I basically didn’t like it at all, and that seems to be the same opinion over at FriendFeedWatch.  I guess we’ll just have to wait until the rumoured Air client get released.  Its future website still shows a “Under construction” page.

[UPDATE]: Less than twelve hours after my post, there is a new version out.  In this new version, I found three different themes, which I must say I did not see in the original version, so I’m not sure if they were already there or not.  And now, we can get rid if the bee!  With a different theme, the app becomes much more usable, the only important thing still missing is minimize to tray.  Take a look at the grey theme in the screenshot.  And François, thanks for your attention

• Dimdim

Dimdim is a very interesting option, for one single, simple reason: it is free to use as a hosted service, but even better, it is an open source project so you can download the server application and host it yourself. There is a totally free Community Edition, and also an Enterprise Edition, which is priced quite reasonably compared to competitors with similar features, and allow for private branding (logos, URLs, etc). For an individual consultant or freelancer, though, this is overkill – either host it yourself if you have the skills or use the free hosted version. You definitely want to check this out if you are looking into web conferencing.

• Adobe Acrobat Connect

Adobe’s offering in this field is very competitive. Reasonably priced at U$39.95 per month for unlimited conferences with up to 15 users (more than enough for most people, I imagine), it has a very slick user interface – as we have come to expect from Adobe products. The major drawback is that there is no audio and you cannot record meetings in this version, only in the professional edition which costs a lot more.

• WebEx MeetMeNow

WebEx is the most popular of the online tools, and there is a reason for that. The service is simple, while offering all the common features, and the pricing is very reasonable at US$49 per month for the basic plan. If you are the kind of person who likes to stick with the market standard, or are too busy (or lazy ) to research too much, WebEx is a good solution for you.

• Spreed

Spreed is a newcomer to this field (as far as I can tell), based in Germany. It is a very good option if your meetings are usually just you and one or two others, since their meetings are always free for up to three people.  Beyond that it gets more expensive than the competitors (around €69 per month for the basic package) – but for my needs three participants would generally be enough.  You also have the “pay-as-you-go” option which you could use for the exceptional occasions where you need more than three participants.

• Yugma

Yugma is also a relative newcomer, and it offers free conferencing for up to 10 participants, which is awesome.  Problem is, it didn’t work on my machine   I found reports from a bunch of other people who couldn’t get it to work either.  They have a Skype edition which would be great if you already use Skype, but again, at least for me it didn’t work.  Yugma shows a lot of promise, but it needs to be more reliable to be considered a contender in this field.

As we can see, there are a lot of options for individuals and small businesses to use web conferencing for a very reasonable price.  There might be other options which I did not find in my research.  Of course, there  are also the big guys, such as Microsoft and IBM, who have their own conferencing solutions, but these are usually far too expensive for the little guy.

• New Features at Comapping Reviewed
• ConceptDraw MindMap 5 Professional: Another Mind Mapping Tool Reviewed
• Mind Mapping Revisited: Two More Reviews
• Mind Mapping Software Review: Organize Your Ideas

Go through them again, and maybe bookmark this post to read them one at a time, prolonging your pleasure (ooooh). Or just ignore and move on

Comapping is one of the better online mind mapping tools, and I first heard of it while researching for the first series of mind mapping tool reviews here at Daily Iteration. The newly added features were really important things that were missing, turning Comapping into (on my opinion) the best online mind mapping tool out there.

Now you can import and export files in Freemind format, meaning you can now work on your maps in a full-fledged desktop application and upload them to Comapping to have them available online and edit them together with your remote friends and colleagues. This alone makes this a noteworthy upgrade. You can also exchange files between Comapping and MindManager, a popular commercial mind mapping tool.

Another nice feature, specially for you blogger types, is the ability to embed maps in web pages, just like you currently do with videos. Below you can see a simple map I’ve put together to showcase this option. It is still a little fidgety, as I had to copy and paste the code twice to get it working – but it looks beatuiful once you get it right! and in fact the map I had embedded here no longer works, so I removed it – this might be because I only have a test account, so my maps are not saved permanently, and my embedded map could be pointing to an inexisting file. but after being contacted by Michael (Comapping’s R&D Director) who explained to me the correct procedure, things worked out.

