipping a great solution to customers takes time. This is especially true when it comes to a collaboration mode, which requires deep integration at all levels of the code. Other projects always took priority, and we never came close to shipping this feature.

Some Progress

Last year at WWDC, Apple announced several features related to collaboration that got us interested, and we started to prioritize the feature. We formed a dedicated team with the ambitious goal of shipping a beta version of collaboration in MindNode by the end of that year.

Our idea was to initially only support collaboration in the outline and build a dedicated document format for shared documents. This new document format would evolve over time and ultimately replace our existing file format. This would have had the added advantage of being able to edit documents on iCloud Drive on several devices without triggering sync conflicts.

Initially, we wanted to use iCloud Drive for sharing documents but planned to extend it to other document-sharing providers. As iCloud Drive is very slow when it comes to syncing documents, we developed a dedicated service called “MindNode Live” to support near real-time collaboration.

Screenshot: Prototype of collaboration in outline using Share Play instead of MindNode Live.

We Failed

Our approach closely mimicked how iWork supports collaboration, and we didn’t expect to run into issues adopting it. Unfortunately, one crucial aspect became a massive problem for us: We found no reliable way to identify a specific document stored on iCloud Drive across devices. We require this to ensure our live collaboration solution can securely and reliably distribute changes and combine them with the correct document. This is especially important when changing participants of a shared document or when duplicating a document on the file system.

While iCloud seems to provide the required features for the iWork apps, we didn’t find a way from our side to access them. As we reviewed our options we came to the conclusion that our current approach wouldn’t work out. We sadly had to abandon our goal to ship collaboration as initially planned.

What’s Next?

Every failure is a chance for something new. We are working on a new solution that we plan to ship in the second half of the year, but we want to share more details later this month on MindNode’s 15th birthday.

Desktop-Class, on ALL Platforms - MindNode 2022.4

We have exciting news to share with you today: MindNode 2022.4, our forth feature release of the year, is now available on the App Store. This update brings a brand new unified user interface to our iPhone, iPad and Mac app, a better integration of mind mapping and outlining, search in the mind map on iOS, and Widgets for your iPhone’s Lock Screen.

Unified User Interface

Apple introduced a new toolbar style in iPadOS 16 that includes the ability to customize the toolbar. MindNode is adopting this style on the iPad and iPhone. Additionally we are switching to the compact toolbar style on the Mac, bringing the iPad and Mac version visually together. With this change, we are also introducing a range of new toolbar items, further unifying the toolbar across all platforms. Switching between MindNode on all platforms will become a breeze.

Mind Map ❤️ Outline

In MindNode 2022.4, we are bringing mind mapping and outline to the same level. When creating a new document you can now choose to start a mind map or outline. Using the new “View” toolbar menu, it’s easier than before to switch between mind map and outline. And on iOS, you can now change the spacing between mind map and outline when showing both at the same time.

Search in Mind Map

Ever since the first version of MindNode for iOS in 2009, we supported searching for content in the document in outline mode only. We are now finally supporting find directly to the mind map with iOS 16. So, search for the thing you are looking for directly in your mind map and you can even use Find & Replace to quickly edit your document.

Lock Screen Widget

With iOS 16, we are also bringing MindNode directly to your iPhone’s lock screen. Add a Lock Screen Widget to launch MindNode, or MindNode’s Quick Entry. This is additional to our existing Home Screen widget on iOS, and our MindNode complication on Apple Watch.

MindNode 2022.4 is now available on the App Store and Mac App Store. We hope you are enjoying MindNode’s fresh new look and we are looking forward to your feedback.

Meet the Team – Michelle

Hi Michelle! Where are you from?

I'm from Hong Kong, but I've called Vienna home for 6 years.

What do you do at MindNode?

My main responsibilities are all things social media and providing support to our users. Usually, I can be found researching, brainstorming or planning new content for Instagram. Lately, we’ve began incorporating new social media channels so I’m really excited to explore new concepts for that!

How about outside of work?

I’m a passionate home-cook and love to throw dinner parties for my friends. Any excuse to eat good and enjoy even better company.

How do you start your day?

My mornings start off with a quick workout, whether it be at home or a short run on the Wien Fluss. I feel this really gives me the energy boost to get out of the inital sleepiness. This is followed by a big breakfast and a giant mug of tea!

What does your vacation look like?

My ideal vacation is spent lazying around on a beach, somewhere in Greece. Nothing beats delicious, fresh seafood and the spectacular sunsets!

How do you use MindNode personally?

I love making lists and checking off my tasks! I start each day with a personal and professional to-do list, which I prepare the day before. It just adds structure and clarity to my mornings.

Professionally?

In contrast to my personal use, I actually create a lot of mindmaps for work. Especially when I plan social media postings and brainstorm different ideas for new concepts.

What got you into mind mapping and outlining?

I’ve also been a deligent list maker, so outlining came quite naturally for me! It is my favourite and most useful feature on MindNode. Mindmapping, on the other hand, took some getting used to. The idea of transforming my list in graphical way didn’t make sense to me until I began utilizing it for other purposes other than list making.

Meet the Team – Deepa

Hi Deepa, where are you from?

I was born and raised in Vienna and spent most of my life in this beautiful city.

What do you do at MindNode?

I’m currently the newest addition to the team and work in design. My primary responsibilities involve producing illustrations, animations, and other graphic-related work and I provide these wherever they are needed. Usually for social media, our website or the App Store. I also produce stickers for the app.

And outside of work?

One of my newer fascinations is fabric printing. I enjoy screen printing or linocut printing my artwork onto cotton or canvas before sewing them into tote bags or little zipper pouches.

How do you like to spend your weekends?

I recently moved into a new place, so right now the majority of my weekends are spent cleaning, organizing, and spending way too much time at IKEA. 

How you do start mind mapping?

On paper. I usually start scribbling and noting down things in a notebook and then switch to MindNode once the mind map is too big. 

How do you use mind mapping at work?

I prepare and redesign mind maps for our social media channels.

And personally?

I used MindNode to help me layout my university projects. They usually start out as normal mind maps but then evolve into bigger mood or storyboards. 

What are your favorite features?

Folding and unfolding nodes! I like all my digital spaces to be clean and organised the folding option helps me maintain this standard.

Staying Organized with Dr. Avi

Hi Dr. Avi, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

My name is Dr. Avi Patel, and I am a dentist and entrepreneur. I currently live in Austin, TX, with my wife and dog. I look to help others believe in themselves and maximize their potential in life. I look at life through a positive lens and believe everything happens for a reason. I use social media as an outlet to spread positivity - foster growth-oriented mindsets, and share tips for dentists pertaining to Invisalign. I created an online boot camp where I teach dentists how to do Invisalign with the hope of helping them provide their patients with comprehensive dental treatment.

When did you discover mind mapping?

I discovered mind mapping when I started my consulting business in March 2022. I was looking for a tool to help me document and organize my thoughts/ideas.

And how have you used it?

I started by using it as a tool to document my brainstorms for my consulting business. I then started to use it for step-by-step protocols and an outline for presentations.

How does mind mapping help you personally?

It helps me document my flow state of ideas and thoughts in a very natural and seamless way.

Professionally?

By letting me stay organized with short and long-term ideas/goals - and allowing me to take a step back and look at the "big picture", which leads me to connect dots and form new connections, that I was not aware of in my brainstorm phase.

Which device do you like to use MindNode on and why?

The iPad. I like the ability to type AND use my fingers to zoom in and out. I feel like Tom Cruise from the Minority Report 🤣

When are you getting your mind mapping done?

Anywhere and everywhere. There is no set time when I use it

Do you have any MindNode features that you particularly enjoy?

Focus Mode – it's great when I'm working on a specific topic.

5 Awesome Updates Available now in MindNode 2022.3

👋. We have a new update out 🎉. It's full of ✨ new features, making it easier for you to 👀 what's on your 🧠, on 📱, 💻 & on ⌚️! Check out what's new in MindNode.

Emoji Stickers

Emojis are ubiquitous in our digital lives. We use them to communicate, show emotions, and make our conversations more fun, expressive, and personal. Wouldn't it be great if we could use emojis like images? 🤯 Add any of the thousands of available emojis right into your mind maps.

Compact Layout

Over the years, we've heard many requests for more layout options in MindNode. Today, we delivered just what you've been asking for! Create organizational charts, family trees, flow charts, and more using the new compact layout!

Apple Watch App

The MindNode Apple Watch App has always been a great way to look at your thoughts on the go, no matter what they are. Now, we've made it even easier and more convenient. The app has been rebuilt from the ground up. We've adapted the look of the new outline from the Mac & iOS, updated the document browser, and added support for folding, notes & tags. Most significantly, the app runs quicker on your Apple Watch, making browsing through your ideas smooth and enjoyable.

Outline Printing

Now, you can share your thoughts as an outline on your iPhone & iPad with more flexibility. We've added the ability to print and export the outline as a PDF in MindNode on iPadOS and iOS.

Just as You Left It

Finally, we've also improved how MindNode remembers the state of your documents when you close them. When you open a file you can expect to see things just as you left them, from open or closed sidebars to the same zoom level. 

Out Now

MindNode 2022.3 is available on the App Store, Mac App Store & Setapp. Learn more about all of the changes in our release notes.

Meet the Team – Greg

Hi Greg!

Where are you from?

I was born and briefly lived in the U.S. As a child I moved to Warsaw, Poland, where I grew up and finished high school. I went to the U.K. for university, after which I ended up Vienna, where I’ve now been for over a decade.

What do you do at MindNode?

I am responsible for marketing at MindNode. I take care writing content for our website, blog, newsletter & working with our social media team. I also keep in touch with the press, keep our promotional assets up to date, and work on spreading the word about MindNode and how it can be useful for anyone with an idea.

What do you do outside of work?

I like to stay busy in many ways. You might find me watching a movie, playing a game on my old Wii U, or trying out a new recipe in the kitchen. I stay active by running, swimming and going bouldering. I also like photography & consider myself an amateur beer brewer. During the winter I get in as much time as I can on the slopes, snowboarding.

How do you take your coffee?

As a rule black, no sugar, filtered, but that depends on where and when. I like to try various methods of preparation, so I regularly switch between making a mokka pot, pour over, Vietnamese drip coffee, or an espresso when I’m at the office.

What do your weekends look like?

Every weekend starts with a visit to my local market in the morning, followed by a stroll through the city & taking care of any remaining shopping or perhaps going to a museum.

And your vacation?

My summer vacations are usually quite busy, focusing on one country or region and exploring as much as possible.

How do you mind map at work?

I use mind mapping as a brainstorming and project planning tool. Every campaign, blog post, newsletter, or even this interview starts out by mapping out what I want to accomplish or understand, and keep building from there.

And personally?

I first started using MindNode over 10 years ago as a student, and it helped me get through my coursework. Nowadays, I enjoy planning vacations and events.

What are your favorite features in MindNode?

How easy it is to get started and start exploring an idea. Because it looks great, I hardly ever spend time customizing my mind maps. I’m also a fan of adding Tasks & Tags, helping me keep track of what I’m working on.

What’s your favorite device to use MindNode on?

I mainly use MindNode on the Mac. I find it the easiest way to jot down something quickly. I also sometimes use my iPad to browse through an existing document. Scrolling and zooming to a particular branch feels very satisfying on the large touch screen.

Meet the Team – Markus

Who are you?

Hi, I’m Markus, the CEO, and founder of IdeasOnCanvas. I started developing MindNode in 2007 as a one-person project and have led the app’s development ever since.

Where are you from?

I grew up in a small village in Lower Austria, about 30km outside Vienna. I moved to the capital during my computer science studies, where I still live with my wife and my two children.

What do you do at MindNode?

My role at the company has changed quite a bit in recent years. In the beginning, I did everything from writing all of MindNode’s code to answering support emails and working with the press. Nowadays, I’m heavily involved in designing new features, leading the teams, and taking care of the business side of things. From time to time, I still write code, but only for smaller, internal side projects.

What led you to create MindNode?

MindNode was born out of a need to find a tool to collect and organize my thoughts. If you are interested in all the details, I recommend reading the blog post I wrote for MindNode’s 10th anniversary.

What do you do outside of MindNode?

My life outside of MindNode focuses on my wife and our two children. During the week, I spend many afternoons at the playground watching after them. On weekends, we try to leave the city for trips into the countryside outside of Vienna. In the rare time I have for myself, I play piano, read books on my Kindle or play a video game. This year I also started to learn to play acoustic guitar.
I’m also a passionate skier and try to go skiing as much as possible. During winter, I sometimes take weekdays off to spend the day on the slopes.

How do you mind map?

Every project I start begins with a mind map in MindNode. I have many mind maps that I’ve been using for years and keep opening almost every day. For example, I have a document tracking the MindNode roadmap or one I use for team meeting presentations.
I also make heavy use of MindNode to organize my week. At the end of each week, I update my mind map with all planned meetings and todos for the following week. You can find an example in the image inserted below.

Mind mapping also plays a huge part in organizing my private life. I use it to plan vacations or birthday parties. One of my oldest personal mind maps is my luggage packing list, which I’ve been using for over ten years.

What is your favorite feature?

It’s probably not a specific feature I like most, but the overall simplicity the app has maintained over all those years. Whenever my brain is flooded with ideas, I always jump into MindNode and write down every single crazy thought. Brainstorming in MindNode always helps clear my mind and discover the next step.

What’s your preferred device to use MindNode on?

My preferred device is constantly changing and depends on the situation. I was a very heavy iPad Pro user last year, but I have used MindNode more and more on my Mac since I got my new MacBook Pro. I use the iPhone version frequently when taking notes during meetings and capturing a quick idea when not at my desk.

Meet the Team – Michael

Hi Michael!

Where are you from?

I am originally from St. Michael, a small village in southern Burgenland, the southeastern part of Austria, close to the Hungarian border. While at university, I lived for 7 years in Graz, and afterwards, I relocated to work in Vienna.

What do you do at MindNode?

I started working for MindNode in 2016. An important part of my work is improving the iOS and macOS apps, and writing some server-side code for our subscription management.

Some of the larger features I've worked on have been Focus Mode, the Node Well, and Smart Layouts. 

Another aspect of my work is release management. From our raw code, I create the distributable app bundle, submit it to Apple's review process and finally release it to our customers.

And in your free time?

Plenty of things:

I'm training for the Wachau Marathon in late September. I also enjoy hiking. The heyday of my hiking career was during my studies in Graz. Nowadays, less so, but I would like to level up again.

My highest peak: Bishorn, 4153m My lowest peak: Geschriebenstein, 882m 

Like most Austrians, I like skiing. My favorite resort is Nassfeld. 

At home, I'm always fighting entropy and chaos. 🙂

I'm watching the last season of "Better Call Saul", which is great.

Finally, we also enjoy playing board and card games, our current favorite is Skyjo.

How do you start your day?

I start off with a Nespresso, out of convenience. 3-4 times a week, I go for a longer run (>10K). Most recently, my little daughter has been joining me in her stroller.

How do you start your weekend?

Turning off my Mac.

How do you use mind mapping?

At work, most of the time I use it for daily to-do lists. For larger features, I use it to make a sketch of the rough architectural plan. Personally, for shopping and travel lists.

What are your favorite features in MindNode?

I have no favorites - I like the whole package. 

What's your preferred device to use MindNode on?

I like capturing quick ideas on my phone (I use it most of the time while on public transport). At home, I prefer using the Mac for the larger screen size and because it is a more comfortable input device.

Finally, do you have a favorite mind map?

Yes, meet Mr. Undo 🎅

Elevate Capturing Your Ideas – MindNode 2022.2

One of my initial motivations behind developing MindNode was to make it quick and easy to capture new ideas. Other apps have a steep learning curve, making it hard to focus on brainstorming. Our solution for that is the concept of the node well: a plus sign next to a node that allows adding a new idea right where you want to attach it. The node well has been part of MindNode since its early prototypes, and today, we are enhancing it in a big way.

Fresh Design

The node well received a fresh new design, but as before, it remains the easiest way to add new ideas to any part of your mind map. A quick tap on it will create a new child node, and you can start typing in your thoughts. You can also use it to quickly fold in child nodes by holding Option (⌥) and tapping on the node well.

Dynamic Node Creation

The node well displays its new dynamic power, when instead of tapping on it – you start dragging it. You can dynamically see where it would insert a new node as you drag it on the canvas. It will dynamically attach to new parents, and child nodes will automatically make room, so you can more precisely position the new idea. You can even move it to a free area on the canvas to create a new mind map.

iPad and Universal Control

For the first time, we're also bringing the full dynamic node well behavior to iPads. So, if you have a trackpad or a Magic Keyboard attached to your device, you can use the same behavior as on your Mac. This even extends to Apple's new Universal Control feature. Seamlessly move between your Mac and iPad using the same keyboard, mouse, or trackpad. No need to adjust your interaction. The node well will work identically on your devices.

Quick Entry & MindNode ID

There are two significant new features in today's update that I also want to mention. First, we brought all of the design and features of our new editable outline to Quick Entry - our solution to quickly capture ideas. You can now enjoy the same behaviors and keyboard shortcuts you already know and love from our outline in Quick Entry. Second, MindNode ID is our new optional account system that enhances our MindNode Plus subscription. Previously, to share our subscription between your devices, you needed an iCloud account. Using MindNode ID, you can now access your subscription from devices that are not allowed to access iCloud (e.g., devices owned by a company).

Available Now

All mentioned features above and much more are now available on the App Store, Mac App Store & Setapp in today's MindNode 2022.2 update. Learn more about all changes in our detailed release notes.

Meet the Team – Mislav

Hi Mislav, tell us a little bit about yourself

I was born in Zagreb, Croatia but spent my childhood in a beautiful and charming city called Samobor, famous for its Carnival and a very fluffy cake called Samoborska Kremšnita. My high school years were spent in the capital city (and in the bus on the way there and back) where I would sit in a classroom from 8 in the morning until 2 or 3 PM learning the typical stuff like math, history, or latin and then would take a walk for a block or two to my music school where I would spend the rest of the day learning, practicing and rehearsing music, usually until 10 in the evening. That meant I would be home by 11 PM and repeat it the next day all over again. At the age of 17 I passed the entrance exam for Academy of Music ,and when I turned 20 I moved to Vienna to continue my studies. Now, it's been already 7 years that I am enjoying this beautiful and windy city.

What do you do at MindNode?

I use the majority of my time here at IdeasOnCanvas to communicate with our users, and present their needs and wishes to the rest of the crew. Basically, if you have an issue with MindNode, or a request for anything to be added or changed in the app, you first have to go through me. Besides that, my latest project is co-creating the new version of MindNode's user guide.

What do you do outside of MindNode?

I am actually a musician. I studied violoncello and chamber music at Music Academy in Zagreb and University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Just last month you could have heard me play in the legendary Musikverein, where I'll perform again in April this year. You can always find me on Instagram under @KingsString, where I'm publishing music related content. When I'm not practicing, playing, writing, filming, or editing music, in my spare time I like painting as well as playing video games. Painting is something I started a few years ago as a way to put some of my thoughts in a different perspective but games on the other hand, I grew up with. After a long practice session, there is nothing more satisfying than to hop on to my gaming console and slay some monsters in Doom or have a nice and peaceful stroll around the island in The Witness trying to solve some puzzles.

How do you start your day?

I do not have a fixed routine that I am following every day but usually I wake up at 7:30, take a walk, exercise, write a short journal to reflect on the last 24 hours, and plan out the day. I will then typically start either with cello practice or dealing with the MindNode's support inbox. This would be followed by either writing or recording music.

How do you spend your vacation?

I am more of a summer person. I take my vacation when the days are long and hot and spend it on Croatian coast swimming and grilling. However, lately I got a strong desire to learn how to ski and enjoy Austrian mountain tops. Slashing through the snow at high speeds with a gorgeous view over the nature seems very exciting too.

How do you mind map?

I use MindNode for a lot of things. One of them is keeping track of my student's progress and their road map. Another is noting down my music repertoire I am currently working on. Sometimes it gets difficult to prioritize which pieces need more attention so creating a mind map helps me do that. I also use it for budgeting, overviewing my diet, using it as a travel checklist, and having a list of future birthday presents for my family. I never think of anything cool to give them when the time comes but great gift ideas just randomly pop into my head. Mind map is a great place to sort all of this out.

What are your favorite features?

What I like the most about MindNode are not the fancy and powerful features, but its simplicity and clean design.

What's your device of choice for MindNode?

If I had to choose, it would be a device with a lot of screen real-estate. I prefer using iMac and MacBook for mind mapping because I feel like it gives me visual and then mental space to develop my ideas. Don't get me wrong, iPhone is great for on-the-go mind mapping but I find myself using MindNode much more while sitting at my desk, listening to lo-fi music, and thinking.

A Fresh Coat of Paint

Our first major release this year is now available on macOS & iOS. We've prepared a new feature for the outline, & added new themes, new stickers & much more! Here's what's new in MindNode.

Notes in Outline

You've been able to view and edit notes in the outline by using a popup window for a while. This update now lets you create, edit and view notes inline in the outline! If you prefer to hide the notes, just open the outline settings and deactivate the "Show notes" option. 

