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.

• Can You Run It?  Can you computer run that video game you’ve been eyeing?  Windows required.
• OpenLDAP + Samba Domain Controller On Ubuntu 7.10 - A great howto guide.
• ScreenSteps - Screenshot-based documentation, made easier.
• GCal In Your Firefox Sidebar

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.

If you’ve got Safari 2.0 (or higher) you’ve got import and export options in the File menu. Choose Import Bookmarks, then navigate to bookmarks.html in your Firefox profile (~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles) and click Import.  

Emphasis mine. So simple, yet almost too simple to believe. Time saved; color me happy.

All of that said, in my new role I’ve been given a MacBook, amongst my other systems, for use and testing. I’ve wanted to run OS X professionally (not just at home), so I’ve made that my main system, and use my Windows box when I must. Being a Windows convert I immediately setup Firefox because it was familiar to me. That, and I’ve grown accustom to my array of extensions.

It’s been 3 months on now, and I figured I best give Safari a fair shake. I’m forcing myself to spend a week with Safari as my browser, using Firefox only when I must. I haven’t been a full week yet, but I think I can comfortably say that I “enjoy” using Safari more than Firefox. I really can’t tell why I enjoy it better. Is it the interface? Extension overload/abuse in FF? There’s nothing logical or rational that I can put my finger on yet; I’ll let you know if I figure it out.

This is not to say that the experience is not without pain. The two hardest things I’m having to overcome are my expectations for tab management, and muscle memory.

In my opinion, there is no FF plugin better than Tab Mix Plus. Period. I keep expecting Safari to function how I have FF setup with my TMP preferences. I am putting out a call for someone to make a plugin for Safari that will extend the tab management functionality along the lines of TMP. I want my bookmarks to open in new tabs. I want my searches to open in new tabs. And I don’t want to hold down cmd to get that to happen, because I forget to do it.

Muscle memory is good, and muscle memory sucks. I’ve got the FF keystrokes so ingrained in my head, that I forget that cmd-k does nothing in Safari, it’s cmd-opt-f to select the search box. There is some overlap, but I’ve just been leaving a Safari shortcut guide up constantly in one tab so I can take a peek when I need something.

Inversely to how there are sites that only work on IE, there are sites that just don’t work on Safari. For that reason I’m going to keep FF around (plus for web testing needs), but I think I’m going to roll with Safari for now. And I reserve the right to change my mind whenever I please.

Six months ago we brought our second child home from the hospital, and it seems like it was just yesterday. In the five months since I wrote last, plenty has changed. Outside of having a new little life to care for, the biggest change for me has been a job transition.

I used to be a full-time Director of Systems/Operations for Admissions at a small (~3300) private university. Multiple factors played into my shift, but I am now half-time Admissions Sys/Ops, and half-time IT developer/sys admin.

Those two major events, plus being guaranteed that at least one of the two kids will wake up in the middle of the night (multiple times), adds up to zero energy for blogging. I feel like, however, I’m settling into a rhythm with how life is now, and I’ve got the energy to get this exercise in writing on its feet again.

Enough of this…the tech talk will be around the bend shortly.

Play Tagger is a neat little tool that allows you to easily play mp3 files directly on del.icio.us (see the popular mp3 bookmarks), and you can have it for your website or blog too. Include this tiny javascript in your HTML, and your mp3 links will automatically become playable right on the page. In addition, your visitors will have the opportunity to easily tag and post the mp3 link to del.icio.us. This script is very lightweight, as is the flash movie that plays on demand.

Probably the most useful part is you can drag a link to your bookmark bar. If you are browsing a page with a link to a MP3 file, give that bookmark a click, and you will be able to play that MP3 inline on the page, rather than being required to download it. Very slick.

UPDATE: I just received six more invites, so I currently have a total of eight for those that are curious about Pownce.

The first is Surface. If you haven’t already heard of Surface you should spend more time in front of your computer and less time enjoying the summer weather (tongue firmly planted). Surface is a multi-touch unit that seems to be the first real commercial product in the collaborative touch-screen market. This is very similar to (if not a licensed version of) what Jeff Han has been working on.

Second is Photosynth. From the main Photosynth page, “Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.” One of the engineers working on Photosynth, Blaise Aguera y Arcas — like Jeff Han — did a presentation at TED, which shows some of the power of Photosynth.

I’m a bit of a cynic, so I sit here and say Microsoft probably licensed the Surface technology from Jeff Han, and the technology behind Photosynth — Seadragon — was the product of an acquisition, and not internally developed. They don’t do the work, the license/acquire the work; that’s just Microsoft being Microsoft. You can’t deny that the products are pretty sweet, though.