I’m not sure if this is a new feature, or if I missed it when I first looked at Comapping, but there is a “Presentation” feature that allows you to create slideshows from your maps. Leave the map at the state you want it to appear, click on “Add snapshot as slide”. Expand or contract a few nodes, then take another snapshot. Arrange the slides in the ordr you want, and presto, a very nice presentation, with the map changing from one state to the other at the click of your mouse – very nifty! The video below shows this feature at work.

A word about video on this blog: I am still testing things, and for this post I thought I’d try Revver’s Quicktime embedding, as it gives better video quality. If you have problems viewing this, or if you prefer me to post Flash video + the original avi, please let me know in the comments.

A couple of smaller updates were also introduced. Now you can add notes to nodes – not breathtaking, but it can be useful. Also, the “Share” menu was improved, and you can send the invitations to look at your map by e-mail. You don’t have to be a registered user to look at the map, but if you want to edit it you have to pay

And here we get to Comapping’s biggest problem: it is the best online mind mapping tool, but there is no free account available. If you want to edit maps beyond a 30-day trial, you have to pay. On the other hand, they charge a very reasonable US$11.99 for six months, for a full account – no limits on usage.

Overall, if you use mind maps often, need to edit them colaboratively, and are willing to cough up a small amount for the finest online tool there is, it’s worth it.

Those who have been following my series of reviews will be aware that I specified some criteria for eligibility: there had to be at least one free usable license and/or account for the software or service, and I had to be able to use it from my two main desktops, Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. Concept Draw Mindmap is neither available for free, nor does it run on Linux (though you can get it for Mac). So why am I reviewing it? First, because it would be a nice comparison test to my previously selected champion, Freemind. Testing Mind Map will allow us to see how well Freemind stands up to a commercial competitor. And secondly, because Igor from Concept Draw asked me very nicely, so what’s the point in not returning the kindness?

So on with the review…

Concept Draw offers many products related to diagramming and technical drawing, and the first impression that you get is thatMind Map has kept true to its roots – there are more drawing tools thanwith other mind mapping tools, and the diagrams you can generate are really good looking. This guy has plenty of features, and even though it takes a little while to navigate through the interface (there’s a lot of buttons there), nothing is too hard to reach.

One of the most interesting features offered is a brainstorm mode. This is a different screen, with a little timer at the top right, which you can set up to count down as many minutes as you think are necessary to your particular session. Set a title for you brainstorm, click go, and the timer starts counting down as you enter all the ideas that come up in a very simple manner. Below you can see a video of this feature at work.

This is the first attempt at embedding video in the blog, and the video quality isn’t what I’d like – even though Jumpcut has the best quality Flash video I could find. You cen get the original .avi from the link below, while I try to find a better solution to stream high quality screencasts in the blog.

Another very nice feature of Mind Map is the large amount of formats you can export your maps to. All sorts of image formats (PNG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, etc…), PDF, MS Word outline files, Powerpoint slide, and, best of all for all the project-heads out there (like me!), you can export your maps to MS Project XML format, so you can start transforming all those bright ideas you had during your brainstoming session into an actual project schedule right away. One that left me intrigued was the ability to export to Concept Draw’s own Project tool – this on I would very much like to take a look at (Igor, are you reading this )

Another point where Mind Map shows its heritage as a drawing tool is in the excellent quality clip art provided, which is actually usable without completely ruining the quality of your presentation. The only sugestion I would make here is to have it all as SVG files, so they would be scalable.

The screenshot to the right shows another interesting feature. You can open a topic structure to the left of the screen, while keeping the rest of the window areas visible to the right. While it does get cramped, it is a very useful way to get around larger maps, editing each topic without loosing all visual reference to the actual diagram.

Overall, Concept Draw Mind Map has proved to be a really nice tool, with some very nice features such as exporting to MS Project files, timed brainstorming sessions, nice display of topic structure, among others. A very positive aspect that I have not mentioned yet is that it generates beautiful diagrams – and lets you create personalized styles which you can save as templates and apply across all your diagrams. So if you need to create great looking maps for presentations, or could benefit from the timed brainstorming sessions and MS Project export, Mind Map would be a good choice for you. Bear in minf though, that at US$ 199 for the Professional version (the website does not make it very clear what the difference is between this and the Personal license, at US$119), this product is more suited to those of us who use this kind of diagram professionally (ar at least intensively). If you do, however, Concept Draw Mind Map is a fantastic tool for you.