New & Updated Themes

All of the existing themes in MindNode have been refreshed to improve their contrast. On top of that, we also added two new themes: Blackberry & Swing! All of our previous themes are available for downloading at mindnode.com/themes

Medical Sticker Pack

Finally, we're also releasing a whole new pack of 25 medical themed stickers! Choose between woman with mask, scale, virus, microscope & more!

All of these updates are available now on macOS & iOS for MindNode Plus subscribers. There are many more minor improvements & bug fixes, which you can read about in our release notes.

Meet the Team – Matthias

Where are you from?

I grew up in the Südburgenland, which is a very rural area in the south-eastern part of Austria, pretty close to the border of Hungary.

After finishing school I moved to Vienna to study software engineering, where I still live.

What do you do at MindNode?

Most of my tasks at MindNode revolve around engineering our native iOS, macOS and watchOS apps. This includes writing code, but also many other related tasks like working together with design or QA, helping with milestone planning and the release process or hiring new engineers.

I was the first engineering hire at MindNode and thinking back a lot of things have changed since then: the team grew considerably, and nowadays I spend a lot of time reviewing my teammates’ code and coordinating within an amazing engineering team. Since I’ve been a part of MindNode for a very long time, I tend to have a good overview of our growing code base and past decisions that lead to the status quo.

What do you specialize in as an engineer?

I love working on user interfaces and making them beautiful, easy to use while still being powerful - which is a perfect fit since this has always been a big part of MindNode’s DNA. 

While I work on all platforms, iOS has always been my speciality. Right now I’m working on modernizing our watchOS app.

What do you do outside of MindNode?

I’m a little bit of a sports and adventure enthusiast, which shows in my hobbies. 

Depending on the weather I spend most days either in the climbing gym or, preferably, in the mountains - hiking, rock climbing or ski touring.

Recently I also discovered kitesurfing and was instantly hooked. I already have a few holidays planned this year, and those will either be kitesurfing or climbing trips 🙂

How do you start your day?

Instead of coffee I rely on a cold shower to wake me up in the morning 🚿. Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy my daily coffee, but that comes later.

Besides that, I try to take the time at the start of the day for myself - taking it slow with some gentle stretching, yoga and breath-work or meditation.

I used to be very disciplined about this, since doing mostly home office, my morning routine is now somewhat mixed with checking my computer and work-related tasks.

And your weekend?

Being a software engineer, my working times are quite flexible - a perk that unfortunately not all of my friends share.

That’s why “weekend time” is usually “mountain time” for me - going on a trip with my friends ⛰. 

As a result of this my time to sleep in is during the week, while on the weekend I get up much earlier 🙈

Where's your favorite place to climb?

One thing that makes living in Vienna great is not only the city itself, but also that there are plentiful options of climbing cracks around Vienna.

My favorite one is probably “Hohe Wand”, which is about an hour away from Vienna. While it actually isn’t as high a mountain as the name suggests (“high wall”), it’s high enough to more often than not spoil us with beautiful sunshine in winter, while the city is covered in fog. 

A few of my favorite winter-escape-days have been climbing there in the sun at around 0 degrees and being so warm that it’s possible to climb in a t-shirt and shorts ☀️

How do you mind map?

Professionally?

Every conference talk or workshop I’ve ever given starts with a brainstorming session. This may come as a surprise, but I like to start with post-it notes because I like the haptics and physical nature of them.

Once I've gathered enough information on the post-it notes, I move everything over into MindNode and continue from there. 

MindNode helps me to put things in perspective, reorganize my thoughts, and gain a better understanding of the interconnectedness of the various topics I wrote down and is an invaluable tool in my process.

And personally?

In the past, whenever I went on a trip or holidays, I used to forget to bring something important. That’s why my most-used mind map is probably my packing list. 

This mind map contains a list of all the items I need for different trips, starting from personal items, clothes, electronics to specialized gear - you don’t want to realize that you forgot to pack your climbing shoes while warming up at the crack.

In combination with MindNode’s Task and Outline features, this mind map makes for a perfect reusable packing to-do list ☑️

What are your favorite features and devices to use MindNode on?

iPhone on the go for quick thoughts, Mac for everything else.

My favorite feature of MindNode is a very invisible one - I like that it gets out of my way and lets me iterate very quickly. 

Especially the vast support of keyboard shortcuts help me to stay productive, while brainstorming and organizing. I can basically tweak every part of my mind map or outline without having to reach for the mouse or trackpad.

Download Matthias' packing list mind map.

Wrapping Up 2021

Another year has come and gone. As we get ready for all that 2022 has to offer, we wanted to take one more look at how we got here, how MindNode has changed, and what we've learned on the way.

New Features

MindNode had 15 updates in 2021! Throughout them we introduced 6 new features, including outlining on the Mac & iOS, smarter sticker search, support for iOS 15 & macOS Monterey, and Shortcuts. We've also made an astounding 120 smaller improvements & fixed 80 bugs 🎉

Getting to Know You

We had the pleasure of interviewing three fascinating MindNode users this year! Summer told us all about how mind mapping helps her keep track of her creative projects and make sense of everything. Matt showed us how he gathers his thoughts with an outline and writes a novel. And finally, Mike explained how he stays productive & manages to produce a lot of content with the help of MindNode.

Introducing Ourselves

2021 was also a chance for you to get to know a few of us. With our Meet the Team series, we introduced Harald, our user interaction designer, Vanessa, responsible for quality assurance & user relations, and finally Marco, one of the software engineers helping create MindNode. We'll be continuing this series throughout 2022 with the rest of our team members.

Welcome to MindNode

Speaking of which, MindNode grew this year! Michelle joined us, taking care of user relations & social media, & Deepa is responsible for design and illustration!

It's been an exciting year. And we can't wait for what comes next. Have a great 2022!

Bigger & Better

As the year comes to an end, we've managed to fit in one more update for MindNode before we greet 2022. Here's what's new in our latest version.

Adaptive Outline Font Size

We've heard from many of you that you would like to adjust the font size in the outline. With this release we've made this possible.

iOS & iPadOS

When you're using MindNode on your iPhone or iPad, the outline will now use your system-wide settings for the font size. You can adjust this by going to the Settings app, then going to Display & Brightness, and finally selecting Text Size.

macOS

On the Mac, you can adjust the font size in the outline with the help of a simple keyboard shortcut: Command (⌘) + Plus (+) to increase the size, & Command (⌘) + Minus (-) to decrease the size. You can also find these options in the Menu bar, under View → Zoom → Zoom In & Zoom Out.

We've also made several other improvements in MindNode & fixed a few bugs in this update. For full details, check out our release notes.

This version is available now on the App Store, Mac App Store & Setapp, and requires iOS/iPadOS 14 or macOS 11.

Developing Ideas & Being Creative – How Mike stays Productive with MindNode

Hi Mike! Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I am the Executive Editor at The Sweet Setup where I write about using Apple technology to be more productive and creative. I'm the architect and producer behind many of the training courses available there, like Mastering Mindmaps and To Obsidian and Beyond.

I also co-host the Focused podcast with David Sparks where we talk about intentional productivity, the Bookworm podcast with Joe Buhlig we read and discuss a lot of books relating to productivity and creativity, and the Intentional Family podcast with my wife where we share what we've learned while raising 5 kids together.

I have a few of my own courses available on my personal website, and I share my Sermon Sketchnote videos there every week.

So TL;DR - I make a lot of stuff on the web. And MindNode is a big reason why I can.

How did you discover mind mapping?

My dad introduced me to the concept of mind mapping on paper when I was in high school, but I had no interest in it until I listened to the Mac Power Users episode on Cooking Ideas. Once I tried mind mapping on the computer, I immediately fell in love with the ability to drag nodes around on the screen and see the layout automatically update in real-time.

How does it help you?

Mind mapping is an essential part of my idea development system.

For me, mind mapping is where I develop my ideas. Whenever I sit down to write, I always spend time mind mapping my ideas for the article first. This helps me gain clarity and makes the act of writing MUCH easier once I do sit down at the keyboard.

I estimate that every hour I spend mind mapping saves me two hours when I sit down to write.

In addition to being an essential part of my creative workflow, I also use mind mapping for book notes. I read a lot of books, and I always read physical books to minimize distractions. I do always have my iPhone with me though, and I like to take notes in mind map format. I love the ability to embed pictures from my iPhone camera, which I use to add diagrams or other interesting visuals. When I get done, they look something like this.

There are lots of other places I'll occasionally use mind mapping (when planning product scope, for example) but writing and reading account for about 95% of my mind mapping.

Which device do you mind map on?

I almost always start mind mapping from my iPhone. When taking book notes, I start by finding an image of the book's cover on Google and placing that in the middle, then fleshing out the major sections of the book before I start reading. Then I add things as I go that stand out to me or that I know I will want to remember later.

For writing, I'm never quite sure what an idea will look like when I start. I'll frequently start on my iPhone and go for a walk where I just noodle on the topic and flesh out the mind map as I go. If I feel the idea is substantial, I'll switch to the iPad because I like the larger canvas. I almost never mind map on my Mac however because I enjoy physically touching the nodes and moving them around on the screen. It's a little thing, but it makes me feel much more connected to my ideas as I develop them.

Are there any MindNode features that are particularly helpful?

When I’m developing an idea before I sit down to write it, I like to use MindNode’s folding feature to help “see the forest through the trees.” I find it helpful to fold up sections that I’m finished developing so my brain can attach more easily to the specific section I’m working on. Then when I sit down to write, I use the Focus feature to highlight just the section I’m currently writing.

Meet the Team – Marco

Hi Marco! Where are you from?

I’m from Austria – which is to say: from all over the country. I was born in Salzburg, raised in Vorarlberg, but now I live in Vienna for half my life already.

What do you do at MindNode?

I’m part of the engineering team, which means I sit at my Mac all day to implement new features and squash bugs across all of the different parts of MindNode. That includes the macOS and iOS apps, as well as a bit of server-side code.

Since I started working on MindNode in March 2020 – quite an interesting time to switch jobs with lockdowns and remote work and all – I put a lot of time into MindNode’s outline feature. Besides that, I worked on various other parts of the app, but I still don’t know all of the codebase, so there’s something new to learn all the time.

Of course, working on an app of this size is a team effort and that involves a lot of communication with other members of our awesome team on a daily basis.

What do you like to do outside of work?

When I’m not working, I’m mostly spending time with my family. My wife and I have a son and a daughter, which means our weekdays are pretty much taken up by work and looking after the kids. On weekends, we often ride our bikes or meet friends – mostly outside, since Vienna has so much to offer for spending your free time.

Apart from that (mostly meaning: when the kids are in bed 🙃), I enjoy playing video games, reading good sci-fi books, listening to podcasts (mostly tech and programming stuff), or watching the occasional TV show. Sometimes I can even get myself to go for a run!

What are your favorite video games?

That’s a tough question, because there are so many good games that I've played. But if I have to go with a single answer, I’d say the Mass Effect trilogy (which is technically three games, but come on). Oh, and Horizon: Zero Dawn.

How do you take your coffee?

Not at all – I’m not a coffee drinker. This sometimes makes for tricky situations when I’m the last one at the office because I can’t make heads or tails of our coffee maker and I never can remember how to turn that beast of a machine off.

How do you mind map at work?

For work, I have two documents open at all times: one where I keep notes on everything I’m currently working on or planning to work on, and a second one to daily document what I actually did work on. Also, I learned to love mind maps for taking notes during meetings because their two dimensional layout makes it easy for me to orient myself to, for example, add more information to things someone said earlier.

And personally?

As strange as it might seem given my technical interests, I don’t use my Mac, iPhone, or iPad all that much apart from work. What I currently do use mind maps for are for keeping notes on what Christmas presents to get for my kids, and keeping track of all the video games I want to play.

What are your favorite features in MindNode?

I really do like the outline as a complement to the mind map. Brainstorming or building up a structure of related ideas is something that I prefer to do as a two dimensional mind map, but adding more details to an existing structure is something that I prefer to do in a linear outline.

Apart from that, I really like that just jotting things down in MindNode in whatever order they spill out of my head somehow always results in something that looks good. The way the layout just works itself out and different colors are used automatically really go a long way to get a document that is understandable not just for myself, but even for others.

And then there are even more features that I really like, but we aren’t finished with them yet, so you’ll have to wait and see for yourself 😉

Download Marco's mind map

Meet the Team – Vanessa

Hi Vanessa! Where are you from?

I’m from a small town near Munich, Bavaria, called Herrsching which is located directly at the beautiful lake Ammersee. But, I fell in love with Vienna the first time I came here 11 years ago, so I’ve been living here for 10 years now.

What do you do at MindNode?

I am responsible for Quality Assurance and User Relations.

What does User Relations mean?

User Relations, to me means having the privilege to be the person who actually has direct contact with the people we’re doing all this for, you - our users. It’s wonderful to get their instant reactions to the new features, and hear about their wishes and needs. I also always want to help them as best I can, be it via direct contact through one of our channels, or the support material on our website.

What have been one of your most memorable experiences in these roles?

Sometimes our engineering team manages to introduce bugs that are more like an Easter eggs and I really enjoy playing around with those. I remember one bug one of our freelancers introduced where the whole canvas started scrolling around by itself and it was great fun to play ‘Catch the node!’. ‘Unfortunately’, the engineer also fixed it super quickly as soon as I told him about it. I miss that bug! 🐞

What does QA mean?

QA stands for Quality Assurance, which, in the case of MindNode mostly means software testing. It sounds kind of boring, but the way I see it, it’s a bit like I’m the youngest child in a group of playing children. All of the others are trying to build stuff and my job is to play with it first and see whether it’s actually fun and does the things it’s supposed to do. 

Vanessa's mind map may seem messy at first glance, but this is part of her process when testing new releases of MindNode.

What do you do outside of work?

I’m into everything around awareness, nature and psychology. The nature part, I guess, comes from the fact that I grew up in the country side with horses (legend has it I could sit on a horse before I knew how to sit on the floor), cats, dogs, chickens, … you name it. I’m also super into yoga (mainly Yin and Tantric Hartha Yoga), since I moved into the city, and any sort of crazy (and not so crazy) meditation. Psychology-wise I am currently doing a training in Gestalt Therapy. Besides all that I’m also part of the team the organizes the annual Buskers Festival in Vienna, where hundreds of artists show their amazing street art skills.

How do you take your coffee?

The first thing jumping to my mind here is a bag I have that says ‘You drink coffee I drink tea darling’. So yeah, the first thing in the morning for me, if I can get it, will be a cup (or a 1000) of Darjeeling (first flush) with (oat) milk and no sugar. Also, I’m a huge matcha latte fan. And last but not least, living in one of the cities with the most renowned coffee cultures, where you can get a decent cup of coffee almost everywhere, I definitely have come to enjoy those two drinks in every size available (but never with sugar). 

How do you relax after work?

Cuddles with my two cats. A good book. Movies or a TV series. Lot’s of music! A walk with my dog. Drinks with my friends. Cinema and concerts! Me, my mat, some incense, yoga and meditation. 

What's your favorite ice cream flavor?

My favorite ice cream flavor is matcha at the vegan ice cream store around the corner from the office.

How do you mind map at work?

Chaotically, when testing MindNode for a new release. Basically, hitting all buttons at once until something breaks, so we send a robust version to our users. Therefore, I have a lot of mind maps where I’m planning something, need to formalize a process and there are also tonnes of collections (knowledge, ideas, …).

And personally?

I loved using MindNode for my bachelors' thesis. I actually got extra credits for how well structured the paper was and I think this is hugely due to MindNode, and the fact that I outlined the whole thing in there. Then and again, a large collection of stuff jumps into my mind. And in general, every time I have to plan something, MindNode is my go to tool.

What's your favorite feature?

This is a really tough one. I think what makes MindNode so powerful is the combination of all of the features, and that the set grows with a clear vision provided by our CEO and the team. But if I’d have to name something I think it would be everything I can attach to a node. Especially notes and images help me a lot!

Ready for Monterey

It's only been a week since our last update, but with the release of macOS Monterey, we've made sure that MindNode on Mac is up to date. This is what we've been working on.

Shortcuts Support

We've had support for shortcuts on iOS for a while now. Now, with the arrival of Shortcuts on macOS, you can enjoy the same, great automations from your iOS devices, on your Mac. With this update, you can automatically export, share, import & create documents, without even launching MindNode.

Try it out yourself with these shortcuts we've created:

Use this shortcut to share your latest mind map with your colleagues, friends, or anyone else via email:

Export mind map to email

Try out this shortcut to import your thoughts from Bear into a mind map:

Import from Bear

You can also use these shortcuts with MindNode on your iPhone or iPad!

Smarter Sticker Search

Sticker search now takes advantage of the same natural language processing we recently added on iOS. This means that your search terms will be recognized more reliably, delivering the stickers you need, and in the language you're using.

More

There's plenty more improvements & bug fixes in this update. You can now use the "Duplicate", "Duplicate Single Node", & " Copy Single Node" actions in the outline, we've improved the performance of selecting nodes and nodes with large amounts of text in the outline, and plenty more. Check out our release notes for more details. You can expect these improvements, new shortcuts, & bug fixes to arrive soon on MindNode for iOS & iPadOS. This update is available now for your Mac, and requires macOS 11.

Meet the Team – Harald

Hi Harald! Where are you from?

Born and raised in Vienna, in the beautiful district of Simmering. In fact, I'm the only original Viennese employee of MindNode!

What do you do at MindNode?

MindNode always had a strong focus on design. It's no surprise that my job as employee no. 1 was, and still is, design. As the company has grown over the years, my job description changed. From "everything design-related" to focusing more on user experience and product design.

What does design mean at MindNode?

Good software is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. This involves many different aspects — from user research, information architecture, and optimal task-paths, to interfaces, usability and accessibility, to integration with marketing, help/support and so on. My job is to make them all work together as seamlessly as possible, from initial intentions through final reflections. In the end, I don’t just focus on creating products that are usable, but also on aspects such as pleasure, efficiency and fun. To paraphrase Simon Sinek: "UX is all about the Why, What, and How of an app, in that particular order".

Do you have a favorite project or feature that you’ve worked on?

That would certainly be the editable outline! I did outline a lot before, but having a powerful outline AND a mind mapping tool in the same app really is a game changer for me. It dramatically reduces friction, because I can comfortably outline at the beginning of an idea within MindNode, and can then just jump into organizing my thoughts without any step in between. Before the editable outline, many smaller ideas just never got past the outlining phase, but now that I do that in MindNode, I realized how often they would have benefited from some organizing in the mind map format, though I rarely did that.

What do you do outside of work?

I'm a person of many interests and what I do outside of MindNode has a wide range. From organizing events like Café to Stay, Gin-chiller, and Creative Mornings, hosting the 3W6 podcast and its ever-growing community and conventions, to writing and designing tabletop RPGs or being a part-time filmmaker.

What's your ideal vacation?

Since the pandemic began, I favor short and local vacations that condense a lot of experiences into a small amount of time. Which makes a weekend feel like an entire week away from home! I enjoy discovering new stuff, whether that's a city's culture, events, food, or connecting to local communities I know from my various projects. But I also love to relax in a spa or at the beach! It is all about the rhythm of mixing slow and fast times, comfort, and new experiences.

How do you take your coffee?

I'm the resident coffee nerd at MindNode and my preferred coffee depends on the time of day and season. I love a good cappuccino, but when it's hot, a shakerato is great. Slow drip with tonic is fantastic to get enough to drink AND some caffeine! And in the evenings, a Churchill's Breakfast cocktail combines the best of whiskey and coffee for me.

How do you start your weekend?

I start every Saturday with sleeping in. Then I have an elaborate breakfast—the most important meal of the day! Followed by hanging out with my extended family who is living nearby.

How do you mind map at work?

I do meeting notes, project management, and sample mind maps for testing new features. And occasionally I present mind maps of new ideas to colleagues.

And personally?

I use MindNode for tons of side projects! It's indispensable to brainstorm ideas for new RPGs. Or outline a story I'm writing. Or making prep notes for the podcast. I even plan and organize my next event in MindNode.

What's your favorite feature?

That's the editable outline, but I use notes a lot as well. Taking a step back, it's the magic of a tool that get's out of my way. This allows me to throw my thoughts at it and then boil it all down. In particular, I love how often that process results in something new. Something I didn't see before, that makes the idea behind it all becomes evident.

Download Harald's mind map guide to coffee drinks.

Smarter, Better & Optimized for iOS 15

Fall has officially arrived. And with it, the lastest version of iOS & iPadOS has been installed on millions of devices, worldwide. Naturally, we've been working on making sure MindNode is ready for the newest system features. Here's what's new.

Optimized External Keyboard Support

Using a keyboard with your iPad is a fantastic way to boost your productivity while brainstorming with MindNode. And now, it's gotten even better. The first new addition is the updated keyboard shortcuts bar. It appears at the bottom of your screen, letting you select autocomplete suggestions, start dictation, or use MindNode actions like creating a new main, child, or sibling node.

