Month: November 2011

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ASCiiFLOW – a cool surprise

I’ve known about ASCiiFLOW for a while – it’s been on my To Do list to share with you, but I had it down as a curiosity, not much more, that I would add to Mind-mapping.org one day.  Then I started playing with it.

It’s a nerd’s delight!

If you’ve been using visualization to understand and help others understand processes for a few decades, I expect you’ll have constructed boxes and arrows with the limited graphics that used to be available before Visio and the like came along.  Things like this:

               +-----------------------------------------+
               |                   +-------------------+ |
               | +--------+        |    Warehouse A    | |
               | |Prepare |        |-------------------| |
               | |manifest+------->|                   | |
               | |document|        | Pack for dispatch | |
               | +--------+        |                   | |
               |                   +-------------------+ |
               +-----------------------------------------+

So when I saw browser-based web app ASCiiFLOW, I though ‘nostalgic fun’ but not much else.  Then I discovered that not only does it help you draw boxes and arrow lines very easily, allow you to select and move parts of the diagram around, and erase mistakes but it will produce a thoroughly tidied up, smart image when you’ve finished (click to see the whole image, full size).

It will also import and export text, and export the smartened-up image. To be more precise, it will pass the character-based drawing to another web app, Ditaa, that will render your finished diagram ready for you to save as an image.

This can even be used for collaboration.  If you fill in the title box and use the Save button, the ASCII text diagram will be saved on their website, and you’ll see a new URL in your browser’s address bar.     It will look something like this: http://www.asciiflow.com/#7652584811276699979/1208836819  You can give that address to anyone you want to collaborate with on the diagram, and they will be able to see and edit it.  If you want to give them read-only access, you would drop the digits after the last slash: http://www.asciiflow.com/#7652584811276699979/ Your collaborators would then see the diagram but not be able to change it.  But for read-only access, sending the better quality image produced by Ditaa would usually be more appropriate.

Ditaa is worth exploring as well.  In fact, I’ve cheated a little in the example above, because ASCiiFLOW itself doesn’t directly support coloured boxes and curved corners.  But a few minutes at ditaa.org will show you how easy it is to go beyond the immediate capabilities of ASCiiFLOW and call for these other Ditaa capabilities directly in the ASCII diagram.  I just added Ditaa to to Mind-mapping.org as well.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about ASCII.

Vic

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Skulduggery in the mind mapping apps

See the updates to this story at the end – it’s fascinating!

Have you seen MindMapr, or the web site http://free-mindmapping.com/tool/?

I was preparing an entry about these for mind-mapping.org and found an interesting tale.

MindMapr is a Google Chrome browser app that lets you make maps without being on line.  Free-mindmapping.com is a site that lets you do the same, but with any HTML5-capable browser. These two look so similar, that I wanted to find out how they were related, so I started digging.

The ‘about’ page for free-mindmapping.com told me that it was the work of David Richard and gave me his email address.   Assuming it was his site I emailed him to ask how these sites were connected.

The reply came back: “Well you caught me off-guard there. I didn’t know about MindMapr and, guess what, http://free-mindmapping.com/tool/ isn’t my domain either.  My original app is hosted here and only here: http://drichard.org/mindmaps/.

Here are the three sites:———————————-

 

 

Mighty similar wouldn’t you say?

The first is David’s and it is open source software under the AGPL.   The second looks like a legitimate copy – legitimate because its About page links back to David and the source code.  David says he’s OK with that.

The third, not strictly a site, but a Chrome extension, is a copy by Manish R Chiniwalar who has removed links to David and the original source. He writes in the description he gives against MindMapr in the Chrome Web Store: “Due to busy schedule, i’m not able to work on the bugs and features. I’ll resume work in 2 weeks.” So he not only removes acknowledgement of the source, but the only way I can interpret “resume work” is that he is trying to pass it off as his own development.

David replied to me “I made this app open source so people could build on it and improve it but Manish Chiniwalar’s extension is an insult to the OSS community as he blatantly violates the GPL in this case and advertises it as his own creation (although he even left my Google Analytics tracking snippet in the code). I will contact Google and see to it that appropriate action is taken.”  Manish’s attempt at converting David’s work isn’t even 100% successful – it can’t save to a local file, which David’s can.

So, to the app itself – the original at http://drichard.org/mindmaps/ of course, now in the database at Mind-mapping.org.

‘Mindmaps’ is a simple mind mapper written in HTML5, but effective within the limits of what it sets out to do.  Unlike many developers, David has focused on ease of use, and even offers step-by-step instructions when you open the site.  It uses a ‘drag the dot’ approach to making branches, and assigns branch colours automatically, but you can change the branch colour, as well as the font colour, size and style easily.  You can click the image for a full-size view.

It gives you plenty of control how and where you place the nodes, and subsequent moving around.  Keyboard shortcuts exist: Tab to make a child of the currently-selected branch, and Shift+Tab to make a sibling.

Although this runs in a browser from a web address, it does not store the map online.  You have a choice of saving the map to local HTML5 storage, or as a normal file on your PC.

I do think that this app needs a better name than ‘mindmaps’ which is way too generic and will never turn up near the top in a Google search – some branding is called for to make it stick – Manish got that part right.

Update 1, 8/11/2011: Manish’s extension was removed from the chrome web store and Manish wrote an email to David Richard apologising for what he did.

Update 2, 15/11/2011: Manish’s extension is back and has been cleaned up to state its true origin and remove wording implying that it was Manish’s own work.

Update 3, 16/12/2011: Now here’s a thing. (My thanks to Mohammed Irfan, who gave us the backstory in a comment.)  Mannish won a Samsung Galaxy Tab in the DIGIT Chrome apps competition using David’s code, altered to hide its origin.  Here’s the proof  (and in case that page disappears, it’s preserved in  Freezepage).

So what next Mannish?  Give the Galaxy back or pass it to David?

Vic

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