• It looks great

The user interface is sleek, nice and simple, and basically feels very nice to use.  That being said, there are a few inconveniences.  For instance, double-clicking on the tab bar does not create a new tab as you might expect – you have to right-click on it and select “Create a new tab”.  There is no option to have all links open on a new tab, forcing you to use either Ctrl+click or use the right mouse button and select from the menu – both of these are bad, they require you to do more than you should to just open a link where you want it.  While I hope these might be fixed in the final version, Safari does have some nice features, such as the option to “Merge all windows”, so that if some page does open a new window you can bring it back as a tab in your previous one (does Firefox do this?).  Ah, not to mention OS integration.  What is that anyway?  How I miss my Gnome+GTK days in this respect…

• Pages render beautifully

Yes, the pages look gorgeous in Safari!   Probably related to Apple’s font rendering mechanism discussed over at Joel on Software yesterday. Apparently people’s opinion on this varies, but to my eyes this alone is Safari’s biggest plus – my blogs all looked awesome So now I envy all you Mac people for living in a much prettier internet than I do…

• It’s stable (for me, anyway)

I used it for an entire day with not a single crash.  This is not what some people reported, but in my experience it was pretty stable.  It ran and started up pretty fast right from the start on my Core Solo notebook with 1GB RAM, also against what other folks experienced.

• It’s not usable everywhere

Some sites complained.  Others displayed drop-down menus in odd ways.  Overall it was not bad, but there were some glitches.  However, Apple has included a handy “report a bug” button that sends the source code and a screenshot of the site you’re visiting to Apple – Mozilla folks should look at this, very nice touch.

Overall, Safari impressed me, and I had a much easier day than I thought I would have.  Things just look great in Safari, and if you are, like me, a sucker for pretty things on your screen (I stare at it all day long, might as well make it look good), you might enjoy Safari.  That being said, it’s still not usable as your only browser, as some sites don’t collaborate with it too well.  Feels like the early days of using Firefox .  For the power-users out there, going without all your Firefox extensions will be a problem – it certainly was for me.  It is a nice browser though, and Apple should see the number of users increase.  If they iron out a few details and perhaps make it extensible like Firefox is (not even OpenSearch plugins, Apple?), who knows, it might work…

The first application to make use of this feature is Google Reader, the company’s RSS feed reader. The first time you access Reader with Gears installed, you are asked if you want to enable this feature. If you chose to do so, a small green icon gets added to the menu at the top right of the screen. Click on this icon, and your browser will start downloading items for offline reading (check out the screenshot). After that, you will have 2000 feed items available for offline reading. Embedded items, such as Youtube videos, are not downloaded, and are displayed as grey boxes. Clicking on them will cause the browser to ask you whether you want to go back online to download the content. Once you reach the end of your offline items, you get shown a little message that tells you have to go back online to get more content. Overall, everything works very smoothly and provides a perfect, “normal” user experience.

This is something that will show up more and more, specially with the release of Firefox 3. Google was quicker than everyone else in releasing their own solution, which should give them a nice advantage over competitors. Their technology is actually a bunch of Javascript libraries, which means that anyone can use Google Gears for their own web apps. While I expect most people will wait to see what happens in Firefox 3 and what Microsoft’s reaction will be, the fact that Google has opened this up under a very permissive BSD license and is cross-browser and cross-platform, will surely get a lot of people interested. Things will get really interesting in this area once we start getting things like Basecamp, Tracks, ActiveCollab, Nozbe, and other great web apps taking full advantage of this kind of technology.

• Comapping

Comapping was recommended at Web Worker Daily (they had a link to me, I’ve been linked to by one of my favourite blogs, yay!), and I must say it is impressive. Lots and lots of features: importing and exporting map files, collapsing lists, the ability to create a slideshow from your maps, interface based on ribbons like Office 2007… Unfortunately, you can only edit maps for free during a 30 day trial. After this period you have to pay US$ 11.99 for six months, which is not bad, but fails to meet the requirements I have set for my reviews – the solutions have to be completely usable for free.

In their FAQ they mention that a desktop version is in the works, which supposedly would allow you to edit your maps offline and upload them to their servers when you need to collaborate on them. And, just thinking out loud here, how would this work with Firefox 3’s offline storage mode? In fact, how would any of these apps work, would we be able to “save” the apps to our browser, work on them offline inside Firefox, and then upload only when we connect? That would be fantastic, eh?