Keyboard shortcuts are a great tool, letting you perform actions at the stroke of a key. The keyboard shortcuts view, available by holding down Command (⌘) has been redesigned to display shortcuts by categories, and enable triggering them with a tap, making it easier to use and learn your favorite actions.

Smarter Sticker Search

Sticker search now takes advantage of natural language processing, and we've improved support for localizations. This means that your search terms will be recognized more reliably, delivering the stickers you need, & in the language that you're using.

And more

We've packed plenty more into this update, like improving navigating nodes using keyboard arrows, performance improvements for the outline, and fixed plenty of bugs. Check out our release notes for all the details. This update is available now for your iPhones & iPads, and requires iOS/iPadOS 14.

From Thoughts to Novels: How Matt uses MindNode to Write

Hi Matt! Could you please introduce yourself?

I’m a writer — a novelist, in particular — full time now. I used to be a consultant software engineer focusing on user experience and interface design, on the various Apple software platforms, but I also wrote extensively for technology magazines and web sites. I made the transition to full time writing a few years ago.

How did you discover mind mapping?

I discovered mind mapping years ago, when I was still at high school, but I didn’t use it very much at that point in my life. I did occasionally create mind maps during my years at university, but generally I’ve always used outlines as my primary planning and thinking aid.

It was only when I started to write as my job that I found both mind maps and outlining had their own roles to play.

How has it helped you, personally or professionally?

Coming from a scientific and technological background, I’m a very logic-oriented person. I like to break down ideas and concepts into their components to help me understand them. I use outlines in almost every aspect of my life, from planning home renovations to creating the plot for a novel. I find it reassuring and comprehensible to be able to see how one thing flows to the next, and to be able to put things in their proper order. In short, outlines help me to refine, understand, and track the flow of any project or process.

Mind maps are very different. Where outlines are in a sense one-dimensional, mind maps have an additional dimension of letting me see clusters of related concepts, and how many branches a dependent ideas come from a common source. Mind maps help me to do two main things: to explore the core of an idea before I really know what I’m going to do with it, and also to discover the relationships between discrete ideas.

When do you reach for mind mapping, or outlining?

One of the things you quickly learn as a writer is that you’ll actually have too many ideas, not too few. I write down every idea I have, no matter how trivial, bizarre, vague, or anything else. I find that the mere act of writing them down lets my mind suggest them to me later, in a context where they’re useful. The challenge isn’t coming up with raw ideas, but rather finding where they fit, and how they relate to other ideas. That’s where thinking tools like mind maps and outlines come into play.

My process for coming up with the plot for a novel usually involves starting with one very specific idea. It might be a core element of the story, or it might be a single scene, or even just an interesting character. There’s always something that feels like it has the potential to carry a story. That’s where I start.

If I feel like the story is something short, I might just go straight from the inspiring idea to an outline, but if it’s going to be a novel, I mind map first. I create a root node with the core idea, and the first thing I do is a sort of free association exercise, where I note down anything that the core idea makes me think about. It can be the meanings of words, or related plot elements, interesting places, other people, or anything else. Next, I tend to scan through my archive of written-down ideas, and see if any of them feel like they might be connected to the story I’m working on. If so, I add them to the map.

At that point, I zoom out so I can see the entire map, and I just let myself read it without judgement. Connections almost always become evident, even just one or two. I then start to move nodes around, and shape the tree into clusters of things that seem to go together. I don’t know why it works, but I can almost always start to see details emerging — perhaps a theme, or a genre, or the nature of the story’s central conflict.

I just allow the mind map to develop organically, sparking whatever associations come to me, and with enough attention (and plenty of breaks to let the subconscious do its work), it starts to shape itself into a few main areas that are relevant to a novel: characters, settings, plot elements, conflicts and themes, and so on.

At that point, I can take what I’ve learned from the mind map and start to slot it into the suitable form for a novel, with the three act structure, an inciting event, adversity, change, confrontation, and resolution.

Broadly, there are two types of writers: those who are more comfortable making it up as they go along (“pantsers”), and those who prefer to make a detailed plan first (“plotters”). I’m definitely in the second category. Before I start to actually write, I create an outline that’s many thousands of words long itself, to guide me.

Are there any particular features in MindNode that you have found useful?

For the most part, I use MindNode in quite a bare-bones fashion, as a robust and keyboard-driven outliner, and as an Apple Pencil-friendly mind mapping tool. I work quickly when I’m planning, and don’t tend to do much adornment — like changing colours, adding images/icons, and so on. There are two exceptions though.

First, since my outlines (and thus the mind maps they generate) can become very detailed, I use Focus Mode to visually de-emphasise subtrees that I’m not currently thinking about. I like to have multiple main nodes, for example to separate plot outlines from meta-textual elements and higher level planning, so I’ll often Focus on a particular main node while I work.

Second, when planning a novel it can be very useful to keep track of how much time you’re spending with protagonists vs antagonists, to ensure there’s a certain balance. Both types of characters need to be present and recurring, and it’s beneficial to make sure the story doesn’t dwell for too long on any one perspective. Tags in MindNode are useful for that purpose, because they place coloured dots on tagged nodes. This makes it easy for me to see which perspective a given scene is from, without having to expand all the nodes beneath it. It gives an immediately-visible overview of the balance of a plot, whether a given scene includes conflict, and anything else I care to create a tag for.

What's your favorite device to use MindNode on?

I use MindNode almost exclusively on iPadOS, because I’ve been using an iPad Pro as my full-time computer for several years. Being a writer means I have the privilege of being able to choose almost any platform or device for my work.

I’ve written a series of articles on my own web site detailing my journey since making the iPad my sole computer, including details on how I accomplish various tasks encompassing writing, publishing, book cover design, and various technical administrative tasks. Those articles can be found here.

(I do also have an iPhone, of course, and I’ve been known to occasionally add an idea to MindNode there while I’m out and about.)

iMac Themes

We love the new, colorful design of the all-new iMac, and how comprehensively macOS integrates the color of each device. So, we decided to create six matching MindNode themes for each of the new iMacs. Add them to MindNode to make your mind maps look right at home on your new device. You can find even more themes on our Themes Page.

iMac Blue

Download iMac Blue Theme

iMac Green

Download iMac Green

iMac Pink

Download iMac Pink Theme

iMac Yellow

Download iMac Yellow

iMac Orange

Download iMac Orange

iMac Purple

Download iMac Purple

Outlining on iOS

This January, we introduced Outlining in MindNode on the Mac. Since then, we've been hard at work, making further improvements, fixing bugs, and adding new features. We added new keyboard shortcuts, new multi-touch gestures, made the Outline easier to use, fixed numerous bugs, and much more. Today, we're happy to announce that we're releasing Outlining on iOS & iPadOS. It's the same Outline you already enjoy on your Mac, but fully optimized for your iPhone & iPad.

Made to Fit

In order to make Outlining a natural experience on the iPhone & iPad, we've adapted it to how you interact with your devices. You can outline by using touch, an external keyboard, or a trackpad. Like on the Mac, you can outline and mind map side-by-side, or use the new full-screen Outline.

Going Further

Outlining on iOS & iPadOS also takes advantage of the unique capabilities these devices offer. We've added support for using an external screen, which lets you see your mind map on a second display while outlining on your iPhone or iPad in full-screen mode. Outlining also supports Scribble with Apple Pencil.

Out Now

Outlining in MindNode is now available for all MindNode Plus subscribers. New Users can try MindNode Plus for free using our 14-day trial.

Check out our full release notes here.

How Summer Connects it all Together with MindNode

Hi! Who are you?

My name is Summer, I'm a figurative artist and Senior Textile Designer for a fashion company in Los Angeles, CA. I create in a lot of mediums and produce content all over the internet. Primarily on Twitch and soon to be on Skillshare. Overall, I'm an artist and a thinker.

How did you discover mind mapping?

I discovered mind mapping years ago, but it was all by hand then. I LOVE the studies of productivity, time and organization. I've read most of the books out there covering everything from memory palaces to GTD to Atomic Habits. I delved heavy into a many of the alternative techniques for mental organization like brain dumps and productivity habits like the pomodoro technique – if there's an organization acronym or catch phrase, I probably know it. I have a lot of ideas all the time, and they get overwhelming – and I've tried so many different things – I make lists and just never look at them again, or have a million interests and project plans with goal sheets of things I want to do that don't connect to each other, and don't take into account everything else I'm doing (or the actual time I have to do them in).

How has mind mapping helped you?

Mind mapping takes alllll of that and lets me get as detailed as I want while retaining the big picture. It helps me see the feasibility of projects or scheduling and it helps me stay on track. My brain is wonderful because it connects disparate ideas and combines them into new ones, but it does that all the time – so having a literal web of ideas that I can jump around in lets my mind feel calm – not only is everything written down like a brain dump, but I can riff on any part, expanding it out, and not loose sight of everything it's attached to. I couldn't get into mind mapping by hand because it felt I'd need an infinite amount of paper and it was so messy! I'm such a visual person, and the chaos on the page of a handwritten mind map did not do for me what MindNode does. It allows me to think creatively, in an organized fashion. It lets me bring order to the chaos after expressing all the gargantuan ideas pressing to get out. I can also re-organize and align things later, and it becomes a working document. I've been a part of the MindNode community for years – but started really diving in more the last year or so since getting an iPad. The new features are amazing too. I've turned a few friends on to it, and one especially has said it changed how she approaches everything now – it's given her a new way to think. I love that.

When do you start mind mapping?

I start mind maps whenever I start to feel overwhelmed or if there's a big project without a straight line of action in sight. I tend to get that deer-in-the-headlights paralysis if I can't clearly see my next steps, and if things aren't broken down small enough to be actionable. So I take them into a mind map and break them down. And then break them down even further if I need to. They're also great for showing me what seems difficult to understand - I did one of my schedule to show myself I shouldn't be upset I don't draw as much as I want – because I could visually see I didn't have the time during the week, if I wanted to also sleep and workout, etc. I use them personally a lot, just to see what I'm prioritizing and what's getting left undone, and where my interests are leading me or what projects I want to tackle next. They are my brain dump and my list maker.

How about professionally?

I use them for professional projects as well. I'm using a large one right now for the first Skillshare class I'm creating. I was given a few outline forms to help with laying out the class, but I'd have to have 4 pages laid out in front of me at all times just to see the big picture.

It felt very overwhelming and I kept going back trying to reorganize the class because I couldn't wrap my head around it the way it was being laid out. With a mind map, specifically with MindNode – I can see what isn't fleshed out, what needs more outlining, what doesn't have enough b-roll or what slides haven't been made - in one, easily navigable document. Once I had everything laid out, I then started to move each item into parent/child line for each video I'm making to see how they would play out. Where I discuss what, with what tools. It's been the only thing to get me moving forward on this massive project.

Any other examples?

I've laid out writing projects, blog and video ideas, business ideas – the format is insanely fun to use and seems to spur more ideas than typical brainstorming. It also helps me see what not to pursue. If I have an idea for a podcast, I can see how many ideas or topics I can pull out of it, or if the content would dry up fast. I've laid out content calendars that, once visualized, are completely unrealistic. It's great, because seeing that, visualizing the imminent failure of such a plan due to the sheer volume of work on top of my full time job, keeps me from trying to do it and burning out. And I don't blame myself! It was a plan that was doomed to fail, and all the time and effort and disappointment of not accomplishing it – I didn't have to go through any of it. I can SEE before I DO. Like I said to a friend, it's like that red yarn on a wall that ties everything together, without the conspiracy theories. It excites and prepares me for new projects, helps me avoid bad ones, and lets me organize this giant ball of ideas that is my brain.

Do you have any favorite MindNode features?

I LOVE the Tags and tag-highlighting. It’s great to go through and mark what I need to do in each section and then have it auto-populate into a very do-able list. It’s a life saver. And tasks?! VERY satisfying to check off as they're done. I like the little pictures and stuff you can add, but I try not to get caught up in making lists prettier as a form of procrastination, lol.

Outlining in MindNode

Today, we're updating MindNode with a powerful, new outlining feature and a fresh look for the Outline. With this addition, Outlining and Mind Mapping are finally a unified part of your brainstorming process.

What is Outlining?

An outline is a hierarchical list that shows relationships in a tree-like structure. That might sound familiar, and with good reason, as mind maps are in many ways the same: visual representations of hierarchical relationships in a tree structure. Outlines and mind maps share the same underlying format but display information in a different dimension.

New Possibilities

MindNode has had an Outline for a long time. Until now, it's been a great way to see your thoughts from another perspective. Today's update builds upon that by adding full editing capabilities. You can add, edit, remove and rearrange your Nodes directly in the Outline. This is an excellent way of brainstorming, particularly when you need a more organized, structured approach.

MindNode lets you instantly jump between Outlining and Mind Mapping. You can edit your mind map and outline side-by-side, or exclusively with the Full-Size Canvas or Outline. This flexibility lets you choose the method that works for you.

New Look

We've also updated the visual design of the Outline with a new, linear representation. It makes it easier to distinguish node levels, and identify the structure of your thoughts. The new visual design will also be available in the Free Editor.

Coming Soon to iPhone & iPad

Today's release is only the first step in our rollout of Outlining in MindNode. The next will be a release for iOS & iPadOS, coming in March. And we'll keep working on further enhancements like inline notes and improved Visual Tags throughout the year, as well as new mind mapping features.

Try it Now

Outlining in MindNode is now available for all MindNode Plus subscribers and on Setapp. New users can try it for free using our 14-day trial. If you have a Legacy License, you can enjoy an extended 6-month or 12-month free trial of MindNode Plus.

Outlining and Mind Mapping Side-by-Side

MindNode’s focus has always been to make it easy and fast to collect your thoughts, brainstorm your ideas, and structure your projects. For this, a mind map is the best technique, but sometimes a different method can help.

For example, I use MindNode’s Quick Entry to capture thoughts or use the outline view to browse open tasks. However, MindNode currently doesn’t offer an easy way to switch back into Quick Entry and doesn’t allow making fast edits in the outline.

Outlining in MindNode

After shipping an outline mode in MindNode for over ten years, we are finally giving it the attention it deserves: we are adding outlining to MindNode. So whether you prefer a mind map or an outline, MindNode is the best tool to brainstorm your ideas.

Outlining will ship with our next feature release on Mac early next year and only two months later on iOS. In our initial release, we will support all basic outlining features. Throughout 2021 we will add new functionality - like inline notes, images, and tags - to cover all your outlining needs.

Public Beta

Bringing outlining without compromises to MindNode was not an easy undertaking. Not all aspects of a mind map can be directly transferred to an outline. We also wanted to support side-by-side mind mapping and outlining. During development, we made several assumptions about the behavior we expect. To verify our decisions and make necessary changes before releasing this feature to our large user base, we will do a public beta for this new feature. If you are a MindNode Plus subscriber, head to our "Public Beta" page to learn more.

A Strong Start into 2021

Outlining has been one of our top user requests over the years. We are very excited that we will bring this feature to our MindNode Plus subscribers early next year. With many new planned mind map and outline features, 2021 will be exciting for MindNode. Thank you for your continued support!

Big Sur, Apple Silicon and the Future of the Mac

This week, we were pleasantly introduced to the future of the Mac during Apple's "One More Thing" event. The show's star was the new Apple M1 Chip - the first Apple processor specifically designed for the Mac. Over the past few months, we've been busy making sure MindNode is ready for this new era of Mac hardware.

Refreshed Interface

MindNode's new user interface looks great and fits right into macOS Big Sur. We've adopted a custom Accent color, updated the toolbar, and redesigned the Inspector with a new tabbed, and fully resizable interface.

App Icon

We refreshed our macOS icon, making sure it looks just right in your Dock.

Widget

We also brought our new Widget to Big Sur's Notification Center. It's an easy and great way to start a new mind map and quickly access your pinned and recent documents.

MindNode 2020.6 requires macOS 10.15 and is available now on the Mac App Store and on Setapp later next week. Check out our detailed release notes to learn more about all the other changes.

Are you also as excited as we are about this week's hardware releases? Let us know if you also ordered the new MacBooks and what other Big Sur features you would like to see in MindNode.

Mastering MindNode – Canvas Interactions Pt. 2

This installment of Mastering MindNode will conclude our exploration of various canvas interactions you may not be aware of. We’ll show you how to instantly drop pictures in your mind map, annotate images and take advantage of the space bar to reorganize your mind map. Here we go!

Photo picker

The photo picker lets you view your Photos collection on the Mac and choose which images you want to add to your mind map. After opening it, you can easily drag and drop images directly from it inspector to your node of choice. You can also drag and drop images directly from the Finder or the Files app on iPadOS while using Split View.

Annotate images

Now that you’ve added an image to your mind map, you can also add some more information to it with annotations. Simply select the image on your iPad or iPhone, tap on Quick Look in the menu, and feel free to scribble with your finger or Apple Pencil. On the Mac you can select the image, right click it, and select Edit Image from the context menu. 

Reorganize

Part of creating your mind map is the freedom to reorganize your thoughts by combining them with other nodes. You can make this process quicker on the Mac by hitting the space bar to instantly attach a node to another one while dragging it.

Detach Nodes

Did you hit the space bar too quickly while reorganizing your thoughts? No problem! Start dragging the branch or node you want and hit "d" on your keyboard to detach it instantly.

That wraps up our coverage of canvas interactions in this series. We hope you’ve learned something new, and look forward to presenting our next installment on how you can use URL schemes in MindNode.

MindNode Fall 2020 Updates

Last November, I updated you on our plans for MindNode 7 and our switch to a subscription business model. This transition is now almost complete. Today, I'd like to give you a brief look back at the past few months and an update on our plans for upcoming releases.

MindNode 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3

One of the motivating factors which helped us decide to switch to subscriptions was that it would allow us to ship updates more regularly. Instead of holding back features for major releases, we can ship them once they are ready. This is what we have achieved by delivering new features every other month. This year we have shipped Visual Tags, new Node Shapes (borderless main nodes; embedded, hexagonal and octagonal styles), Image Positioning within nodes, new Siri Shortcuts, and full Pointer support on iPad.

If you haven't already, give MindNode a try on a Magic Keyboard. We have continually improved our integration, and you can now also use gestures like Shift + Drag on a node to create a cross-connection.

New Version Numbers

We noticed over the course of this year that our current release versioning scheme no longer fits our new development cycle: We no longer want to ship major updates; instead, we want to focus on regular, incremental improvements. With this weeks' update, we are switching to a year-based version number. Going forward, our release numbers will be comprised of the current year, followed by the release number.

2020.5 – Widgets on Your Home Screen

Yesterday, we shipped our iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 update. This release adds a Widget that you can add to your Home Screen or Notification Center. Our Widget comes in three sizes:

• a small Widget that allows you to pin a single document on your Home Screen
• a medium Widget that lets you access two pinned documents, and buttons to start a new document or launch Quick Entry
• a large Widget that has the same features as the medium Widget, but also lists Recent Documents

Additionally, we have now adopted two new system pickers. The new iOS 14 photo picker gives you access to your full photo library and has the same albums, events, and lists as Photos app. We also adopted the system font picker, which was added to iOS last year. It enables you to access your custom-installed fonts and use them in MindNode documents.

Finally, we also adopted several new iPadOS features, including Scribble support and support for the new context menu.

2020.6 – Big Sur and Apple Silicon

Apple announced big plans for the Mac last June, and with our 2020.6 release, we will optimize MindNode for macOS 11. We have carefully updated MindNode to adopt the new user interface, refreshed our Mac icon, and will also bring our Widget to the Mac. Throughout the summer, we have also been busy porting MindNode to Apple Silicon, and we will be ready when the first new Macs arrive.

2020.7 – Create an Outline of Your Ideas

At the end of this year, we will add one of our most frequently requested features to MindNode. It's a feature we have been working on for almost a year now, and I can't wait to share more details once we have locked in the final design.

All of the features and enhancements in our 2020.5 and 2020.6 updates will be free for all existing MindNode 5-7 customers. Starting with 2020.7, new features will be exclusively available to our MindNode Plus subscribers. Enhancements and bug fixes will continue to be free to all existing customers.

Mastering MindNode – Canvas Interactions Pt. 1

In this edition of Mastering MindNode, we’ll focus on some useful tips and shortcuts that you can use on the canvas, where you create your mind maps. You’ll learn how to reset the width of your nodes, straighten cross-connections, and a few more things. Let’s get started!

Resizing Nodes

Whenever you select a node, you see a purple button appear in the top-right corner. You can use this button to adjust the width of the node. If you double-tap/click this button, you can automatically reset the width to fit your content.

Straighten Cross-Connections

Cross-connections are a useful way to link ideas across mind maps. We’ve previously covered how you can use keyboard shortcuts to create regular and inverse cross-connections between nodes. If you double-tap/click the green knob at the center of a connection, you can automatically straighten it.

Fold Nodes

Folding nodes allows you to organize your mind maps and collapse topics that you don’t need to see. You can do this by right-clicking on a node and choosing “Fold nodes” on the Mac, selecting a node on iOS and choosing “Fold” from the popup menu, or by using the “Option (⌥) + .” keyboard shortcut.

