Monthly Archives: January 2008

MindMeister Revisited

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It’s been a while since I talked here about MindMeister (11 months), and about six months since I’ve seriously used it. In that time they have made some pretty sweet changes.

The big announcement in November was their release of MindMeister Offline. Built on Google Gears, MindMeister Offline allows you to take your mindmaps offline, work completely offline (including creating new maps), and sync it back up when you are able to get back online. This feature is only available to Premium account holders.

Geistesblitz is a set of tools that let you do spur-of-the-moment-brain-dumps to your default map. Whether through the dashboard widget, or the browser search bar extension, what you enter in is place in your default map. I tested this out a bit, and found it worked quite well in a form of a to-do manager. This is open to all account levels.

Thirdly, they have come out with a full API, on top of the embed API. Nothing really here for the general public, per se, but I would expect to see some sweet stuff for tying MindMeister maps into any and every online resource possible. I’m also curious to see if someone will come out with a cocoa-based MindMeister app.

In account level “news”, now all account levels can embed maps into websites and blogs. I might just have to do that to say I’ve done it.

Lastly, one thing I noticed today which I thought was very cool. If you have shared a map, you can have MindMeister notify you through Twitter that your map has been modified. Gotta love that.

Keep up with MindMeister development on their blog.

Tiddle Wherever You Are

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A short while ago, I was talking with a co-worker about personal productivity (i.e. to-do) systems.  There are so many systems out there, and each with their own spin on GTD.  He showed me one that is a spin on the TiddlyWiki system:  Tiddlyspot.Tiddlyspot is a hosted version of TiddlyWiki, with a twist.  Not only can you work on your wiki online, but you can download a version of it to work on locally when you are, say, getting ready to get on a flight.  Once you are where you have an internet connection again, you can sync you local copy up to the server, and you are back in the cloud with it.Yeah, sure you can just get TiddlyWiki and put it on a thumb drive, but this gets you local and cloud workability without having to tote a thumb drive around with you.And, do top it off, there is a pretty slick Firefox extension that complements TiddlyWiki and Tiddlyspot.  TiddlySnip gives you three key context menu options:  TiddlySnip a selection, the clipboard, or the page. The clipboard option is perhaps the most creative of the three. Say you want to create a tiddler of something from Word, you copy it from Word, go into Firefox, and TiddlySnip the clipboard. Extremely handy. 

Multi-protocol IM Clients Done Right

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There are a lot of options out there for the instant messaging crowd. There are probably three multi-protocol clients available for every one single-protocol (standalone) client. There are two related multi-protocol clients, that work pretty much across the board on the three major flavors of operating systems, that I think are flat out better than anything else out there.

If I’m installing an IM client on a Windows or Linux box I’m going with Pidgin. Pidgin is released under GPLv2, and has implemented (at present count) 16 IM protocols, ranging from the standard ones — MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, and Jabber — to the no-so-standard — Gadu-Gadu, MySpaceIM, and Groupwise to name a few. While this does require the GTK libraries to be installed on Windows, they have seamlessly integrated this into the installer, so there is no pain involved. There are lots of plugins available, including my favorite — Psychic Mode.

Adium is a cousin of Pidgin. Adium is built on the libraries behind Pidgin, and is only for Mac OS X. Where Pidgin doesn’t quite seem to carry the look and feel of Windows, Adium is 100% Mac in its look and feel. Adium also integrates perfectly with Growl. The protocol support is a little bit less with Adium compared to Pidgin, but I’ll never use the obscure ones it doesn’t support. It does, however, pickup support for the .Mac protocol.

You may say, “What about Trillian? What about iChat?” What about them? With Trillian, you have to buy the pro version to get the Jabber protocol. With iChat you only have .Mac, Jabber, AIM, and Bonjour protocols; no MSN or Yahoo! support. I’ve tried using Trillian and iChat, but I always end up back with Pidgin and Adium.

iChat does have one major advantage over Adium at this point: voice and video chat. While Adium (and Pidgin) is currently working on this issue, you have to go to iChat to take advantage of that functionality.