Overall, Comapping is very impressive indeed, packed with nice features. The only drawback is that the app is a little heavy, I experienced temporary “freezes” when editing my maps while things updated themselves – but nothing that seriously harms a fantastic web app. If you are willing to pay a fair price for your mind-mapping tool, Comapping is a nice choice.

• Mindomo

Nick recommended this tool in a comment to my previous post on mind-mapping tools, and I thought I’d check it out as well.  The first thing that surprised me is the amazing similarity between Mindomo and Comapping – roughly the same feature set, very similar interface based on ribbons… Take a look at both the screenshots and you will see what I mean.

The main difference really is in the business models – Mindomo lets you edit seven maps on a free account without a time limit, whereas in Comapping you can edit as many maps as you like, but only within a 30 day limit.

There is really not much else to say about Mindomo – just read the paragraph about Comapping, it’s all the same.  I wonder what is the relationship between these two companies?  The only real difference on the interface is that Mindomo has an advertising banner on the right side of the screen.  It is quite a large banner, and may be a little intrusive, but if that’s needed to give us a usable free account, then so be it.

The free account is limited to seven maps, and there are also premium, business and education accounts.  The premium version  removes this restriction, gives you access to a dedicated server with secure connections, and is quite reasonable at 4.99 € / month.  However, the plan is billed anually, requiring you to make a fairly long-term commitment to the service.  Business and education plans allow you to host the application locally, but no pricing information is given on the website.

Based on these new tools, I have changed my previous setup.  Whereas before I worked on my local maps using Freemind and uploaded them to Mindmeister to work collaboratively, now I plan to replace Mindmeister with Mindomo.  More features, nice interface, all in all a fantastic app.

A couple of interesting features: search results are tagged (ah, the golden sound of buzzwords – Spock has them all), and people can add tags or vote for them. Positive votes make tags more relevant, negative votes has the opposite effect. A nice well thought touch is that you can view who voted for a particular tag (see screenshot, click for full image). Supposedly this would disencourage people from thoughtlessly clicking on defamatory tags.

This is all stuff you get to see as an anonymous user. When you log in, you have the option of importing your own contacts from a variety of sources (see screenshot to the left). Here I found Spock to be still a little rough – everything is well presented, but the website failed to load any of my contact on repeated attempts. Since we’re always a little lenient with everything that smells of beta (and these days everything does), let’s move on. This is where Spock’s social features begin to see some action. You have the possibility of adding people as your favorites (anyone, but supposedly you would do this for your contacts). Cool, so now I can have Bill Gates, the Queen of England and my boss all in my favorites list!

Then there is your own profile. You can add up to twenty pictures of yourself (but again, this did not work for me), and also add tags and an about blurb. I guess the idea is that by adding as much information about yourself as possible, it will be easier to find you, or at least help place your profile where you want in terms of keyword affinity.

I might be dumb, but I really fail to see the point in this. If Spock is about getting yourself a nice web presence, it would be much better to use a business-oriented social networking site such as LinkedIn or Xing. If you need to be seen by everyone, how about starting a blog? Either of these seems to me a better option for showing up online. Spock does bring in some nice ideas and adds a new twist to the whole search engine thing, technically it might be great, but for me it needs to offer something more focused, more objective. Then there are the social network possibilities.  I’m not a user of sites such as MySpace or Orkut, so perhaps I’m not the best judge here.  But Spock lacks the feeling of having a home, there isn’t a homepage or some little place to call your own.

I could be wrong about Spock though, and who knows, it might be the next big thing among celebrity-seeking teens or something…

• The tools have to be free (at least as in beer), and
• The tools have to be cross-platform, either web-based or run in Windows and Linux.

I’d love to be able to test also on a Mac, but unless some kind soul decides to give me one, I’m limited to these two platforms for the moment. After some quite extensive searches, I arrived at the following list of tools to test:

• Web-based:
  • Mindmeister
  • bubbl.us
• Desktop
  • Freemind
  • Labyrinth
  • Compendium

One very interesting tool which was left out was Web of Web. This allows you to run a collaboration/mind-mapping application on your own web server, as a J2EE web application. I can see beautiful applications for this in corporate intranet environments, but that is outside of our scope for now…

Mind mapping, or conceptual mapping, for those not yet familiar with it, is a kind of diagram created to help people visualize ideas, tasks, or any other kind of linked information. Contrary to what people might think, the existence of mind maps is a very old thing – Wikipedia says the concept has been around since the 3rd century. A mind map consists, basically, of a diagram of linked elements, or nodes, depicting ideas, tasks or words. Different tools add different capabilities, such as collapsing elements, adding images, or creating sophisticated libraries of elements.