When using a trackpad or mouse on macOS or iPadOS, you can also hold “Option (⌥)” to turn the node well (the plus button next to a node) into a folding button. This is the fastest way to fold a branch.

That’s it for now. Our next installment will continue to look into more ways that you can interact with MindNode’s canvas.

Mastering MindNode – iOS Gestures

Every time you interact with a touchscreen device, whether its a simple tap or a swipe, you’re using one of the many possible gestures in iOS and iPadOS. While those two are the vast majority of gestures used, there are plenty more that can make using your iPhone & iPad faster, smoother, and more intuitive. This installment of Mastering MindNode will show you the various iOS gestures supported by MindNode and how to use them.

Undo & Redo

Typing and creating mind maps can often become messy. It should be no wonder then that there are three gestures available to undo your last action.

The first of these is a 3-finger swipe. Simply place three fingers on your screen and swipe them to the left to undo your last action. With this gesture, you can also swipe your fingers to the right to redo.

The next gesture is a three-finger tap. If you tap once, you open up a small editing menu at the top of the canvas where you can undo, copy, paste and redo. If you do a double three-finger tap you undo you your last action.

Finally, the last undo gesture is shaking. Naturally, this is a bit easier with an iPhone than an iPad, however, a short shake will undo your last action.

Copy/Cut/Paste

The regular way to cut, copy, and paste things in iOS can be somewhat tedious. You first have to select something, let the options menu appear, and then choose which action you want to perform. A simple pinch and expand gesture makes things simpler. After selecting an item, make a pinching movement with three fingers to copy it, or do that twice to cut it. To paste, expand three fingers in a selected position.

Multi-Select

MindNode has two ways of viewing your content. The default view is as a mind map on your canvas. The other is in outline mode. Because of this, we have different gestures to select multiple items.

Canvas

To select multiple nodes on your canvas you can use a rubber band selection, by holding down your finger and dragging the box over what you want to select. Alternatively, you can place a finger anywhere on the canvas, and use another finger to tap each item you want to select.

Outline

Select multiple rows in outline mode by placing two fingers on an item and dragging them up or down.

We hope that you’ve learned something new and that you enjoy mind mapping with these gestures. Since they are a system-wide feature, you can use many of them in other iOS & iPadOS apps. Our next installment of Mastering MindNode will be about canvas interactions.

New Styles, Improved Tags, and Smarter Layouts

The last few weeks we’ve been digesting all of the new features that were announced at Apple’s virtual Worldwide Developer Conference. We’re excited about the transition to Apple Silicon and all of the new features we can bring to MindNode with iOS 14 and macOS 11. You can read about our impressions of the conference in the Wall Street Journal. We’ve also been hard at work on bringing you our latest update and with it new styling options, improvements to Visual Tags, and a significant change to our Smart Layout Engine. Let’s dig in!

New Node Shapes

We’ve added new styling options, giving you more ways to organize your thoughts. You can now create borderless main nodes (finally!), use an embedded style in the horizontal layout, and a line style when mind mapping in a vertical layout.

Visual Tags Improvements

We’ve updated the popup tags menu with the ability to enter tag highlighting mode, and remove tags (swipe the tags to the left on iOS).

We’ve made tag highlighting mode even more powerful. Now, when you highlight two or more tags, you can display them as a union, showing nodes with any of the chosen tags, or intersection, showing you nodes which have all of the selected tags.

Smart Layout Engine

Our layout engine is what makes your mind maps look great and determines how your nodes move as you create your mind map. With this update, branches will now appear centered to their parent node.

As always, there’s plenty of smaller improvements and bug fixes in this update. For full details check out our release notes.

MindNode 7.3 is a free update and is available now on iOS, iPadOS and Mac.

Mastering MindNode – Mac Shortcuts

Every platform has a different way of interacting with its devices. On iOS, you tap the touch screen to navigate your content. The iPad works similarly but is opening up to new ways of working with it. This chapter of Mastering MindNode will focus on a few shortcuts that rely on the traditional keyboard and mouse/trackpad interaction, available on the Mac.

Create Connections

Cross connections are a great way to link ideas that are on different mind maps. You can create them with a keyboard shortcut (⌘ + L), or by selecting the option in the Node menu. Another way is holding down Shift ⇧ and clicking & dragging between two nodes. Hold down Shift ⇧ + Option ⌥ to create an inverted connection.

Move the Canvas

On iOS, you use your fingers to swipe around on the screen to navigate your canvas. On the Mac, you can do the same with a trackpad and a 2-finger gesture. If you're using a mouse, simply hold down the spacebar and click and drag the canvas.

Create New Nodes

The trackpad lets us interact with the Mac through a variety of gestures. Most of them are based around swiping, pinching, and using multiple fingers, however, one of the more subtle gestures is force touch. You can use force touch in MindNode to instantly create a new main node anywhere on your canvas.

That's it for this entry. The next Mastering MindNode will explore how we use iOS gestures as shortcuts in MindNode.

Meet the Team – Andreas

MindNode is made by IdeasOnCanvas, a small, independent company based in Vienna, Austria. Since our founding, 12 years ago, we’ve grown from a one-man team to a group of 11 people, working on improving, developing, supporting, and designing the world’s most delightful mind mapping app. In this new series, we’d like to take the opportunity to introduce our team and give you a glimpse into the people that make MindNode happen. Without further ado, meet Andreas.

Hi Andreas! Who are you and what do you do at MindNode?

I'm Andreas, a student at the University of Vienna and I'm working in support here at MindNode. That means that I help our users with all sorts of problems and questions regarding MindNode. I use the information provided by users to file bug reports for engineering and I forward ideas, feature requests, and general feedback to the whole team.

Did you use mind maps before you worked at MindNode?

Since I'm a person who likes to visualize thoughts and ideas, I occasionally used mind maps to structure information before writing papers for university. I mainly used pen and paper for such mind maps and the limitations of maps on paper annoyed me but I didn't know MindNode back then.

How do you use MindNode?

​I still like to create mind maps before writing a paper for university. However, now I'm using MindNode to do so and it's just fantastic! I can quickly rearrange branches, detach and re-attach them, add images and links, and quickly restyle the whole mind map without much effort. Basically, all those things that are not easily done on paper. I have also used mind maps for presentations at university and at meetings of a volunteer student organization I am a member of. 

Are there any features that are particularly important for you?

I don't think that I can name a specific feature. What makes MindNode such a precious tool is the whole experience of effortless mind mapping and the visually pleasing design. 

What are some of your favorite uses of MindNode?​

I discovered that using MindNode for presenting my ideas to others is actually a lot of fun. Especially Focus Mode improved that by a great deal.

Has working at MindNode changed how you use mind mapping?

Working at MindNode has changed my use of mind-mapping by a great deal. I would say that I'm using it more extensively now; mainly because of the interaction with our users. It's really amazing to see all the diverse use-cases and what our users can accomplish with MindNode.

Mastering MindNode – Advanced Text Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts can be a powerful tool when trying to avoid distractions and staying focused. When you’ve become acquainted with an app and its shortcuts well enough, they can start to feel like a natural extension of your hands as you type away. MindNode has many shortcuts that we all know from other apps, like ⌘ + C & ⌘ + V for copy and paste. But in this edition of Mastering MindNode, we’d like to show you a few shortcuts that will help your fingers stay on your keyboard and mind map more efficiently.

Smart Text Shortcuts

Smart text shortcuts make it easier to create notes, tasks, and tags while typing. Turn them on in the settings panel, and use them on the canvas and in Quick Entry.

Notes

You can create a note while editing your node title by adding a new line (⌥ + Enter), typing "--" and adding one more new line. Everything that you write below the two hyphens will turn into a note.

Tags

Add a hashtag at the end of a node title, followed by a word to add a new tag instantly. Do the same with other nodes, and they will all have the same tag.

Tasks

Add "-[]" to the beginning of any node title to create a task. If you add "-[]" to a parent node, it will transform all child nodes to tasks.

Software Keyboard Shortcuts (iOS)

Most keyboard shortcuts require the use of a modifier key, like Shift ⇧, Option ⌥ , or Command ⌘. However, if you're using the on-screen software keyboard on your iPhone or iPad, you don't have access to most of these keys. That's why we've added a few shortcuts that work without a hardware keyboard.

New Child Node

Add a new child node while typing by entering three spaces.

New Sibling Node

If you want to add a new sibling node, just hit the Enter key three times.

Delete a Node

If you create a node by accident, you can remove it by hitting the delete key three times.

That wraps up our coverage of advanced text shortcuts. Our next topic will be Mac shortcuts.

Trackpad Support for MindNode is Here

It’s not often that Apple surprises us with a with a major new feature that completely transforms how we interact with a device. Yet, this spring they accomplished that with the announcement of pointer support in iPadOS 13.4 and the introduction of the new Magic Keyboard.

We’ve been using MindNode with the Magic Keyboard for the last few weeks. Based on our experience we gradually added pointer support to MindNode 7.1, and today we’re happy to share our first enhancements (with more to come soon).

Select nodes

Like on the Mac, you can now use the pointer to easily select multiple nodes using a rubber-band selection. Making it very easy to move multiple nodes or change the style.

Hint: this is also possible with touch input, by long pressing on the canvas and dragging your finger

Move and rearrange

The pointer also makes moving and rearranging your nodes slightly simpler. Now, you can instantly click and drag a node.

Interact

When you’re working on a Mac, the cursor is constantly adapting to what you’re doing. We’ve taken the iPad’s playful, animated pointer and made it transform to the node well, tasks, notes, tags and the resizing knob.

Trackpad support makes an already fantastic mind mapping experience on the iPad even more powerful. Combined with our vast collection of keyboard shortcuts and gestures, it makes capturing your thoughts a breeze.

MindNode 7.2 is a free update and is available now on iOS and Mac. For a full list of all of the bugfixes and improvements, check out our release notes.

Mastering MindNode – Long Press Actions in iOS – Pt. 2

In our last post we explored various features that can be triggered with a long-press action on iOS. All of the gestures we saw were focused on the four icons in the inspector panel. In this installment of Mastering MindNode we’ll conclude our focus on long-press actions by digging deeper and showing a few other spots you can press down a bit longer.

Long Press to Refocus

Focus Mode lets you put a spotlight on a single thought on your mind map. While in Focus Mode, you can tap on any other branch to see an option to refocus to it, or you can use a long-press action to refocus instantly.

Enter Node Width

Entering a custom node width is a useful feature when you’re trying to create a unified style across several nodes. One way to set the width is by tapping the + and – buttons in the style panel. However, if you long-press “Width” you can open a text field to enter the number you wish.

Changing the Color

You can change the color of any element of your mind map by using the built-in color picker. While it’s very easy to pick a nice shade of blue with the sliders, there are times where you need the same shade as your company's logo. Long-press the color picker to enter the precise hex value you need.

Extract a Personal Theme

When you’ve put in the effort of making your mind map look just like you want it, it makes sense to save it for later, or even to share it with others. If you long-press the + symbol in the themes panel you can instantly extract a theme based on your mind map style and give it a name.

That’s a wrap for long-press actions. Our next Mastering MindNode post will be focused on advanced text shortcuts in MindNode on Mac and iOS.

Shortcuts, Shapes and Repositioning Images

Since we released MindNode 7 several months ago, much has changed. Our team has not seen each other personally for over a month. We’ve all found ways of adapting to working at home, taking care of our kids, pets and coordinating over Slack. Yet, one constant has remained throughout the lockdown, which is our work on MindNode. We’ve been busy fixing bugs, improving existing features, and adding several new ones as well. Here’s what we’ve prepared for MindNode 7.1.

New Node Shapes

We’ve added two new node shapes, hexagonal and octagonal to help you emphasize certain ideas and further personalize your document.

Image Position

We’ve also looked into more ways that you can customize your mind maps. Now, you can decide where your images and stickers are placed, to the side, above or below your ideas.

New Shortcut Action (iOS)

Many of us begin our weeks by creating a mind map of what we would like to accomplish. With our new Shortcut Action you can create a workflow to automatically export your documents to Reminders, Things & OmniFocus.

We’ve also added basic support for Pointer Interactions on iPadOS 13.4, with full support coming with MindNode 7.2, and several bug fixes and improvements. For a full list check out our release notes:

• MindNode 7.1 Release Notes

MindNode 7.1 and the upcoming 7.2 release are free updates for all MindNode 7 users.

We hope that you’re all doing well, wherever you’re spending the lockdown, and we look forward to hearing your feedback on our latest update.

Greetings from Our Home Office

Greetings from our home office(s)!

While the spread of the new corona virus has impacted our lives, we've all taken preventative measures and have switched to working from home. Instead of chatting with each other in our office kitchen, we're now doing daily team video chats. With our kids at home, our productivity has naturally slowed a bit, but we are adapting and are still hard at work on the next update. In the spirit of a recent post by Jason Fried, we want to offer you a small glimpse into our current home office setup.

Marco Masser (Senior Engineer)

"My home office setup is a MacBook Pro with an external display and nothing else. Rarely pen and paper. That black thing behind the display is a PlayStation 4."

Vanessa Sigl (QA & Customer Relations)

"I share my home office with my two cats. For testing MindNode and supporting our users I have a MacBook Pro (+ second screen, stand, Magic Keyboard & Trackpad), two iPads (+ keyboard & Apple Pencil), an Apple Watch and iPhone XR. Also a notebook, highlighter, pen & sticky notes."

Markus Müller-Simhofer (Founder & CEO)

"When I work at home I normally work from the kitchen table. For the quarantine, we built a home setup in our bedroom. From the office, I brought home a monitor, an office chair and peripherals. We also 'borrowed' a desk from our daughter. My wife and I share this setup at the moment."

Michael Schwarz (Senior Engineer)

"Luckily, I have my company iMac here at home. Otherwise MacBook Pro 13", late 2013"

Harald Eckmüller (Designer)

"My usual home office is a IKEA standing desk, Mac Pro with XDR plus 27” LG, a RødeCaster with AudioTechnica mic and headphones for podcasting, as well as my cam for video work. Audio is done with a smaller Bose Setup and some stereo-linked HomePods in the rear. Oh, and I use all the lighting gear for video stuff to bring this room to blinding daylight brightness, which helps a lot with the mood right now. :)"

Gregory Bondaruk (Marketing)

"My wife and I converted our dining table into a shared home office. My half of the table features a MacBook Pro with an external monitor and an iPad Pro."

Tom Kraina (Engineer)

"My desk didn’t really change due to Covid-19. Just the office in Impact Hub Ostrava that I share with 2 others is just for me in these days. Featuring Ikea motorized desk, old but still good 24” HP display, 16” MBP, 11” iPad Pro, B&O headphones, Magic Mouse."

Hannes Oud (Engineer)

"My office is in my bedroom. I reassure myself of the existence of the outside world with a desktop wallpaper of my last holiday. I use two video-led panels on microphone stands to brighten up the room."

Mastering MindNode – Long Press Actions in iOS – Pt. 1

One of the philosophies that go into the design of all of MindNode’s features is that the app stays out of your way, letting you focus on your thoughts and create your mind map. Simultaneously we put a lot of effort into making our features as powerful and easily accessible as possible. We take advantage of the various types of gestures and shortcuts that are possible on the Mac and on iOS to make mind mapping intuitive and a delightful experience. So we’d like to shine a light on some of the interactions in MindNode that are slightly hidden, and will help you become a power user.

Long Press Actions in iOS

A long press action is triggered by holding your finger down on the screen of your iPad or iPhone on a particular element for about a second. This gesture can add an extra layer of functionality to a button or element that you normally tap, which is how we added a few of the following hidden features in your actions panel.

Add tasks with the inspector panel

You can easily change a node into a task by using the Command + Shift + T keyboard shortcut, or by finding the feature in the actions panel, however there is one more hidden shortcut to make this happen. Simply highlight the branch you would like to transform into tasks, and long press the inspector panel icon (the three dots) and voila! You’ve just made some tasks. Long press the icon again to remove them.

Preview Notes

If your node has a note attached to it, you can quick preview the content of it by long pressing the notes/tag symbol. A preview will appear on your canvas as long as you keep your finger pressed on the screen.

Add images from file manager

Next time you want to add an image to your mind map that you have saved in your iCloud folders instead of your photo stream, long press the images symbol and the file manager will show up.

Apply style

If you like the way a particular node looks, you can quickly copy its style to your entire map, nodes on the same level or the rest of the branch. Select the node you like and long press the style symbol to choose where to apply your look.

That's all for now. Mastering MindNode will be a recurring series on our blog, showcasing more gestures and interactions throughout MindNode on macOS and iOS. Our next topic will be long press actions in iOS.

How Christopher Creates Adventures with Mind Maps – Being a Dungeon Master

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Christopher Grant and I am a professional artist working in the medium of oil on large format canvas to create traditional Abstract Expressionist works.

How has MindNode been a part of your workflow?

While I mainly use MindNode in my professional work, one of the more interesting uses I’ve found is creating cartographic style concept maps for a game I play with friends, Dungeons & Dragons.

Originally it was just a part of my workflow, utilizing other applications along side it. Now, however, MindNode is the workflow. Almost everything I do for our games begins and ends with MindNode. From brainstorming and creating adventures to expanding our cartographic maps. It is the constant brainstorming that is the workspace rather than a jumping-off point.

Tell us more about how you use mind mapping for creating an adventure.

During our gameplay, players will adventure through fictional places I’ve created for them as the Dungeon Master. A Dungeon Master is like a storyteller and the Players are like the main protagonists of the story. Rather than using traditionally drawn maps, I create concept maps where each node represents a specific place such as a town or dungeon.

Are there any features in MindNode that help in particular?

When players explore new areas I’ve not yet created, something that happens a lot in our games, I can quickly create new nodes describing them. It’s this ability to not get bogged down with the multiple keystrokes that makes it so desirable. It’s fast to create maps! This drastically reduces preparation time and perhaps more importantly helps keeps our fictional world where it should be, in our imaginations.

Another important feature of MindNode is one most people may not even consider a feature, it’s esthetics. Because these mind maps that are created for our games are often shared, it’s important they look good. MindNode’s mind maps are quite esthetic and thus I’m not forced to spend large amounts of time making changes in order to make our maps pretty. As such, the app feels lighter, faster and more fluid than other mind mapping applications.

• Christopher's Dungeons & Dragons website
• Christopher's professional website

Downloads

• Christopher's Mind Map of Antiacus

Add More Context to Your Thoughts – MindNode 7 has Landed

MindNode 7 is now available on the App Store, the Mac App Store, and Setapp. This release adds Visual Tags, a new feature that helps you add more context to your thoughts. We have also introduced our new MindNode Plus subscription and a new Free Editor.

Visual Tags

Tags are a great way to categorize and add more context to your thoughts. You can use them to prioritize ideas and bring focus to a related group of ideas that are otherwise not connected. Using our tag highlight mode, you can focus on a group of tags to discover new connections between your ideas. 

We’ve also updated our outline to support tags. Now when you’re browsing your mind map in outline mode, you can see which tags you’ve assigned to your nodes.

Visual Tags can also be added to your thoughts while typing them up in Quick Entry. Simply select the tag symbol to add a tag to your node or just type # and the following text will become a tag. This #-shortcut will also work when you edit your nodes on the canvas.

MindNode Plus

With MindNode 7 we have also changed our business model from a one-time purchase to a subscription. MindNode Plus is our new cross-platform subscription that unlocks all of MindNode’s features on Mac & iOS. 

MindNode 7 is a free upgrade for all existing MindNode 5 and MindNode 6 customers. This means that if you purchased MindNode 5 or 6 your app will automatically update to MindNode 7 and you will get Visual Tags and all other enhancements for free. New features in future releases will require MindNode Plus.

MindNode Plus is available as a monthly and annual subscription. Initially, the monthly subscription will be priced at $2.49 and the yearly at $19.99 (local prices will vary based on taxes and currency conversion).

We have also introduced a new Free Editor, which allows basic editing operations like adding nodes, editing titles, reordering and folding. Documents can also be imported and exported. Even when your subscription has elapsed, you are never locked in and you always have access to your data.

For more information about our decision to change our business model please read our previous blog post, and if you have any questions about your license please check our extensive FAQ about MindNode Plus.

Full Steam Ahead

With only 9 months since MindNode 6, a major point-update last fall and now MindNode 7 with Visual Tags and a major update to our business model, we have entered a new era for MindNode. In the future, we will be able to bring you new features and updates much more frequently.

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback and please don't forget to check out the release notes for all new MindNode 7 changes - like new stickers, a new theme and better system integration on iOS.

How David Develops with Mind Maps – Automating and Planning

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

My name is David and I am working as a freelance React Native developer and bootcamp instructor specializing in cross-platform application development. I work remotely and I love building things for happy users.
My other mission is helping people to earn time by sharing all my automation and life hacks!

How has MindNode been a part of your workflow?

I am using MindNode for a lot of things, but basically it's for dumping my brain.

1. Bookmarking tool

As a developer — and especially in the JavaScript world — it's really complicated to stay up-to-date with all the different technologies. When I am reading a great article, instead of just bookmarking it, I make a manual curation for my own work. I found this technique really effective for the memory, because when I am working with clients or during a bootcamp I remember the location of the bookmark on my giant mind map.

