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Four guys out of Bulgaria just built this .Net application for mind mapping. It looks really cool with a very fresh look! It was built with WPF and all our latest technology like Silverlight. I can't wait to try it out when it goes beta on November 1st. What amazing things could happen if Mindjet would hire these guys? What if another company were to hire them?
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A few months ago, I create a Microsoft Office Groove 2007 to share the source code for my SilverlightMap project: code to transform a Mindjet MindManager Map into a Silverlight Streaming Application hosted on silverlight.live.com. For those of you who don't know Groove is Microsoft's Peer-to-Peer workspace solution. I find it very useful for putting together ad-hoc workgroups or working with my distributed team, since I am in the field (work at home and travel).
Last month, Hugh Pyle, posted Silverlight in Groove about how to put the Silverlight control inside of a Groove Form. It was obvious to me what I needed to try next: put the Silverlight Map control in a Silverlight form to share maps via a Groove Workspace. Following Hugh's guidelines, I was able to get a Silverlight control in a Groove form. It was clear to me that I could modify the uploader that I built to use a Groove Web Services to insert the Map's XAML into a Groove record. What wasn't clear was where I would put the images, video, and audio that were part of the MindManager Map so that they would be visible in the Silverlight Map and part of the Groove Space. If anyone has suggestions, I would love to hear them. If you want an invite to the Groove Workspace for the SilverlightMap project, please send me a message.
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In an interesting twist on a blogroll, Gaelen at Mindjet posted a map of MindManager Bloggers on the Mindjet Blog. This works because Mindjet has built a passionate following of individuals who cannot do without their flagship software, MindManager. It's great that Mindjet recognizes these assets in the field and enables them as evangelists for the software. Here's my Silverlight version of the map (click on full screen in the upper right to enlarge):
var blogsWrapper = null;
function CreateBlogsSilverlight(){
Sys.Silverlight.createHostedObjectEx({source: "streaming:/216/blogs",parentElement: blogsWrapper});
}
blogsWrapper = document.getElementById("blogsWrapper");
CreateBlogsSilverlight();
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Just when you get really good at a tool, you find something better. This happened to me when I moved from C++ to C# for desktop application development. I see it happening again with Expression Blend which you can use to design windows user interfaces and Silverlight applications.
Here is simple application that I built recently to create Silverlight streaming applications and upload them to http://silverlight.live.com. I built it using C# and Windows Forms on Visual Studio 2005. This week I am learning about .Net 3.0 which includes WPF.
The application that Microsoft delivered for designing WPF applications is called Expression Blend and it is aimed at User Interaction Designers like Lars Jensen and Gerelee Goltsev at Mindjet (You'll see their talent when MindManager 7 comes out at the end of the Month with the Office 2007 Fluent Ribbon UI). Typically user interaction designers use tools like Photoshop to communicate design intent to software developers. They typically don't use the Form designer in Visual Studio. I have used Microsoft Visio in the past to design interfaces and that worked well for me. The problem is that there tends to be a disconnect between the tools used to design the UI and the tools used to implement the UI. The workflow is not fluid because the design surface that the user interaction designer works on is not the same design surface that the developer uses to builds the software. The creators of Expression Blend at Microsoft knew that and created it to address the design/build workflow that is common in software development.
As an exercise in learning WPF and Expressions, I reimplemented the user interface in Expressions:
I experimented with using a gradient background. This was done entirely in Expressions Blend. I know when we did visual effects in MindManager like gradient backgrounds, it was done in C++ code and not in the design tools, where it should be done. Now If I want to make any changes to the user interface, I don't have to touch the C++ or C# code at all. Designing and making changes to the UI of an application just got much easier!
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been playing around with Silverlight and trying to see how it could work with Mindjet MindManager maps. Because both MindManager and Silverlight are based in XML, it is fairly straightforward to transform the MindManager XML to Silverlight XML (called XAML) using XSLT. Since then, I have been working on adding some additional functionality to my XSLT transform to add images, zooming, panning, and video playback...
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It seems that Microsoft's Sliverlight (formerly WPF/e) is the topic of the day. Since I first learned about WPF/e last year, I started thinking of ways in which Mindjet MindManager could work with it. I started playing around with it and the most exciting feature of it was that it was all based in XML. That means that I could use my existing software tools like Visual Studio and my favorite languages, XSLT and C#, to transform MindManager's XML to Silverlight's XAML. To get my mind around the feature set of Silverlight, I built a simple website (it isn't live yet) that lets you upload and view Mindjet MindManager maps on Internet Explorer, FireFox and Mac Safari. Watch the video that I produced in TechSmith's Camtasia Studio.
It's just rough so far with simple expanding and collapsing of topics, but as time permits, I will work on developing its feature set.