So with our introductions out of the way, on with the tests:

• Freemind

Freemind is an open-source software (i.e., free software as in freedom), so it immediately gets bonus points in my review. It is written in Java, therefore fully cross-platform. It is a lightweight, yet flexible tool, which allows you to create nice looking, practical maps with minimal effort. There is also the option of exporting files to images. Where it lacks is in the collaboration features – it is designed to be a stand-alone application sitting on a single machine. Whether this is a limitation or not will depend on your intended use. The only problem I had with Freemind is something that seems to be a general problem with Java apps running together with Linux’s Compiz window-manager: this time, I could not maximize the window, or rather, I could maximize the window, but the size of the editing area remained the same, so all I got was a lot of blank space on my screen. A similar situation happened with Thinking Rock in my previous review, so this really seems to be a problem in Compiz. However, turning it off gets everything working again.

• Labyrinth

Labyrinth is also free software as in freedom. It is developed originally as a Gnome application (for Linux). However, there is a Windows installer available at the website, even though I haven’t tested it. This one is very, very light – too light I would say. It only has the most basic tools: draw boxes, lines, and insert images. I did not find an option to created grouped items, or to create collapsible lists, both of which I would consider very basic. One very good point about it is that it integrates very nicely with your Gnome desktop, so if you are using that Labyrinth becomes a better option. Overall, it is a nice app, which is certainly going in the right direction, but it still has some way to go. Adding collapsible lists, icons and better linking of elements would be the next steps, I would say.

• Compendium

Compendium is a very powerful tool created by the UK’s Open University. It is used by them in something called the OpenLearn program, which I did not really dig into to see what it’s about. The software itself is written in Java, therefore cross-platform. I had no problems at all getting it to run in Ubuntu. It is fully featured, has options to use a central database for sharing projects and resources (you can create a node, for instance, and share that with someone else). The software creates its own users, all of which have in-boxes, so you can send your resources to other people through this. It has different types of node, such as list, question, answer, note, reference, decision… All in all, a fully-featured, extremely powerful piece of software, keeping a nice enough level of user-friendliness.

• Mindmeister

Mindmeister is a very, very cool online app for creating and sharing mind maps. It has all the basic tools for creating the maps, and then allows you to share these maps with other people and edit them together. Even better, you can export them to images, to Rich Text Files for embedding in word processors, and in the format of two of the most popular desktop tools, Freemind (open-source) and MindManager (proprietary). Mindmeister also allows you to publish your maps, so they can be accessed directly by a URL, or you can give them limited access only to people you invite by e-mail. The major downside, for my purposes, is that the free account has a number of limitations, including limiting you to a maximum of 6 maps.

• bubbl.us

Bubbl.us is another web offering, similar to Mindmeister. The first major difference I should mention is that bubbl.us is entirely free – there are no limitations on the standard account. There is an ad showing in the bottom left corner of the screen, but it is not very intrusive, and didn’t bother me at all. The maps generated by the application are very pretty, and the interface is very well thought out. However, the way the nodes (apparently they’re called bubbles here) are drawn makes them a little worse for list-style nodes, and, like in Mindmeister, there is no way to customize individual nodes beyond changing their size and color. Export options are image (png or jpeg), html or xml files – there is no option to export to other mind-mapping software. Collaboration is there, and is easy to use, but there is no way to publish online via a URL like in Mindmeister. All in all, a very good offering, specially considering it is 100% free of charge.

Just one final note: I did not test extensively the collaboration options in any of these offerings, as that is not a priority for me right now.

My choice? In the end, I have decided to go for a combination of Freemind and Mindmeister. I use Freemind on the desktop to get things going, and when I need to share a map I upload it into Mindmeister, which has import and export options for Freemind’s file format. This allows me to avoid having to sign up for a paid account, as I can keep only the files I am currently collaborating on on the web, with the remaining files safely stored in my local machine. Compendium would be a good choice too, but it has some complexity which I don’t need, and would not work together with Mindmeister in this manner.