2. User Flows

As a React developer I am always thinking in terms of a tree of component (It's more or less the same as a giant HTML page with plenty of nodes). When I jump on a new project, I used to draw the application component tree on a whiteboard. Now I am using MindNode, it helps me to visualise the interactions and state.
As an automation Nerd I am using a lot of tools like Zapier to connect API's together. It's really powerful for creating automated flows like the classic onboarding. It's ok when you have simple interactions, but when it become more complex I always create a mind map to reflect all the different scenarios.

3. Road trip planner

Going to vacations can be a stressful experience. As humans being we like to complete tasks. That's a great opportunity to use the feature "add task to node" and export them to notes to complete my packing list from my phone!

What features in particular have been important for you?

When you are working 8 hours on a tool, every seconds matters. I am a power user of Alfred, a productivity app which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys.

One of my main problem is time. If I want to edit a mind map here is the classic workflow:

• Hit command + space
• Open the finder app
• Go to iCloud Drive / MindNode
• Select my file
• Open it!

It's very slow, I don't have time for this. This is why I am using Alfred to automate the workflow.

If I want to update one file I just:

• Hit command + space
• Hit m + {name_of_the_file}
• Open it!

According to me, the most important feature with MindNode is sharing files in different formats (.pdf,.png or .markdown) I am using it all the time!

When I need to write a blogpost I can quickly export my MindNode document (with option +  command + e) to a markdown file and illustrate my thoughts with a nice image.

Feel free to contact me on Twitter if you want some automation advice with MindNode 😉

Updates to Our Privacy Policy

From time to time we update our privacy policy to adapt it to changing legal requirements and updates to our services infrastructure. Today we released a significant update and we want to ensure you are aware of it.

We updated many parts of the policy to improve its clarity and added more details on how long we retain data. We also added a new section to document how we process the data of applicants. Due to local Austrian rules, we also changed the required legal age for data collection from 14 to 16.

You can find our updated version of the privacy policy here. If you have any feedback or need help, please drop us a note at privacy@mindnode.com.

MindNode 7 – Visual Tags and Business Model Changes

We are excited to announce that we are going to ship MindNode 7, our next major update, early next year. MindNode 7 will add Visual Tags - a brand new feature to bring more context to your ideas. With this release, we are also introducing a new Free Editor and customers can unlock our full feature set with our new MindNode Plus subscription. For all existing MindNode 5 and MindNode 6 customers, MindNode 7 will be a free upgrade.

We will share more information about our new tagging feature in the coming weeks. Today I’d like to focus on our motivation behind changing our business model and what it means for the future of MindNode.

What we learned from MindNode 5 and MindNode 6

Over the last two years, we released two major updates: MindNode 5 was a paid upgrade and MindNode 6 was a free upgrade. When we started working on MindNode 7 we knew that our next release would be a paid upgrade and we closely looked at our experience with the recent updates.

While MindNode 5 was a very popular release with our customers, we weren’t happy with how our new upgrade mechanism worked. As the App Store has no native support for paid upgrades, we tried to work around this limitation, by using differently priced In-App Purchases. This sounded like a great solution on paper and worked great in our tests, but we ran into many issues in real-life situations. Our discount mechanism had to launch a previous version of MindNode to check for eligibility. This did not always work as we had imagined it and resulted in a bumpy experience for some customers.

With this in mind, we knew that we didn’t want to go down the same path again. A subscription-based model showed the most promise to meet our customers’ needs as well as our own when we mind mapped our options.

The Advantages of Subscriptions

There are several reasons why we believe subscriptions are the right choice for the future of MindNode.

With subscriptions, we can deliver updates to our users much more frequently. In the past, we had to hold back completed new features for over a year until we had finished all other features that made up a major update.

Going with subscriptions also decreases the entry price for new customers. This is particularly useful for people who may only need MindNode occasionally, for example, a freelancer who is kicking off a new client project.

It also makes pricing much more predictable. New customers no longer need to wonder about the right time to purchase MindNode, since there will be no more paid upgrades that might unexpectedly surprise them.

A subscription-based model also gives us more flexibility in what we can offer to our users. MindNode can be unlocked on macOS and iOS with a single subscription (this is not possible with one-time purchases on the App Store) and we are exploring how we can offer family and business licenses in the future.

Finally, we have to take into consideration that MindNode is a constantly evolving product, which we want to continue working on. Subscriptions provide us with a stable roadmap for the future where we can continue to adopt new Apple technologies in a timely manner, work on supporting collaboration and expand into new platforms.

Free Editor

We are fully aware that a subscription might not be the best solution for all of our users. This is why we are launching a new Free Editor together with MindNode Plus. Instead of a viewer of MindNode documents, our free version now also allows basic editing operations like adding nodes, reordering and folding them. In the Free Editor, we will also continue to support all import and export formats, so your data is never locked in!

Loyal Customers

When we considered subscriptions, we also made sure we found a good solution for our existing users. As a loyal customer, you will receive MindNode 7 for free and keep access to all its features in the future, even without subscribing to MindNode Plus. Furthermore, you will continue to receive bug fixes and minor enhancements.

MindNode Plus

MindNode Plus will launch together with MindNode 7 in early 2020. We will offer a monthly and annual subscription. Initially, the monthly subscription will be priced at $2.49 and the yearly at $19.99 (local prices will vary based on taxes and currency conversion).

I understand that every adjustment in a business model can be confusing or irritating. We’ve tried our best to make this transition as smooth as possible and hope you will continue to support us in the future. We’ve prepared an extensive FAQ and if you have any more questions, please contact us.

Multi-Document, Dark Mode and more – MindNode for iPadOS 13

It’s that time of the year again when many of us are updating our iPads & iPhones to the newest version of iOS. While most of the attention is usually given to the new system features Apple has created, developers are also excited to take advantage of new tools and features they can integrate into their apps. And we’re no exception. We’ve been working hard the past three months to make sure MindNode users can benefit from and enjoy what iPadOS and iOS 13 has to offer. Here’s what we’ve been able to create for MindNode 6.1.

Multiple Documents (iPadOS only)

Multi-tasking has been a slowly evolving feature of iOS. Starting with being able to have apps running background processes and to the unveiling of a split-screen multitasking mode two years ago. This year the next step is the arrival of having multiple documents open simultaneously from a single app. What this means for you is that now you'll be able to have MindNode open in multiple spaces on your iPad, enabling you to work on multiple mind maps simultaneously.

Dark Mode

MindNode users will know we’ve had support for Dark Mode for a while now. However with iPadOS 13 there’s a subtle change in how it works - thanks to systemwide support for Dark Mode. Now you can have Dark Mode active when your iPhone or iPad goes dark, based on the time of day or your system settings, or you can have MindNode’s appearance adapt to the theme of your mind map.

Quick Entry Drafts

Quick Entry is an easy way to jot down your thoughts in an outline format and instantly transform them into a mind map. With MindNode 6.1 we’ve added the possibility to save your Quick Entries as drafts, so that you can keep working on them until you’re ready to send them to your canvas. Quick Entry Drafts will be coming to our macOS version soon in an upcoming update.

Siri Shortcuts Parameters

Siri Shortcuts is an easy way to automate tasks that you regularly perform by asking Siri to do them. These tasks can be something Siri learns about your behavior, or workflows you create on your own. With iOS 13 Siri Shortcuts have become even more powerful, by allowing users to add parameters to their shortcuts. What this means is that you can now tell Siri to open a new MindNode document with a title, some text, or the current date already filled in.

Try a shortcut out for yourself!

• To start add the Export Document action from MindNode's shortcuts
• Change the parameters to last opened document
• Choose the file format you need. Make sure that the export goes to Clipboard
• Add the Get Clipboard action from the Sharing shortcuts
• Next add the Send Email action from the Mail app shortcuts and change the parameters to send Clipboard to your team's email addresses and enter your subject.

Make sure that the last opened document in MindNode is the one you want to share before you start the shortcut!

Annotate Images & Add Drawings

With iOS 13 Apple also greatly improved support for Apple Pencil and annotations in general. MindNode 6.1 takes advantage of this in two different places.

You can now add drawings and annotate images directly in MindNode. In annotation mode, you can easily scribble a few comments on your attached images, quickly draw a supply and demand graph for your economics class notes, or start sketching your next backyard project.

The second improvement is related to screenshots. When you take a screenshot using the Top/Side button and Volume-up button combination you can now get a screenshot of the entire mind map. Annotating and sharing a mind map has never been easier.

Further Enhancements

While we were getting these iPadOS & iOS 13 features baked into MindNode 6.1 we also were busy squashing bugs, fine-tuning existing features and adding a few others as well. Check out our full release notes for more details.

• MindNode 6.1 for iOS Release Notes

MindNode 6.1 is available now on the App Store.

How Thomas Shows Clients the Bigger Picture – Creating a Marketing Strategy

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Thomas Dori and I'm a digital strategist who combines his 3 passions - contemplation, communication, and coding - into one business.

Is there one situation or project in which mind mapping helped you the most?

Digital Marketing (Strategies) is a very broad concept. Especially, when you are not working in this field every day, it can quickly feel overwhelming. To help my clients and me see the bigger picture including all the opportunities and necessities I start every project by presenting a mind map that gives a clear overview of what needs to be considered before and while doing digital marketing. We then use a copy of that mind map as a checklist to keep track of what we already thought about and what still needs to be considered. The final result is a clear vision of what the client’s company currently stands for, where it wants to go, and what needs to be done to get there.

How did you get your thoughts out of your head and into a mind map?

My current mind map for digital marketing is probably the millionth version of what it used to be several years ago. It started with the wish to have an overview of types of media (owned vs. shared vs. earned vs. paid). I continued to work on mind maps about branding, personas, social media marketing, and content marketing - and thought "Why not merging them into one huge mind map?" After moving everything around for hours and making it as MECE (mutually exclusive & collectively exhaustive) as possible, I tweaked the wording to get some nice acronyms (BRACES + 4C). The final but also essential step was the styling. I used the brand colors of my agency „Anwert" and the gorgeous stickers that MindNode has built in. Although I love the Auto Layout feature, I used the manual layout in my mind map because I wanted to give some nodes a bit more spacing than others.

How did it feel to finally see all your thoughts in a mind map?

Relieved. This mind map is like my external memory, and every time I look at it, I'm delighted that I have spent so much time to build it. It's like a cheat sheet that helps me to remember everything.

Once you were done with the mind map, what did you do next?

My mind map for digital marketing will never be final. It is the core of what I'm doing in my business every day. And like my business adjusts to new knowledge, trends and customer needs, so will this mind map. But even though it's a living document I use it all the time for myself as well as to support my clients in their (digital) marketing efforts. Most of the time people are stunned by how graspable such a complex topic becomes in a mind map - and how beautiful MindNode makes it look.

Where can people find out more about you and your work?

• Anwert's Website
• My Twitter Profile

Downloads

• Anwert's Digital Marketing Mind Map
• Anwert's Personal Theme

Photo by Catalina Koe

Photo Background by Alex Ruthner

How Teddy Turns Complexity Into a Plan – Preparing a University Course

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Teddy Svoronos and I’m a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Is there one situation or project in which mind mapping helped you the most?

MindNode is the app that I use to begin the process of developing new classes. When staring down the barrel of a new class session, there is a seemingly infinite number of paths I could go down - huge numbers of topics, examples, and in-class exercises that could conceivably be incorporated into the class. MindNode helps me turn this complexity into a plan. I can group ideas into categories, which then link to one another in ways that gradually emerge as a class plan.

How did you get your thoughts out of your head and into a mind map?

I start by creating as many Main Nodes as possible - using ⇧-Enter to dump all the ideas that pop into my head into a messy group of unstructured ideas. As I do this, I often start seeing connections immediately, so I’ll drag them on top of one another, or creating connection lines between them. If there are images, examples, or tables that I want to reference, I’ll drag them onto the map as well.

How did it feel to finally see all your thoughts in a mind map?

The best part is the transition from feeling overwhelmed and without structure to seeing a concrete set of steps to move forward. The mind map ends up being the starting point for further content - handouts and slides and such - but the map is always visible and always guiding how I conceptualize the class.

Where can people find out more about you and your work?

You can find out more about me on www.teddysvoronos.com or on my Twitter profile.

Downloads

• Teddy's Public Policy Class Mind Map
  References: Kleinberg, J., Lakkaraju, H., Leskovec, J., Ludwig, J., & Mullainathan, S. (2017). Human Decisions and Machine Predictions. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(1), 237-293.

How MindNode Propels Eric Forward – Writing a Novel

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Eric Bowers and I'm a Mortgage Loan Originator, business owner, writer/blogger.

Is there one situation or project in which mind mapping helped you the most?

That would be working on writing my first novel, the forthcoming The Mayor of Blackout County. My issue with the project was that I had the basic outline in my head, but needed to create more of a timeline so that I didn't get lost within the milestones of the story. I ended up creating a horizontal timeline using Vertical layout with angular branches, which was a great help in creating visual indications of my progress along the story line. 

How did you get your thoughts out of your head and into a mind map?

I began, as I often do, with the Quick Entry feature. I input the main goal of what I was trying to accomplish, which was, "Write novel". Quick Entry seems to be at the core of what MindNode represents to me; a literal canvas upon which I can just let my mind wander. I entered a few major milestones into the outline entry area in Quick Entry, and then clicked "Create Mind Map". As the weeks and months went on I was able to add to the mind map using my iPhone and iPad or of course, my MacBook. It's important that MindNode is installed everywhere so that when inspiration strikes I have captured my thoughts.

See here for the map for the novel. It's not overly useful because I have folded up the details as it has the entire story contained there in milestones and major events. One thing to note: I created a separate theme for this particular mind map, to coincide with the overall feel of the story...that's a hint, but it always puts me in the right mindset.

How did it feel to finally see all your thoughts in a mind map?

In a word: relieved. I thought,"There. Now you have no excuse not to write this novel, because the elements are in place."...and what was funny was I just began writing, checking off tasks that I had assigned to various pieces of the story. Getting the main points out propelled me forward as a writer.

Once you were done with the mind map, what did you do next?

Because it obviously contains spoilers, I only showed the mind map to my wife who exclaimed,"Wow that looks great! What app is that?" (I'm not joking, either. She hadn't used MindNode for a while and was impressed with the layout capabilities).

Where can people find out more about you and your work?

• My website
• My Twitter Profile

Welcome to Our New Website

For many years our website was only an afterthought. We pride ourselves on sweating over every single detail in our app, but we neglected all other channels of communication with you.

Last year we embarked on a journey to change this. As a first step, we updated our onboarding emails earlier this year. These are the emails you can subscribe to when you first launch MindNode. The 3-email-course takes you from how to create nodes to how you can style your documents and while doing so teaches you a little bit about Apple Strudel - a typical Austrian dessert. You can subscribe to this course on our new Learn page or preview the first email here.

While working on our new onboarding emails, we also started a project to revamp our website. The goal was to no longer present MindNode as two separate apps (with dedicated feature pages), add focus on how you can use MindNode (something that comes up a lot in support emails) and to find a fun & delightful design that better fits with the app.

A lot of team effort went into creating our website, but it wouldn't have been possible without the fantastic work and collaboration from our graphic designer Isabella Thaller, our web designer Thomas Strobl and marketing consultant Thomas Dori.

I hope you like our new website. Let us know what you think.

How Rosemary Teaches JavaScript – From Awed to Overwhelmed

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Rosemary Orchard and I'm a developer by day, and a blogger and podcaster by night!

Is there one situation or project in which mind mapping helped you the most?

It's hard to pick just one, any complicated idea starts out as a mind map for me to let me get to grips with all facets of it. I'm currently working on a course to help people learn JavaScript to use with apps like Drafts and MindNode has been extremely helpful letting me keep track of and organise all my ideas.

How did you get your thoughts out of your head and into a mind map?

I usually start in quick entry mode on iOS. My iPhone is usually the device in my hand so I start listing things there, then I jump into the mind map as the ideas slow down, and add to what I have and rearrange things.

How did it feel to finally see all your thoughts in a mind map?

Depending on the mind map I can feel anything from awed to overwhelmed! In this case I feel rather daunted by the tasks ahead, creating a whole course, but also calmed because I can see where everything is and what I've already completed is marked off.

Once you were done with the mind map, what did you do next?

I shared my mind map with a few friends for feedback before tweaking it. Then I printed it out on A3 paper so I could stick it on my wall! It's colourful and a great reminder of my goal right now.

Where can people find out more about you and your work?

• rosemaryorchard.com
• My Twitter Profile

Download

• Rosemary's JavaScript Mind Map

Learning to Focus – How we created Focus Mode

What do you do when your ideas become overwhelming? When you need to concentrate on just one thought? These were some of the questions our team was asking itself nearly a year ago, and resulted in the development of Focus Mode.

It’s now been a few months since we released MindNode 6, and many of you have had a chance to experience it for yourself. We’ve been happy to hear from plenty of our customers about how Focus Mode has become a part of their brainstorming process, from helping them put a spotlight on the details, to presenting just the right part of their mind map to their audience. Your feedback has been indispensable, and we’ve already been working on squashing bugs and looking into how we can make Focus Mode even better.

To shed some light on how we work, we spoke to one of our engineers, Michael Schwarz, & our designer, Harald Eckmüller to gain some insights into what goes into making a new feature.

Baby steps

Michael’s motivation came from wanting to find the solution to a problem: “It was a challenging task, and as I have many large mind maps, I liked the idea of focusing on the sub-content”. With the challenge set, the first step was imagining what the feature would look and feel like. Even though the idea seemed straightforward, focusing on one particular branch and make the rest of the document less distracting, the nature of the tree-structure of mind maps raised a lot of questions that added a layer of complexity.

Harald explains: “Mind maps may have content all over the canvas with naturally occurring clusters. These draw more attention visually, so should they be de-emphasized more when focusing elsewhere? How much of the surrounding of a given branch do you need to clearly see to be able to work with it? When you start focusing on a branch with a node three tiers removed from the main node, do you need the path all the way up to the main node with the focus, or is this too much context?”

To answer these questions a few different approaches were tried out, at first with paper prototyping and static mockups, and later creating an entire Swift Playground to quickly tweak parameters like opacity, blur, hue etc. One of the earliest implementations was a “hoisting mode”, elevating a subsection of the mind map into a separate document. This seemed too disconnected, leading to a “presentation mode” which showed more context. After seven iterations the final result was a dynamic mixture of both approaches, using the zoom factor as a way of presenting more or less surrounding content.

An early version of Focus Mode (above) showing a different approach of presenting the unfocused nodes compared to the final version (below).

Solving problems and creating new ones

As development continued new questions were appearing all the time - from designing the user interface and interaction to how other features like undo & redo were impacted by entering Focus Mode. Michael and Harald elaborate:
- How can you effortlessly get into and out of Focus?
- How does an unfocused node react to a mouse cursor?
- Where do you refocus if you delete all of the focused nodes?
- Do you re-enter Focus Mode if undo/redo is triggered?
- How does keyboard navigation work?
- What is selected when you use a shortcut like select all?
- How can you make the feature discoverable, yet keep it easily at hand for more pro users?

Indispensable to finding a way through this maze of issues was the support of our fantastic QA team and our beta testers. Trying something new meant we had to learn what works and is right for our users. We combed through our support requests for inspiration, conducted interviews, and collected as much feedback as early as we could into the process to find the right solution.

Learning by doing

What Harald and Michael both learned from working on Focus Mode was the importance of prototyping and creating an environment where the designers and engineers could play with and adjust the feature and quickly collaborate. With something as nuanced as Focus Mode the limitations of static design mockups became apparent very early on, and revealed the need for more dynamic tools. Simultaneously working in an environment with flexible project management allowed the ultimate goal to be changed as much as necessary. And what have they been able to do with the fruit of their labor? Harald and Michal explain in their own words:

Harald: “I do a lot of narrative design for interactive fiction in my spare time, and being able to throw all my thoughts into a document, then sort it, and eventually fine-tune my thoughts into a workable narrative idea is a process that produces huge mind maps. All the characters, places, events, plot-relevant objects, groups and what not can make it hard to concentrate on a specific part. Don't get me wrong, I need that creative chaos to find unexpected connections and come up with plot-twists that are interesting, but having the option to simply push away all the distraction and focus on just one scene is extremely helpful to me.”

Michael: “I use it most of the time to present the content of a large mind map in smaller pieces. It’s also useful during joint brainstorming sessions to ‘lock in’ into a special subtopic.”

Focus Mode is available now in MindNode 6 on Mac and iOS.

We’d love to hear how it’s become a part of your mind mapping flow and what you love, hate or would change about it.

Pro-tip: Refocus quickly from one node to another using the long press gesture on iOS or Option-click on Mac.

More Focused Than Ever - MindNode 6 Has Arrived

MindNode 6 is now available on the App Store and Mac App Store. MindNode 6 comes with a brand-new Focus Mode, Sticker Search, and the ability to hide Connections.

It also brings Multi-Select, improved External Screen Support, and customizable Panels to iOS.

And we added Traditional Chinese as our 14th supported language! MindNode 6 is a free update for all MindNode 5 customers.

Focus Mode

Our brand-new Focus Mode puts a spotlight on one part of your mind map and fades out all the rest. It minimizes distractions and - at the same time - ensures you don’t lose context. The path to the main node is always visible, and when you zoom out, surrounding nodes will slowly fade in. This unique perspective enables you to easily refocus on a single area of your idea.

To help you reduce distractions even further, we also added the ability to - independently of Focus Mode - hide all connections on your canvas.

Sticker Search

Stickers are a great way to give your documents clarity and personality. As our library grew, it became harder to find the right Sticker for your thought. With the search field in the sticker picker, you can now quickly find the perfect sticker in no time.

Multi-Select on iOS

Styling, editing and rearranging multiple nodes at once just got a whole lot easier. Select multiple objects by touching and holding anywhere on the canvas. Alternatively, long press the canvas to start a rubber band selection. And in case you're using an Apple Pencil, touch the canvas with one finger and move the pencil to start a rubber band selection.

External Screen Support (iOS only)

Big ideas need space, and with an external screen, you get a different perspective on your ideas. Using the feature "Lock Viewport" in the settings, you can lock the zoom and scroll position on your external screen to always keep one part of your document in view. You're now also able to use Quick Look to view images and configure the resolution of connected displays.

Customizable Panels (iOS only)

MindNode's most important task is to support you exactly where you need it. This applies to every (UI) element of MindNode including panels. Drag and drop your favorite actions from the Actions Panel onto the Panel's quick actions slots. On iPad, you also got the ability to drag Panels to the other side of the screen now.

Traditional Chinese Localization

MindNode is now fully localized to Traditional Chinese. With this addition, we now support 14 different localizations: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English (US), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (Spain), and Swedish.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Besides adding features that give you more focus we also wanted to make the transition between the iOS and the macOS versions of MindNode as seamless as possible. This is why we also decided on changing some of our keyboard shortcuts. Yes, for your muscle memory, it will take some time to adapt, if you were used to the old shortcuts. But trust us, in the long run, you will enjoy being able to use the same shortcuts on your iPad and Mac. We can sincerely say this because everybody in our team went through the same process.

MindNode 6 is a Free Update

MindNode 6 is a free upgrade for all MindNode 5 customers. If you are using MindNode 2 for Mac or MindNode 4 for iOS, we offer discounted upgrades for MindNode 6.

For more details please have a look at our release notes:

• MindNode for iOS Release Notes
• MindNode for Mac Release Notes

If you tried MindNode 5 before and want to retry MindNode 6, you can reset the trial using the following links:

• Reset iOS Trial
• Reset Mac Trial

A Snappier MindNode Part 2 - Text Persistence

MindNode lets you format text in various ways.

You can use different font types, make text bold, italic or underlined, or use strikethrough.

Under the hood, we save your text and its formatting using a markup language called HTML, the same used for websites.

HTML makes it easy to display the same formatted text when sharing MindNode documents to myMindNode, our web service for viewing your mind maps in a browser.

Since MindNode 2 we have been using a component called Ashton to transform formatted text to HTML.

Ashton stands for AttributedString to HTML Transformation and we open sourced it a long time ago.

Up to MindNode 5.1, Ashton required a lot of extra work to compensate for differences between iOS and macOS.

First, it converted the platform-specific text to an intermediate format, which is then converted into HTML, as illustrated below.

Using this method we were able to share more code between iOS and macOS when converting between the intermediate format and HTML.

Back then this was a sensible decision. The platforms had a lot of differences and a layered approach was a suitable solution to tackle this complexity.

Since then, both platforms have evolved and the differences in the text system shrunk significantly.

Therefore, we decided to rewrite Ashton without the overhead of an intermediate format, speeding up the loading and saving of documents in MindNode, simplifying the process diagram.

The rewrite was undertaken in Swift, which we expected to give us an additional performance boost when compared to the former Objective-C implementation. Surprisingly, after testing our first rewrite approach we experienced a significant slowdown despite having removed the intermediate conversion phase. After analyzing the performance in more detail, we discovered that Swift’s string manipulation methods were substantially slower than the previously used Objective-C implementations. But we didn't stop there. We further refined our rewrite, by diving one abstraction level deeper into Swift String handling and used the character view directly for parsing the input. Consequently, we were finally happy with the results of the rewrite.

Measuring the speed of both implementations showed the following results:

Ashton 2.0.0: 0.0055 sec.

Ashton 1.0.3: 0.013 sec (136% slower).

AppKit Implementation: 0.13 sec (2236% slower).

The results show, that we were able to improve the reading performance substantially.

Reading text from a MindNode file is now twice as fast as before 🎉.

Interestingly, the writing speed slightly decreased compared to the old implementation.

This was a result of slower AttributedString reading performance due to the use of Swift. Nevertheless, as consequence of the ongoing performance refinements on the Swift programming language we expect this time to go down in future.

From a user's perspective, the reading speed which affects document opening performance, is far more important than the marginal writing slowdown, when closing a document.

Additionally, we improved other aspects of the Ashton component.

We fixed a longstanding bug which led to removed leading and trailing newlines and also improved the text color parsing, removing small visual differences in color perception across macOS and iOS.

Based on this work we were able to enhance our Markdown import to now support bold and italic formatting.

Ashton 2.0 is extensively unit tested, which gives us great confidence in making additional improvements in the future, without worrying about accidentally breaking expected parsing behavior.

We are happy to announce that Ashton 2.0 is now open source as well, you can find it on GitHub.

Ashton is released under MIT license as part of IdeasOnCanvas’s open source effort.

A Snappier MindNode Part 1 - Performance Tuning

At first blush, the last couple of MindNode releases may have seemed minor - focusing on bug fixes and smaller improvements. Though if you dig deeper, and take a closer look, they have been huge. A lot has changed under the hood and depending on the size of your documents and the tasks you usually perform, you might have noticed that MindNode now feels snappier, more responsive and overall much faster than previous versions of MindNode for iOS and macOS.

In this blog post, we will take you through some of the changes to MindNode's code base and architecture, the changes that allowed us to make big performance improvements during document opening, text editing, node dragging and node resizing. Before we start, let's take a look at the final result.

Common Performance Problems

Software today is very complex. There are many factors that influence both the measurable, as well as the perceived performance of the software we all use and love. In fact, performance tuning is a common task for many software engineers - and it can be equally frustrating as well as very satisfying. Finding the fixes for performance issues can sometimes feel like the famous search for the needle in the haystack. While issues might be complex and very diverse, the root source of many performance problems falls into one of a few buckets. Let's take a look at the most common problems and some ways to solve them.

Batch Processing & Deferring

Being lazy might not be a trait, that you'd attribute to fast and snappy software. Funnily enough, it can be one of the most effective solutions to performance problems.

Whenever a result is computed, which isn't actually needed at this point, unnecessary work is done that slows down the device. So being lazy is a good thing - the goal should be to only compute what is actually needed. While this may sound trivial, it's far from trivial in big and complex software with ten thousand lines of code or more. At this size, it can become hard to reason about the code, especially if functions have side effects.

One common example of potentially unexpected side effects can be seen when using Key-value observing. Key-value observing, or KVO, provides a mechanism that allows objects to be notified of changes to specific properties of other objects. Speaking in simplified terms, in Object-oriented Programming we try to mimic real-world objects. These objects can have certain properties and defined behavior, just like real objects. An object car can have properties like color, amount of fuel and max speed and behaviors like accelerate() and break(). Whenever the amount of fuel of our car drops below a certain threshold, we would want to know. KVO is a technology that allows us to observe the amount of fuel of our car, and get notified when it changes.

In MindNode we use KVO a lot. Whenever, for example, you change the color of a node in the inspector, the canvas gets notified of this change and knows that it needs to redraw the node with the new color - exactly what we want. But what if we change the color of many nodes at the same time, like for example when we apply a new theme? The way KVO works is that we get notified about the color-change of every node in our document, potentially hundreds or thousands. If we now redraw the canvas on every change, this is a lot of redundant work. It would be much more efficient to first change the color of all nodes and then redraw the canvas only once.

This is exactly the approach that we took in many places lately. By reducing KVO, providing a batch API and deferring work to a later point, we were able to speed up many operations like dragging around nodes on the canvas.

Caching

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.

– Phil Karlton, Leon Bambrick

A cache stores (usually expensive-to-compute) data, so that future requests can be served faster. In its essence, using caches is another way of being lazy. Instead of computing a result every time we need it, we can cache the result and instantly return it on subsequent requests. Caches can dramatically improve the performance of many tasks, but they come with their own problems. Whenever you cache a result it increases your memory consumption. The result can become outdated. So you need to make sure to correctly invalidate your cache, or you'll be served wrong results.

Ashton is our open source solution to convert between rich text and HTML and it's used heavily during saving and opening of documents. It can convert between an NSAttributedString, the object that is used to represent rich text in iOS and macOS, and an HTML representation of the same text. This conversion is rather costly, so we looked into ways to speed it up.

A node's title, converted by Ashton, can look like this:

<p style='color: rgba(109, 109, 109, 1.000000); font: 20px \"Helvetica\"; text-align: left; -cocoa-font-postscriptname: \"Helvetica\";'>What will make this week a success?</p>

While parsing the HTML description is slow and expensive, in a typical MindNode document many nodes look the same. The text itself, which is unique for this node, is "What will make this week a success?". Everything else describes the formatting of the node - which is exactly the same for many other nodes in the document. Once we realized this, we were able to speed things up with a cache by using the whole formatting string style='color: rgba(109, 109, 109, 1.000000); font: 20px \"Helvetica\"; text-align: left; -cocoa-font-postscriptname: \"Helvetica\";' as the key for our text formatting cache.

If every node in a document is formatted differently this cache is useless and actually slows down document loading. For typical documents, however, our tests showed a 25-30 % speed increase when opening a document.

If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Improve It.

These were just a couple of changes, that we performed lately. By focusing on performance and bug fixes we were able to make MindNode's code base ready for MindNode 6 and the upcoming challenges. Rest assured that along the way, we have been working on some amazing new features, that we plan to release this year.

MindNode 6 – Focus on Your Ideas

As we celebrate MindNode's 11th birthday today, we have a very special surprise for you: MindNode 6 ships next month! It will add a brand new Focus Mode to MindNode. Also it's a free upgrade for users of MindNode 5.

Focus Mode – Focus on Your Ideas

When working on the nitty-gritty details of a broad concept, you just don't want to see the bigger picture. Instead, you want to concentrate on the one area you're currently working on and hide others. Focus Mode allows you to do precisely that. It puts a spotlight on a particular part of the mind map and fades out all the rest. With no more distractions, you can focus on letting your ideas grow.

But there is more! Ideas are unpredictable, and you can never know when inspiration will hit you. To that end, we made it easy to refocus on a different part of the mind map. With Focus Mode you can always follow your train of thought.

MindNode 6 – New Free Update

Focus Mode is only one of the new features that will ship as part of MindNode 6 next month. MindNode 6 on iOS will also add Multi-Select and a greatly improved External Screen Support. Furthermore, we added the ability to hide Cross Connections, and you can now search for stickers.

MindNode 6 will ship on April 24th, and if you have a license for MindNode 5, you can upgrade to MindNode 6 for free.

MindNode Goes Setapp

MindNode for Mac is now available on Setapp. When you are already a Setapp subscriber you can find MindNode right in your Setapp app.

Setapp is a subscription service for Mac applications. For $9.99 /month you can use all apps included in Setapp without an additional charge. And best of all, some of the apps MindNode integrates with, are already part of Setapp:

- Ulysses: a text editor using the TextBundle format. This means you can exchange documents between MindNode and Ulysses.

- Marked: a Markdown previewer which allows you to preview your MindNode documents using Marked (File > Advanced > Open in Marked).

- TaskPaper: a simple text-based to-do list app. MindNode supports importing and exporting TaskPaper documents.

Try Setapp for Free (7-Day Trial)

MindNode 5.2 - Dark Mode, Continuity Camera, Siri Shortcuts, and More

Today we released MindNode 5.2 for macOS and iOS. This update adds Dark Mode, Continuity Camera, a resizable outline, and improved automation including Siri Shortcuts. You can get this update on the App Store now.

Dark Mode - Focus On Your Ideas

You may have noticed that we are supporting a dark interface on iOS for quite some time now. When you switch to a dark theme on iOS, MindNode's UI automatically turns dark. With macOS Mojave and the system-wide Dark Mode, we are now also supporting Dark Mode on the Mac.

In MindNode's preferences you can decide whether you want to adopt the system's default appearance or configure MindNode's appearance for yourself.

Improved Sidebar – See Everything You Want To See

Since earlier this year we had the ability to resize the Notes sidebar. Today we are bringing the same feature to the outline in MindNode for Mac. If you have a large screen (or even if you don't), you can now give the outline a lot more space to see all your ideas at a glance.

When we updated the sidebars to support dark mode and resizing, we also took the time to refresh the overall design. In MindNode 5.2 we carefully updated the layout to use headers and we moved outline search to the bottom of the view. This gives the window a more balanced look.

Continuity Camera - Adding Images Just Got Easier

One easy to overlook, but really neat feature in macOS Mojave is Continuity Camera. With this feature you can use your iPhone or iPad to scan document or take a photo. This feature is now also available in MindNode. If you take notes during presentations this is a great way to snap a photo of a slide and put it right into a node. Or if you use MindNode to learn for your exam, you can scan the pages of a book to store it with your notes.

Automation and Siri Shortcuts - Tie It All Together

One significant new feature in iOS 12 is the integration of Siri Shortcuts. They allow to trigger actions using a Siri phrase and to build complex workflows using Apple's Shortcuts app. MindNode 5.2 adds the ability to launch Quick Entry; open, export and import documents using Siri Shortcuts.

This enables you to build workflows which export a document in MindNode and send it to iMessage for example - all by just using your voice.

To go beyond shortcuts, we also made these actions available via URL Schemes on both - iOS and macOS. This is only the beginning and we hope to add many more automation actions in the future. So please let us know what you want to build! You can learn more about URL Schemes in our User Guide.

Other Enhancements – There Is Even More

This release includes many other enhancements, including custom app icons on iOS, new stickers (Apple, Cake, Clock, Pie, Tree), and a new dark mode optimizes theme Steel). You can learn all about MindNode 5.2 in our Release Notes:

• MindNode 5.2 for Mac Release Notes
• MindNode 5.2 for iOS Release Notes

MindNode 5.2 is available for iOS 11 and later as well as macOS High Sierra and later. With this release, we are no longer supporting macOS Sierra.

MindNode 5 - Volume License

When we released MindNode 5 last year we switched from a paid upfront to a freemium business model. MindNode 5 is a free app on the App Store and the full version can be unlocked using an In-App Purchase (IAP). Considering the constraints of the App Store, this model gave us more flexibility by allowing us to provide you with a free 14-day-trial, discounted upgrades and a viewer-only version of the app.

When we changed business model we were aware that this model also had one major downside: We were no longer able to sell to businesses and education institutions as In-App Purchases are not available on Apple's Volume Purchase Program (this program allows to purchase bulk licenses of App Store apps). We had high hopes that Apple would eventually resolve this oversight, but the Spring Education Event and the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) passed without hints that this might happen in the near future. Talking directly to Apple representatives at WWDC, we realized that we need to find our own solution to this problem. We considered several options, had to dismiss our preferred option due to App Review concerns, but for iOS we finally have a solution that you can start adopting today.

MindNode 5 – Volume License is a new paid upfront version of MindNode 5 that is now available on the iOS App Store. This version is fully feature equivalent to MindNode 5 and we plan to update both versions with the same features going forward. We still think that our standard app is the best solution for most of our users, but if you want to purchase MindNode 5 through Apple's Business and Education Volume Purchase Program, or if you need Family Sharing support, this is the version you should get.

The volume license version is currently only available for iOS. For macOS, we are looking into providing a direct download version through our own web store. Though, we can't share more details at this time.

MindNode 5 – Volume License is now available on the iOS App Store for $14.99.

MindNode 5.1 - Performance Update

We released MindNode 5.1 earlier this week. It's our first major MindNode 5 update and we focused on increasing the overall performance and stability. When manipulating nodes and connections, all interactions are now smoother and more responsive. This is especially true when working on large documents. Also opening and saving documents is considerable faster compared to the previous version.

MindNode 5.1 also includes several other enhancements. On macOS you can now set a global keyboard shortcut for Quick Entry, configure the default file format for improved compatibility with third party sharing services and the ability to resize the notes sidebar.

On iOS we've added the ability to import supported file formats directly from within the app and the possibility to remember your favourite colors in color picker.

Your can find the full release notes here:

• MindNode 5.1 for iOS Release Notes
• MindNode 5.1 for Mac Release Notes

GDPR Updates to Privacy Policy for MindNode, Our Newsletter and myMindNode

I know you've probably heard a lot about this in the last few weeks and might even be sick of it. For us this is really important though, and we think the changes are actually really good for you, our customers. So this is our bit:

Due to the new GDPR regulations coming into effect, would like to inform you of changes to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

You can find the Privacy Policy here. It includes information on our apps, the website, the newsletter and the myMindNode service. *myMindNode* is a web service that allows you to share your MindNode documents on the web.

MindNode Newsletter:

• As before you can unsubscribe with the link at the bottom of every email. Your data will be deleted within 2 weeks.
• Due to a migration of newsletter providers last year, we lost the opt-in documentation for a large number of our subscribers and needed to re-document consent. We sent out a second opt-in email. Unfortunately we messed up the link and not everyone got to confirm the subscription that might have wanted to. If this is you, please subscribe again at the bottom of this page.

myMindNode:

• In compliance with GDPR you can now request a data takeout that will contain all your myMindNode documents here
• To delete your myMindNode account follow this link

If you have any questions, please message us at support@mindnode.com.

How To Automate Achievement In Three Easy Steps

In the first post of this series I talked about how goal setting makes achieving your dreams totally inevitable. After that coin dropped for me, I started asking around about how to effectively track my progress. Because if I can track it it's science and I know how to science. I am a meticulous tracker IF things are quantifiable. Problem: Most personal goals are anything but. (Cue hysterics.)

Take a deep breath and let's review some terms:

A dream is a certain feeling, or lifestyle you want to achieve, or the legacy you want to build. A goal is a teeny tiny step on the path to achieving your dream. You have broken down your dream into goals.

This means that you can not be off track, if you are setting the right goals.

You do not need to know how far along you are to achieving your dreams, all you need to know is that you are progressing.

Do you trust yourself to have chosen the right goals?

Good.

Here are three things you can do to automatically achieve your goals :

Track Habits

You want to track completion of your goals. And one of the best ways to achieve anything is with habits, the automatic completion of a repetitive task. I learned this when my friend Primoz showed me his system, he tracks his habits in an excel sheet. 

As an example, to become a recognized authority on any topic you need to know how to speak and write effectively and authentically. Practicing writing and storytelling are habits that would support that goal.

Of course you could dedicate a whole day each month to writing and storytelling with the goal of ending up with one good story to tell, but it would require much more initial cognitive effort and be less effective than five minutes every day.

Do you think you could come up with a good turn of phrase within seven tries? Most of my writing gets less than two edits. If I spent five minutes a day for one week working on one sentence it might actually be brilliant, effective and memorable. Within a month I would have four such phrases. Can you imagine doing this in one day? No, me neither.

Habits automate reaching your goals. Choose things that if repeated will accumulate into big wins.

Choose the right circumstances

The other side of the habit coin are processes and circumstances.

You could set yourself the task to write 5000 words every day and then struggle to complete the task, or form the habit. You could also see what environment actually supports you in a creative writing flow.

My husband writes really well in the mornings in a café with a background noise of people. I prefer afternoons on the sofa with a dog snuggled up on either side.

Choosing an environment and a time that makes your task easy will mean you do it. It might not always be 5000 words, or always be a text worth publishing, but on the other hand sometimes it will be.

And the more often you do it the more likely you are to get good at it. Trust yourself to get things done without micromanaging yourself. Fix your environment to support valuable tasks.

Take notes on what works and how you spend your time

Depending on how you see yourself you might falsely assume that you are totally getting a lot done, or nothing at all. Neither is likely to be the full truth. Writing down how you spend your time and under what circumstances allows you to track reality and draw conclusions about what works for you.

Going back over notes like these in a weekly, monthly or yearly review allows you to set better goals for the next time period and shows you how you are getting closer to achieving your dreams. These little course corrections and process adjustments bring you closer and closer to smooth sailing

Happy 10th Birthday, MindNode

On this day ten years ago I released MindNode to the public. Like so many things it was born out of my own need and my own struggle with linear thinking.

This Is Why

I've struggled with focus and successful completion of a project my entire life. Over the years I've dreamed up many ideas for products, or projects, but I've always had a hard time when it came to actually developing the idea into something concrete. I tried collecting my ideas in Moleskine notebooks, outlines, text documents, and many more, but the challenge of forming my thoughts into a fully developed idea, and then into a real thing, was hardly ever met. I never seemed to be able to grasp the big picture and forgot important details along the way. You can say I was - and still am - a very unstructured person.

Enter Mind Mapping

What helped was when I discovered mind mapping, more than ten years ago. For the first time I had a concept that allowed me to collect thoughts in an unstructured way and process them visually in a way that is so much more how my brain works, than everything else I tried previously.

I started to use pen and paper to visualize my thoughts and this is what started my path towards developing MindNode. So for me, MindNode, at first, wasn't the product I was ultimately aiming for, but a tool to enable me to clear my thoughts for other ventures.

Today I start almost everything with a mind map - even this post. At first I collect every single thought. This includes thoughts that initially seem completely unrelated, thoughts that contradict previous thoughts, or thoughts that are seemingly only a different way to phrase a previous thought. I even mix and match German and English words in the same thought. My initial brainstorming mind maps are always a "mess", but this is how my brain works. I learned to accept it. Even better, I discovered that writing down literally every single thought frees my mind to discover new connections. As MindNode has grown from a simple thought, to a small app, to a business, this initial brainstorming step is still the core of MindNode.

Becoming a Team

When I last wrote about how MindNode came to be (The road to MindNode 1.0), a few freelancers helped me with certain aspects of the app like design and coding. Then, almost five years ago I hired my first employee and the company has grown ever since. Only last year we doubled the number of employees to six and we are currently looking into hiring a backend developer to help us bring brainstorming to teams.

MindNode is no longer my baby, but the combined effort of a motivated team of people who share a common passion: helping you, our users, develop your thoughts into something alive in the world.

How we Create our App Store Screenshots

Today we want to share a small side project with you that we created during the development of MindNode 5. Screenshot Framer is a free app we are sharing with other developers to help create appealing App Store screenshots.

The first thing a potential customer notices when they come to an App Store page are the screenshots of the app. If they are boring, chances are they will move on.

Here are two examples of the same content. Which screenshot do you like more?

The first image is a little bit boring, right? Sure it shows the content of the app but not much more. The second image looks much more appealing. If you look at all the images you see a visual description of the app.

The white device frame shows what the app will look like on your device, but does not distract from the main content, the screenshot itself. The label on top guides the customer through the different screens and adds a lightweight description. Would you rather read the complete app description, or a short summary while you see the app in action?

Mind mapping is a visual tool, so we chose the same approach for our screenshots. In the following I want to share how we created these screenshots for MindNode.

Simulator Status Magic

At first we had to make sure the status bar is consistent on all screenshots. We use the tool Simulator Status Magic. This allowed us to displayed the same time, battery status, etc.

Fastlane screenshot

Image headers are a great idea, but MindNode is localized in 13 languages. With five images and 5 devices that adds up to over 300 images. To speed things up, and dramatically reduce errors, we used fastlane. This allowed us to automate the creation of the raw screenshots. We created 390 screenshots with a click of a button.

Fastlane frameit

Now comes the hard part. We needed to frame these screenshots and add text. At first we tried fastlanes `frameit` which is super easy if you use the original Apple device frames. These frames shows the devices realistically, which takes too much attention away from our main content. Trying to work with frameit and our own frames was really frustrating and we didn't get it right. This was the main reason why we developed our own application.

Screenshot Framer

The task was really simple. We needed to stack different images on top of each other and take a picture of it. After a week of work we had a simple prototype which was then extended and polished. After roughly three weeks of work, we had a more flexible solution. The app itself works like a really minimalistic version of Photoshop, but can display text in different languages and export the finished image in all languages at the click of a button.

Upload to iTunes

The last step was to upload the created images to iTunes Connect. Normally you need to upload the images manually. You can imagine that dragging 390 images, five at a time, to Safari is a very boring and time consuming task. Again we used fastlane and it's tool `deliver` to upload all 390 screenshots in roughly 20 minutes.

Free Download of Screenshot Framer

We receive a lot of support from the open-source community and we would like to give something back. Today we are releasing Screenshot Framer for free. Check it out at GitHub.

You can learn more about our other open source project on our dedicated page.

Improving Integrations with Things and Sharing Providers

We've continually been working on improvements to MindNode 5 since it's release. Generally we save the list of changes for the release notes. Today though we sneaked some interesting changes into a minor release and we want to highlight some changes for you that we think you should definitely know about.

New Things export

Integrations with other Apps is one of the things that makes MindNode so powerful. What we can offer often depends on what interfaces the developers of another software offer. One such are URL Schemes that allow you to perform an action like opening a new document in another app.

With Things 3.4 Cultured Code are introducing an all new URL Scheme that will allow us not only to improve our task export to Things 3, but also to finally bring it to iOS.

To use the improved new export of your tasks to Things 3, ensure that you have MindNode 5.0.6 or later. Select the share button and select Things as your export location.

This will create a new project in Things titled with the name of your document. Below the title you will find a URL that opens the MindNode file directly (if your document is saved in the MindNode container in iCloud Drive), regardless of whether you are on the Mac, or on iOS.

In MindNode only the outermost leaves of a branch are tasks, their parents and grandparents only carry a status indicator. Previously the hierarchy of a node was hidden in a note on the newly created task in Things. Now we create headings that show the hierarchy of the respective tasks and the notes field is free to be filled with the notes you have added to that task in MindNode.

Things is available for the Mac, iPad and iPhone. There is a free trial of the Mac version available on the Cultured Code website.

Improved Support for third Party cloud services

Those of you, who are into that kind of technical detail, know that MindNode uses a package format. Package formats are like hidden folders *pretending* to be a file. What this allows is to store different components of a file separately, which is great when you are re-uploading a file and only have to update the text rather than also updating picture elements. It makes uploads and downloads faster and uses less mobile data.

Unfortunately not all cloud services handle package formats really well. Generally they need to be particularly coded to do so. For that case we offer a single file format. Until recently you had to specifically select and export this format in MindNode. With version 5.0.6 we are automatically detect where you are saving a file and will change the format to single file if you are NOT saving to the MindNode container in iCloud Drive, or locally. This enables you to use Box, Dropbox and OneDrive in the new document browser.

For now this change is iOS only, but we plan to also bring this feature to our Mac version. Until than you can manually switch new documents to single file in the main menu under *File > Advanced > File Format > Single File*.

Bringing URL Schemes to MindNode 5 for Mac

On iOS we have had the ability to open a MindNode document using a URL scheme for some time now. In a recent update we made this even easier by adding a new sharing extension to create the URL directly from the document manager UI (long press on a document in document manager, select "Share" and pick "Copy URL Scheme" from the sharing actions). With 5.0.6 we are now bring the URL schemes also to the Mac. You can now use the format mindnode://open?name=YourDocument to link to any file in the MindNode iCloud container and links will work on iOS and macOS.

How I Developed the Superpower of Achieving Anything I Set My Mind To

Having a life worth living is hard, right?

I mean, sure, you have a dream, you break it down into goals and achieving goals takes lots of steps that you achieve in even tinier steps, right? It all takes a lot of time, right? And sure, you can probably do anything you set your mind to, but if the goal is truly meaningful and worth achieving it will be hard and intimidating. Right?

Uh, maybe ... not.

Like you I used to believe all those things and never really did any of the audacious things I dreamed of. Turns out I was wrong.

It’s true that you need to take tiny steps, but it is not true that those would inevitably include things that were painful and intimidating.

In fact reaching your goals is actually totally INEVITABLE. That's right, inevitable!

Let’s clarify some terms

A dream is something you want to achieve; say helping people resolve business challenges, while getting to travel around the world.

A mission is something you need to fulfill that dream. Like a map of the dream. In this example a mission could be to develop the tools and teaching methods to help people resolve the business challenges and to build a business that allows me the type of flexibility and income to live my version of a rich life.

As you can see neither the vision, nor the missions are particularly specific.

This was my first stumbling block. I believed that I had to make my grand fuzzy vision into a clearly described very specific goal. (True.) I believed that to be specific I needed to add things like „By the time I’m 35“ or „6-figure income“. (False.) Can you see how that ups the pressure? And doesn't do anything to tell me how to actually do the thing? Yeah, not so good.

How this really works

A goal is something much more benign. A goal is a component of the map, say a country road. Once you travel the road you are closer to fulfilling the mission. In our example it might be something like holding a single workshop on this one thing that you are pretty sure will help people be more awesome, so that when you have done it you can analyze the results and learn more. Can you see how that seems much more doable, way less intimidating? Yes.

As you go through breaking down a particular goal you will see that many parts, like the teaching and the organization for example, seem super doable. Only some parts will be really frightening, say marketing; how to find the right people for the workshop.

This is your pressure point. Pressure that builds up into pain if you try to manage the full weight if it.

I used to think that I would just need to get the eff over myself. Now I know better. This is the point where we need to do those steps at the beginning of the article. And not just a little bit. We need to take apart this pain point until it is crushed into dust on our country road. A dust so fine that taking a piece of it seems ridiculously easy, like full on, belly-laughing, ridiculously easy. Say step one is asking your bestie for advice. Can you ask your bestie for advice? Sure you can.

With each step, with each grain of dust, you tick off, you eliminate a piece of the pressure point. Carrying a piece of dust from A to B is something we can do every day! Can you see the amazing thing that happened here? Something that seemed hard turned into something that would inevitably happen. Just like that.

On the surface you know what you have to do, but do you really get it that you can do anything you set myour mind to?

Yoda said: "Do, or not do. There is no try." How about this year you don't try to achieve your goal, be it a side business, a book, or a sabbatical. How about this time you break it down so fine that all there is, is the choice to do?

MindNode 5 – It Starts With a Thought

It is my pleasure to introduce MindNode 5 to you today.

An optician once told my dad about the new expensive glasses he was sporting, “Don’t worry if nobody notices your new glasses, it just means that they suit you perfectly.”

We’ve rethought every part of our app to make it more intuitive to use. We hope that you will find the new UI that MindNode sports as invisible as my dad’s new glasses.

Connect your thoughts and clarify your ideas.

We started MindNode 10 years ago, the same year that Apple released their first iPhone. With the iPhone X Apple has completely rethought their design and with MindNode 5 we’re doing just the same.

Rather than fudging the existing design to work on the iPhone X, MindNode 5 on iOS uses floating panels. They always show the most relevant actions, and are particularly adapted to this iPhone. Collapsed panels allow easy access to important shortcuts. Expanded panels host inspector, outline and the all new actions panel. The actions panel gives access to new and relevant actions like "Sort Subnodes Alphabetically", "Zoom to Fit", and "Add new parent node".

Similarly we’ve adapted the user experience on the Mac. We’ve taken a step back from hiding all of our tools in an Inspector and to give you the most frequent actions right in the toolbar. A new left sidebar hosts the outline and the new theme picker. Power users can now choose their own set of tools for the toolbar and keep Notes and Outline open at the same time.

With this release MindNode is moving past being just a mind mapping app into something more. We’ve listened to what you’ve said about how you use MindNode and we’ve found it’s a “visual brainstorming” app, more than just a mind mapper. This release is all about making that visual brainstorming as easy as possible. In terms of priorities it means we stuck to a focused feature set and a clean interface.

Nobody wants to spend hours learning how to get their thoughts on the page. We don't want you to be distracted by dozens of adjustment options. Instead we make sure your document looks great, while you make sure the content is amazing.

Join us on a tour of MindNode 5:

Capture Your Thoughts

Our big new feature for the beginning of your thought process is Quick Entry. You might want to start out just laying down a few keywords for your document. The menu bar widget on the Mac and the Today Widget on iOS let’s you do just that. Each new line is a new entry. And when you are done, you click a button and a new document is created automatically.

Any idea starts with a loose collection of thoughts. MindNode makes it easy to get them into one document. On iOS we’ve made the leap to iOS 11 only, so we can take advantage of the new features, like Drag and Drop from other apps.

MindNode’s Smart Layout feature has always made sure your document is readable and beautiful. This is now clearly the default; you can disable it by checking "Manual Layout" in the layout panel. So you don’t have to worry about layout when you are just getting your thoughts down.

Explore the Connections

Only when we start making connections do thoughts become ideas. MindNode gives you the space to easily configure and reconfigure the relationships between different thoughts.

We’ve added several improvements to these features and made it easy to trigger them using the actions panel and new keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts also work in the new iOS full screen mode, that allows you to focus on your ideas even more.

Organize your Idea

MindNode helps clarify the context and connections from one thought to another. Add individual styles to text and nodes to understand complex information at a glance. We are adding top-down layout and orthogonal branches, our most requested features. A brand new color picker on iOS gives you access to more colors than ever before and makes it easier to find related colors.

Many additional tweaks, like unlimited personal themes and redesigned stickers, allow you to create even more beautiful and expressive documents.

With the outline view you can easily browse through even the largest document. Expand or collapse what you need and search your entire document. It now always displays the entire title and you can select to view your notes inline. We also improved search to show all results in a node.

Share your Project

Present or export your document. Publicly share interactive documents via our myMindNode service. Whoever you send them to can explore your ideas without having to install anything.

On iOS 11 we adopted the new document manager. Open documents stored anywhere in iCloud Drive, create nested folders, and easily access documents from supported third party document providers like Box or Google Drive.

Download

- MindNode 5 for iOS

- MindNode 5 for macOS

System Requirements

- MindNode 5 for Mac: macOS Sierra, or newer

- MindNode 5 for iOS: iOS 11, or newer

- MindNode 5 for Apple Watch: watchOS 4, or newer

MindNode is localised to Arabic, English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Simplified-Chinese.

Release Notes

- MindNode 5 for iOS

- MindNode 5 for macOS

10 Ways to Jumpstart Your Creativity

There are days we sit down and get to work translating the vision in our minds into something tangible, be it an important email, a proposal, or an event.

Other days we slog along and nothing gets done. We bang our heads against the table waiting for inspiration. The muse won’t do us the favour.

Though, as Steven Pressfield reminds us in The War of Art:

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

We can’t wait around for inspiration to strike. We have to do the work anyway. Here are 10 ways to get the creative juices flowing, no inspiration needed:

1 Practice having ideas and associated thoughts

Creativity is like a muscle. The more you use it the stronger it gets, and the more you can lift. Creativity is combining old ideas in new ways, so you can practice having ideas with anything.

Start making lists of ideas. Write down places to visit, books to write, interesting sounding jobs, things that would look horrible in green, even horrible shades of green (and there are many). See where some free association will get you.

Collect your best ideas on index cards. When you need a new one draw two index cards from the pile and mix.

2 Steal ideas from an unrelated field

Stealing is bad. You’re not allowed to just copy what others are doing. Embarrassingly, you probably wouldn’t do it as well as they’ve had more practice. Then again why would you want to anyway? Straight copying is boring. Looking at something that seems completely unrelated and creatively seeing how that applies to you and what you do, however, that’s different.

Say you are working on workshop you want to present, what if for a moment you pretended to be an astrophysicist studying the stars. Imagine how you would approach their questions and see if you can apply the same approach to your workshop as well.

3 Talk to a friend

You don’t have to do it alone. Sometimes explaining to someone where you are at and how you are struggling is enough to figure out the next step to take. Sometimes talking about something lets you know what you really think of it. Pick up your phone. Better yet, meet at a café, or take a walk in the park. And on that topic…

4 Take a walk, or do the dishes

Funny thing about walking, it gets you going. Part of that is that the motion gets the ideas moving too. Keep your phone handy to record notes as you walk. Doing the dishes, or any other repetitive and simple activity that frees the mind to wander, can also stimulate the though process.

5 Dance it out

Scientists are known for being dry and factual and yet, every year there is a Science Dance Off, where scientist describe their projects in interpretive dance. What if instead of writing your blogpost you set out to dance it?

Or if dancing is not your thing, how about you paint your business plan, or even just get out paper and pen to handwrite. Working in a different way lets our brain look at a problem in a new way, and when you’re stuck, that’s always good.

6 Rephrase the question

Remember how our teachers used to tell us to say things in our own words? This is kind of like that. When you rephrase the question, or problem, you are taking on a new perspective and sometimes that makes all the difference.

7 Change your place, change your luck

Speaking of changing perspectives; there’s an old jewish saying that changing your place changes your luck. Why not give it a go?

Experiment and see what happens when you sit on the floor, or stand on your chair to work, or maybe go outside, down the road, turn left and sit at your favorite cafe with your favorite beverage and just the smallest, tiniest little piece of cake. Just a bite really. Friands are very tasty.

8 Write a shitty first draft

Nothing kills our creative flow like the internal pressure to produce something perfect from the first key stroke. If what I wrote down when I started this post were preserved in perpetuity, I’d definitely never touch a keyboard again.

Between spelling and run-on sentences, it was quite a mess. It’s much better now. No, it is. No. Really. IT IS! And you know what? I got something onto the page. Editing is far easier than original writing. Ernest Hemingway said the first draft of anything is shit, so getting the bad stuff down and out of the way is just part of the process. Next time you stare at a blank page, challenge yourself to write the worst possible first draft. You get extra points for every spelling mistake and every unnecessary adjective.

9 Talk to your creative blocks

Having a creative block sucks, but have you considered asking it why it is there? You can imagine it as a creature with a voice blocking your way. Ask what it wants. Listen. Often our creative blocks have overblown expectations of our perfection. Learn about what they are. Then allow them to dissipate. Your creative blocks mean well, but generally they don’t understand that safety and success are not mutually exclusive.

10 Take a nap

If nothing else helps, a nap is a surefire way to renewed energy and changed perspective. When we stop holding on to our shoulds and musts so tightly, as we do when we sleep, our unconscious has time to noodle the project and sort itself, so you can get up and directly to work.

What are your favourite ways to get into a creative flow? Let us know on twitter.

Photo by Khara Woods

MindNode 5 is Coming!

We have been releasing small hints about our next major update for some time now and today I'm finally able to officially announce what we have been working on for the last two years: MindNode 5 will be released later this year for iOS and macOS.

MindNode 5

MindNode 5 is an update packed with new features, enhancements and many small refinements to make working with MindNode even more productive.

We want to empower you to reach your goals and have an impact, where you think it is important.

Top-Down-Layout and orthogonal branches have been our most requested feature. They will ship with MindNode 5 and will enable you to use MindNode for new use cases, like organisation charts. Other new features include a brand new brainstorming mode and the adoption of many significant iOS 11 features.

I'm personally very excited about how our new lightweight panel-based UI on iOS is turning out. As our initial approach didn't work out, we lost several months as we had to go back to the drawing board. But the effort was worth it and the new solution is a perfect fit for iOS 11 and the brand new iPhone X.

We will share more details in the coming weeks, but for today I'd like to update you on our new payment model.

A new Payment Model

The goal of any business model discussion is to find a solution that is fair to the users and the team that works hard to create an excellent app.

MindNode will celebrate its 10 year anniversary next year and in those years the software business has changed a lot. The App Store revolutionized the purchase experience and brought many new customers to us. While many fellow indie developers had to give up developing their own apps, your ongoing support has enabled us to stay successful without outside funding.

Our current paid upfront model worked great for us all those years, but comes with several disadvantages on the App Store:

New customers are unable to try the app before purchasing and it's not possible to provide existing customers with discounted upgrades when releasing a new version. We learned about this the hard way when we released MindNode 2 for Mac in Spring 2015.

We observed with great interest how other developers moved to new business models. We had many very passionate discussions in the team about switching to subscriptions, staying with the current paid upfront model, and various models in between.

With the current structure of our user base and the way that you use MindNode, a subscription model is not the right way for now. That's why we have decided that MindNode will become a free app with In-App Purchases (IAPs).

The free version will allow the viewing of documents. All editing functionality can be unlocked with an In-App Purchase. Following is what this will look like in detail.

Viewer Mode

The free version doubles as a viewer for MindNode documents. If you only want to edit your documents on your Mac, but want to view them on you iPhone you can now do this without paying for the iOS version.

Full App

When you first download the app you can try all features during a free 14-day trial. If you are ready to buy you can unlock the full app using a one-time In-App Purchase (IAP).

Existing Customers

One of our main motivations to switch to a freemium app was to finally offer existing customers with a discounted upgrade. If you purchased MindNode 2 for Mac or any version of MindNode for iOS, you are entitled to a discounted upgrade.

And beyond that, all new customers since September 1st will be able to upgrade to MindNode 5 for free on the respective platforms.

NOTE: This offer is expired!

Let us know what you think about our plans and subscribe to our newsletter to be notified of more details as we get closer to release.

An Easier Way to Build Knowledge

This spring a parent wrote us that his children use MindNode to study for school. First they make a map of the way the different facts connect and then they look for images on Google that represent, or show the facts. The proud father tells us that all the searching on Google, finding images, and making abstractions and integrating the various types of knowledge was, for his kids, an inseparable part of the learning process.

And this is all well and good. But do you remember when you were in high school, or college, and took notes into an exam? And they were either too small to help or too big to carry? Remember when maybe you weren’t allowed to take notes in and you did anyway (cough)? In socks, on the wrist, under your shirt… I knew someone who wrote cheat notes on his chest and would stare down his shirt front as though he couldn’t help admiring his own muscles. I’m pretty sure it took him a lot of effort to write upside down like that. Should have just studied for the time it took…

Yeah. We’ve seen all the tricks, right?

Of course, back in the day, printers and copiers were sometimes hard to access. All notes were on pads. That’s right. In my day computers were called paper. Old school. Literally. Any and all notes were handwritten. So were assignments and thinking back on it you had to be sorry for the people marking them sometimes.

But there was something in writing out the notes again and again, editing what was written down to the essentials, shuffling around the pages, scattering it all on the floor and looking at it until there was a click moment and the whole would start to fall into a pattern. Then came the task of summarising, extracting the core lessons in the neatest, tidiest, best way possible, even to the point where it could fit on a page or a skinny teenager’s chest.

Maybe after all that, he didn’t end up looking at them so much. No one, with a good, concise document like this, would only have the information summarised on the page, they would have had it summarised in their heads. All they needed was confirmation of what it was they already knew, what it was they’d actually, you know, learned.

That was the thing, looking back on it now: the whole rigmarole of notes and summaries and making a mess on the bedroom floor was integral to the learning process. It may have actually been the learning process.

That’s what mind mapping could have given us, if we’d had it: a learning process, not too different from the good old days, but surer, neater, faster and more effective. Oh well, we’ll just have to show it to the kids and then grumble when they get better grades than we did and talk about things we don’t understand or, worse, perhaps never did.

When looking at what makes up knowledge, a real understanding or a topic, it’s easy to come to the quick realisation that it’s about more than just memorising facts. Facts in context are what creates meaning and knowledge. Even the question asked is part of the knowledge. It says things, all on its own. And, of course, different questions are related. Now once there’s an understanding of that, all the questions and all the answers, and, unfortunately all the further questions that come from all the answers, become easier to understand as well. Knowledge is built. Sometimes, the best of times, you get to build it for yourself.

A tool like mind mapping is pretty much the spars and struts and connections, the cement and the scaffold, of the knowledge and understanding the wielder of the tool is building. It’s strong stuff, holds things together. You can throw all your facts into a document and then group them according to principles and methods to see the way they are connected. Just look below at our example for the topic electricity.

See how closely the use in speakers and motors are related? It wouldn’t be obvious until you researched and mapped it. Similarly you can see we have a lot more knowledge about electric currents. Meanwhile the knowledge on atoms looks like it needs to be expanded upon. Or, maybe, we’ll decide to dive deeper into currents because it looks cool. If you use MindNode to map out what you know, what you’re curious about, then you become the builder of your own learning experience.

Perfect Project Management, Just For You!

Wouldn’t it be nice to just google “perfect project management” and find a system you could un-thinkingly apply and be done with it? Oh, yes!

Considering how many thousands of productivity, task and project management apps there are it seems that perfect is still out of reach. Damn!

Task management, wether it is for a complex project like starting a business, or a straight forward project like putting some shelves up in your apartment, is a highly personal thing. I’ve spent years trying out systems on paper, digital, digital plus paper, and just in my head. Today I use a mix of mind maps, loose paper and a Bullet Journal. It works, at that precarious balance point of now.

Once I am struck with an idea, or a project comes up at work I’ll take notes on scraps of paper, or posit-its, and have them more or less flying around on my desk. Once I realise that a project is bigger than a few notes I open up MindNode and start connecting the pieces. From that I take a list of tasks and transfer that by hand into my journal. Half of you probably rolled your eyes at that last one. As I said; it’s what works for me.

While MindNode doesn't come with ticklers, dates, alarms, and everything else a full-fledged project management app would have, it can do a decent job for these tasks when used creatively. And for most of us something simple and flexible like MindNode will be more than good enough to do both project planning and managing. So in this post I want to introduce some of the features and hacks that make MindNode surprisingly useful for project management.

Tasks

Tasks are the most obvious project management feature. They help create lists of actionable steps and parents show the progress of an over all project. Once all tasks of a branch are toggled complete the parent shows completion as well.

Additional notes can be used to add information to the task at hand. Consider adding location, phone numbers and other relevant information.

Styles

Of course not all tasks or branches are equally important. To signify what is in a burning hurry and what can wait a bit longer you can consider applying different styles to the nodes. If you check out the Style tab in the Inspector you will see that you can individually set borders, colours and thicknesses for nodes. The code that you use will depend heavily on your own aesthetics. To start out you could try colouring nodes with different intensity according to priority and different colours according to difficulty.

Stickers and Emojis

(image: emoji-map.png alt: An example of how to use emojis to assign tasks in MindNode caption: An emoji can help quick understanding width: 350)

For something even more fancy consider using stickers and Emojis. We have our native Image picker with a handful of sticker sets and you can use the shortcut ⌃⌘Space to add Emojis on macOS, or the Emoji-Keyboard on iOS. You can use them to assign a task to a person or signify importance, or time sensitivity.

Using the mind map infrastructure

One of the great things about mapping your project out in MindNode is that you can see the relationship of tasks with each other and how doing one thing contributes directly to the overall progress of a project. Employing cross-connections you can create additional relationships and dependencies. And once your tasks are done feel the satisfying feeling of folding away a branch and making the project overall smaller.

—

These are just some ideas to get you started. MindNode is a very versatile tool and will adapt to a project management method that works for you and the way you work. Have fun and play around; perfection is over-rated.

How to Use MindNode and Ulysses for a Better Writing Process

At IdeasOnCanvas we understand MindNode as part of a project workflow, not a single destination app. That’s why we want to introduce Ulysses – an excellent writing app – to you today. Ulysses and MindNode have file types in common, making a seamless integration possible.

How you approach writing is likely unique to you. Whether you start with some notes; a collection of loose-leaf, digital snippets; a full-blown outline; or straight with a first paragraph. Any which way, Ulysses is a flexible way to get you there.

I must confess, I am usually of the multiple-notes-on-index-cards-type writer. A few of them always get lost and then turn up later, making for nice twists on the new piece I am writing. So when I look at writing software, I am looking for something that is as simple to use as those note cards and allows me complexity on par with any word processing app. Ulysses, I am happy to say, manages that beautifully.

A short tour of Ulysses

In its standard layout, Ulysses comes with a Library, a document section, and your writing space. At the top, you can find a simple button to create a new document. Click it and you can immediately start writing.

Instead of cluttering the app with all kinds of formatting buttons, it allows the use of Markdown to structure a text. A traditional word processor will require you to pick a style for each and every type of heading, description, and text. With Markdown you simply assign it an order and are done. Styling happens later. By choosing Markdown Ulysses lets you focus on the content above the look of what you are writing.

Additionally, its simple layout transfers well to iPhone and iPad allowing note-taking and writing anywhere. Sync over iCloud makes your notes instantly available everywhere.

I said I’d make this a short tour, so I won’t go into all the features. It has to be noted though, that while it is easy to just get started writing, Ulysses incorporates a powerful set of features for even the most demanding text wrangler, including notes, writing goals, and outline views.

Once you are done you can either leave the note right where it is or add it to a collection in your library. How you use collections depends on you, I prefer to use them like individual notebooks. You might want to use them as a collection of book chapters, or project sections. This collection is displayed in the central column, so you know how your current document relates to the overall project. Of course, it is entirely possible to just display your writing process, focus on the white space and your typing.

Ulysses offers several export options to continue on with your text. As a blogger, you can send your document directly to Wordpress, or Medium, or create an ebook. Here you have the choice to use several different styles, or even create your own. With power like that at your fingertips, nothing can prevent you from writing the great “American” novel anymore.

Integrating with MindNode

Now a more complex writing project of mine likely doesn’t live exclusively on index cards, or in digital notes, but goes an additional round through a mind map in MindNode. Here I will map out the topic, ideas, and applications before trying to wrangle it into a coherent text. Any research I have done, images collected and the like, will live in this document. When I am ready to flesh out this outline I export it as TextBundle and then drop this into my Ulysses Library to work on. MindNode converts your nodes according to their hierarchy level to first, second and third-order headings and nested lists

What’s even more fun, this exchange doesn’t work just one way. As I mentioned with the index cards, I’m likely to just collect snippets of text inside a digital notecard. I can also export this from Ulysses and import this partial list into MindNode to flesh out the ideas until I am ready to make a full text out of it.

How to share documents between MindNode and Ulysses

To export a MindNode map into Markdown or TextBundle select the Export option in the File menu. This will open the Export menu where, under Text, you can select to export with Markdown, including pictures.

You can then drag the document into Ulysses or use the Open panel to open it in the app.

In Ulysses you can export a sheet, or even multiple sheets, using the share symbol at the top of the window. In the dropdown menu, you can select the type of document to create and whether to send it to another app, like MindNode.

Again you can drag the Markdown document onto MindNode, or open it via the Open panel.

Get Ulysses

Ulysses is available on the Mac App Store for $44.99 and for iOS at $24.99. You can download a free trial on the Ulysses website, that is limited to ten hours, after which the sheets you create become read-only.

You also have the chance to win one of five licenses for Ulysses. To enter please tweet our tutorial on Twitter, or comment on our Facebook post.

The giveaway is open until Tuesday, June 13th, 2017 at 2 pm CET, and the winners will be announced on June 14th, 2017.

Using TextBundle with MindNode

For some time now, MindNode had the ability to import documents from, and export documents to Markdown, which is a simple format to share text with formatting. A limitation of Markdown is that, while you can reference images, you can't actually include them in the file. This is where TextBundle comes in handy, a format MindNode is now able to import and export.

TextBundle is a Markdown format that bundles images with the text. Any app that can read this particular Markdown version, now also has access to the images that come with the text. This allows you to easily transfer your mind map to Ulysses, for example. You can flesh out what has, essentially, become an outline, into a full text.

When you look at the export dialog, accessed through the File menu on macOS, you can select to export your document as text. Here you have multiple options such as Markdown, Plaintext and Word document. Once you select Markdown you get the option to include images as well. This will automatically create a TextBundle file instead of a Markdown file.

On iOS you access the export options from the Share menu. Here Markdown and TextBundle are separate options. In fact, since we want to save images along with the text file we use the compressed format TextPack. You can find it at the bottom of the format selection.

In the world of sandboxing, where access needs to be given on a case by case basis, bundling all the files you need for one project with different apps makes life just that much easier.

You can find the complete list of apps that use TextBundle on the TextBundle.org page.

And in case you are wondering; here is a whole list of the formats that you can export from MindNode:

- FreeMind: supported by most mind mapping apps

- OPML: supported by most Outliners and many mind mapping apps, does not apply formatting

- CSV: supported by spreadsheet apps

- Plain Text: supported by all text editors, no formatting

- RTF: supported by most text editors, includes formatting

- Markdown: for Markdown editors, converts easily to HTML

- TextBundle & TextPack

- Single File MindNode: supported by MindNode and makes it easier to save files to sharing and note-taking services

- Docx: supported by Microsoft Office and many Wordprocessers (only supported on macOS)

- PNG: image format

- PDF­: vector-based, so scales very well when enlarged

Image (modified): Lisa Nottingham under CC-license

How to Get Married Without Losing your Mind

When I got engaged last year my sister immediately said “You know, after you are married you know how to plan the perfect wedding. Hopefully that’s the most useless knowledge ever.” I proceeded to ask her all the questions and listened to only half of her advice.

So before I went on vacation last week to get married I sat down and wrote down my own more, or less useful advice and the boss indulged my fancy of posting it here.

Here’s to the future in which you have more use of this information than I.

Have fun clicking through the document, there are levels to it, not just nodes ... also comments.

Download MindNode Document

Getting Married Blogpost

A MindNode mind map.

Q&A: Linking Documents Across Platforms

One of the things that makes mind mapping on the computer so much more powerful than a simple paper document, is the ability to easily incorporate many different types of data. Be it images, music, texts, or other types of digital files.

Philip from the Netherlands asks:

“I want to add files to my mind maps, can I do that?”

In MindNode 2 for Mac we have the ability to add any file on your Mac to a note. You simply open a Finder window and drag the file onto the note. MindNode takes care of the rest, adding an Alias for the file. To access the file you open the note, click the linked document symbol and the file is opened in Finder.

This is really great when you are working on a single Mac. Once you move over to using the same document with multiple devices, or even on both the Mac and iOS platform, you will run into trouble. The Aliases don’t transfer to other computers, or mobile devices.

Let me get overly technical for a moment:

There’s several reasons for this. An Alias is not the file itself, just a note with an address, like an URL. We don’t import the documents into MindNode, because it would make files huge and working on them clunky. And what’s worse, when you share the files to your mobile devices they would take up precious space and bandwidth.

So why can’t we do a thing where we store all the files in iCloud and then access them in MindNode on our iOS device? The answer is Sandboxing. It’s the technical term that Apple uses for the restricted file access that it has implemented.

Sandboxing makes a lot of sense if you consider that your carry your life around with you and you don’t just want any app, or any person accessing your files. It becomes an issue when you use an app as part of a whole workflow.

How to link files

I’m not going to leave you with just technical ranting though. While there is no perfect solution, one way to circumvent Apples restrictions is to use links to cloud services, so online document storage.

If you store all relevant documents in a Dropbox folder, you can use the links to those in either node titles, or notes. When you open the link in MindNode 4 for iOS it takes you directly to the document in the Dropbox app. The same goes for documents stored in Google Drive. (Though be careful, Google Drive does mess up MindNode files if they are not saved in the Singlefile format.)

On the Mac this is slightly less comfortable, as the links will not take you to the Dropbox, or Google Drive folder, but to the website and there is no easy way to navigate from the Website to the actual document in your Dropbox folder. You can, however, read the document path and open the document manually. Another option would be to include both an Alias-type link to the file in your Dropbox folder and the Dropbox link so you can access them on either platform.

**Q & A posts answer interesting and frequently asked questions by our users and give us the opportunity to share our long form answers.**

photo credit: joshtasman Question Finger 1 license

How To Learn Faster and Better

Many of us believe that if we want to learn something new, like a new skill, that all we need to do is sit down, read the book and then practice. I can show you a better way to learn.

A favourite online personality, Ramit Sethi, often admonishes his students saying “front load the work”. Basically he means come prepared to meetings, projects and interviews.

But it goes deeper than that. It’s about being smart and structured with your planning. If you plan while you have that initial bout of motivation, you have a chance to set yourself up to make the actual work automatic and easy.

One common adage is that it takes 10,000 hours to go from beginner to expert. And yet, when scientist look at elite musicians, or athletes, they find that the difference between the best and the very best is not in the hours of practice, but in the way they practice.

I’m going to be using guitar playing as an example for this post, because it is something I am personally interested in, but these principles transfer equally well to anything you want to learn. I found mind mapping in this context extremely helpful as it allowed me to go from general themes to more and more detailed analysis of what it is I need to learn and achieve.

Playing the Guitar

A MindNode mind map.

Download Mind Map

Each learning process has two goal components, result and process goals. For the first you imagine yourself as having succeeded and set a goal for *what it means to have achieved the skill*. In my case what I really want is to sit around at the beach with my friends and be able to play a song with them. I picked two songs that I wanted to be able to play, to consider myself a guitar player. Learning classical guitar skills would not bring me there and would likely not be interesting. Picking two songs is a good start for the next part of planning.

The second goal is a goal of how much time you are going to invest, like “I will practice 10 minutes a day”. For skills that require a lot of dexterity or muscle memory shorter more frequent sessions are ideal. That said. Having one practice session a week is infinitely better than no practice session, so set your goal in a way that is achievable.

Now that you have your goals, let’s go into details. Look at your goals and identify the skills that you need to achieve them. This will be a little like Arya stabbing around in the dark, trying to hit her adversary. At first you will fail, but soon you will find things that add to your picture.

For learning the guitar there are two major components, Muscle Memory and Musicality. You have to develop the finger strength and independence to make the chords, or pick strings and you have to develop left and right hand coordination. On the other hand it helps to understand rhythm and the ability to hear if what you are playing matches the sound in your head. Beyond that anything that requires tools, requires that you know how to take care of these tools.

From here it is even easier to break down the goals you have. A little bit of googling got me to Tim Ferris’ blog where his guest and readers take apart learning the guitar effectively.

Another big component of learning is to know what you are practicing. To this end you can record yourself at the end of each practice session doing what you just learned. Then at the beginning of the next, with fresh eyes, watch what you did and decide what you are going to practice today and what progress you are making. At the end you record again. This is one excellent way to keep you on track to reaching your learning goal.

Another way to keep yourself on track is to find allies and support. Find someone to cheer you on, a teacher who or friend who is more knowledgeable in what you want to learn, someone who will check in that you did what you committed to and whatever else you think you need in support. The great thing about learning as adults is that we are not required to study in the way we did in school, or going to piano lessons. We can choose to get instructions in a way and from someone that works for us. But this only works, if we have done the work before hand to understand what we are trying to achieve.

In the end I decided that, knowing what it took to learn the guitar, I would rather not do it and enjoy other people making music for me. After wistfully staring at guitars for years, wishing I could play, I feel content now knowing that I decided not to.

Photo by Ernesto Pletsch, licensed under Creative Commons by license, modified.

Journaling with MindNode

The key purpose of journaling is to sort through thoughts, feelings and stories. It allows you to capture tasks and get an overview over what is important to you. And the benefits are many. What journaling allows you to do is to make connections between seemingly unrelated things in your mind. For some, the pure act of writing or typing out their thoughts allows these connections to form.

Journaling has become the self-help genre’s answer to all life’s problems. Pinterest is full of hand lettered inspiration and blown out photos depicting young women with a notebook and pen, holding a steaming mug of coffee. 

This kind of setup is fine if you are a wordy person who doesn’t shy away from an empty notebook page and long form writing. Some of us find journaling that way slightly terrifying though, so I was very intrigued when I heard from several MindNode users that they use mind mapping to journal.  

Mind mapping is the ideal tool, especially for those of us who don’t enjoy writing. You make shorthand notes on a page, or in a document, as they come to you and when you have emptied your head you use branches and connections to arrange the thoughts in a structure that makes sense. 

So you might have thoughts about wedding invitations and the meeting next week jumbled in with thoughts about how to bring about world peace and, oh, the milk you need to buy at the store and the yoga class you want to try. Each item becomes a prompt to associate further and see what is there.

The thing about journaling is that we don’t censor ourselves. Every thought will have its place. The beauty of mind mapping is that it allows you to break out of linear thinking and having to think one thing through first, slowly placing all the items in visual relation to each other. 

In the mind map below I have included a few journaling prompts to get you started. Write down what these questions or topics trigger in you. 

It is hosted on MyMindNode and you can navigate it here, or download it to your own device to work from directly.

Journaling with MindNode

A MindNode mind map.

The Road to MindNode 1.0

On this very day 5 years ago I released MindNode 1.0 and it changed my life. I’ve never talked about how MindNode came together and I’d like to use this occasions for a short trip down memory lane.

A Failure

About six or seven years ago I attended a presentation by Will Shipley at WWDC’s Student Sunday. He talked about his success with Delicious Library and motivated us to follow his lead and create great Mac applications. This really inspired me and the idea got stuck in my head.

At this time I was working on InfiniteCanvas - a simple tool for creating visual stories/comics that aren’t restricted by the confinements of a page. I developed IC as part of my final thesis at university. I saw high potential in the concepts explored in this app and had the idea to build 2.0 into a full featured presentation tool. In functionality similar to Keynote, but much more interactive and free form.

InfiniteCanvas 2.0 failed miserably. I never managed to turn it into a product. I wanted to solve too many things at once: planning too many features and covering too many different use cases. I got completely lost in the complexity of the project. I was no longer sure if I was following the right path and as my work still didn’t pay off financially, everything felt like a failure and I was very close to give up on my dream.

Mind Mapping

However, I wasn’t ready to truly give up. When I decide to follow a certain path, it takes a lot to throw me off track. I reviewed the current stage of InfiniteCanvas and realized that I never actually wrote down my ideas. I then tried to write outlines, all kinds of design documents, but nothing really helped clear my head. During my research I encountered mind mapping. I had heard of it, but I never gave it a fair try. And it worked great for me, at least on a piece of paper. But no software solution came close to what I was looking for. They all sucked.

Then I had an idea. Why not write a simple mind mapping app for my own use? I could get this done in one or two weeks and the experience finishing a small project would surely motivate me to continue my main project.

I never came back to InfiniteCanvas.

Working on a Product

Working on the mind mapping app was fun. I had a clear picture of what I wanted to solve and what features I wanted to implement. I designed it to help me clear my thoughts and it helped. I was finally able to focus and without meaning to I created something I was proud of.

The naming of the application was also pretty straightforward. I had purchased the domain MindNode.com a few years earlier and it was a perfect fit for my new application.

The Release

It wasn’t two weeks, but 7 productive months later when I released 1.0 on March 15th 2008. MindNode 1.0 was simple, basic and free. It was fast, supported new Leopard features and to my surprise it got featured by Apple on Apple.com/Downloads a few days after the release.

About six months later I released MindNode Pro, followed by MindNode touch the following year.

Special Thanks

Over the years many people have helped turn MindNode into a success. As this posting focuses on the initial year, I’d like like to thank Wilfried Reinthaler and Peter Purgathofer especially. Both of them helped me shape the app in its initial years. Thank you.