A few months ago one of my favorite tools http://www.text2mindmap.com went down and since there doesn't seem to be any plans to bring it back up I created my own version of the site. It's basically just a quick mashup between some of the code from the original site and some code from my Markdown Editor (https://tobloef.com/markant/), but I hope someone will find it as useful as I did.
Do you know why it went offline? I'll assume lack of funding. What would be the best way to make a niche-app like this self-funding, given developers' aversion to ads? Donations? Monthly/Annual subscription? I have a similar site that I want to spin up, that serves a different purpose but has a similar interface.
Thanks. I use it as I would a normal mind map, to organize ideas and sometimes visualize trees of data. I just find the text-based approach to creating mind maps a lot faster and simpler than using the various other online tools, even though it's a bit more limited.
I've used one in the past to organize my monthly routine. Seeing the "size" of my expectations for each week helps a lot. I used text2mindmap for this and a few other things. Didn't realize it was down, thanks for this!
This looks great, I'm really looking forward to giving it a try. I've been using Trello to accomplish the same thing for a while, but it hasn't been ideal. Thank you for posting that.
I would have closed the website after failing to find a description if not for the warning. But the videos are very short and clear, and it'd probably be harder to explain the interface with text.
I started something similar, but it's been gathering dust lately. FWIW, some differences were:
Graph instead of tree. I'm rather baffled by the popularity of mindmaps. Even on paper, I do cyclic graphs of typed nodes and links. So the end of text lines could optionally contain link targets, node types, and "use this link type for these children".
Outline mode for text. Mirrored in the graph.
3D graph. I'm mostly interested in using it in VR/AR.
Graph nodes with arbitrary markdown. So a node might be a markdown list. Dynamically managing outline-like "collapsed vs list vs graph vs graph-with-reduced-force" was a puzzle.
Instead of online editing, it was a development kludge of file watching and hot reload.
Motivating use case: Most project management is so constrained on time and resources, that that's what tools are build around. But I do a lot of opportunistic lazy projects (eg "when browser bug #N eventually get's fixed, we could do an exploratory spike over that way, or alternately, we could take this other path which is bottlenecked on X and Y and needs a risk mitigation exercise on Z"). Even a small project can have an order-1000 node graph. And I've never seen tooling that wasn't wretched at managing them.
It's just toy fragments at present. Using an idiosyncratic format. And a Windows MR HMD (for resolution), on linux(!), with three.js-but-not-WebVR (for resolution), and React, and emacs ... so in its current form, market size seems order-1. Low order one, since even I don't use it.
One might pull together something simpler for people to play with. Maybe preprocessed yaml. Just a browser window. Simple three.js. ... But I haven't.
What aspects of it sounded interesting? I'd been thinking of it as a niche itch-scratch type project.
It doesn't seem to work at all for me. Not sure why, I've checked with Chrome and Firefox on Linux (using i3 tiling window manager). I see the text outline on the left and the white pane on the right, where I assume I should see a mindmap. I see nothing but white in the large right pane, so maybe there's something you're supposed to do to get it to draw the mindmap, but I can't figure out what.
Nope, still the same, can't see any mindmap or any button to click to create one.
However, I can now see some blue text up above and to the right of the menu items, which when clicked takes me to mailchimp for email. That text is unreadable for me, though, not enough contrast with the black background it's on.
Looks pretty good, I'm looking forward to trying it out. The UI a bit more cluttered than I would like, but it's nice to see something like this more fleshed out than what I posted.
The idea is great, but the nodes constantly rearranging and floating around (and overlapping) makes the actual "mind mapping" hard to do, at least for me. When I look at something like that, make a few changes on the left, I would expect the right side to stay relatively the same or at least change in a more predictable way.
> the nodes constantly rearranging and floating around
Sigh. So there's like three decades of research on interactive graph layout stability. And almost none of it has become available as code. Much of graph layout is like that. Perhaps VR/AR will finally create sufficient incentive to make it more accessible.
> Any suggestions on where in the literature to get started
On stable layouts for user mental map preservation with interactive dynamic graphs? I'm sorry, not really.
Avoid depending on a mental map with tasks that permit that (eg by using task-specific highlighting). Increase graph layout stability (eg by nested layouts). Simplify visual tracking (eg colored groups). ... Sorry - not my field.
Let's see, a few very quick and crufty random thoughts... There are a great many open source graph programs available to be played with - which might contribute inspiration. And "sometimes much more easy to get working" images and videos of them. For surfing literature, I mostly use google scholar and scihub. Blog posts seem part of how the software dev community is educating itself and advancing, so perhaps do a post at some point. Perhaps approach the project like "writing a renderer" - something useful for learning computer graphics, without the expectation that it will escape the zombie fate of most graph libraries. Writing and posting a d3 example isn't hard, and might inspire others. ... Good luck.
I'm a longtime user of a piece of Mac software called Tinderbox which I've used use to create mind-maps (linked knowledge trees) and Text2MindMap compares very favorably in that its directness and intuitive workflow allows for immediate and direct visualization.
There's also something about the animation implemented here that for me seems to stimulate my thinking as I add nodes.
I started typing as soon as I could. I jotted some notes down and indented with spacebar. After I had 5-6 lines written I noticed that the webapp completely deleted everything I had written and replaced it with something else. I guess the page hadn't fully loaded yet or something. But I would recommend hiding the text view or something until it is ready, so you do not accidentally delete user data.
Tried 1+ top level nodes and it automatically marked them as a child of first one. Not sure if this is broken or is a feature tho, just wanted to comment.
Yea, presumably in the visual format you could connect to root nodes together. Or do weird ancestor joins which would be impossible to represent in this tabbed format. But I guess that might be breaking the "mind map rules".
Looks awesome! We're in the process of building a knowledge graph and were looking for a more intuitive way to manage the main hierarchy. Adding node autocomplete would a great way to do that, especially if it could pull in existing children and dump them to text.
We're building a food/nutrition knowledge graph. Goal is to be able to take a product, recipe or restaurant dish that someone ate and determine what type of food it is, cuisine, ingredients, dietary properties and etc.
We have a newsletter sign up form on bite.ai but haven't really emailed anyone yet. The API is coming soon though so we'll probably send out a message when we launch it.
Hi, just a few days ago, I had the same problem and no text2mindmap. :(
So I started a similar project but with a different approach: I use a local webserver (written in go, because everything written in go is automatically awesome, obviously) with a filewatcher and a simple websocket to send everything to the browser.
I like the idea of transforming the text into visual representation. This project takes structure defined with tabs and builds beautiful maps. What if apply to static code analysis to produce dependency maps for the program? Or draw the type structure with their usage across the code?
CTRL-N is apparently a shortcut for new? Nice thought but this runs into standard navigation supported in OS X and most Unixes of using CTRL-N to go down a line. Kind of hard wired for me to navigate text boxes using CTRL-N and CTRL-P so would recommend another shortcut.
My antivirus software blocked the site as malicious. I would think it's a false positive but the AV hasn't marked anything bad in the past year --- first time seeing the message. ( Also blocked the Markdown Editor)
Xmind has the outline editing mode that I find very useful for this very reason. Sure it's not just a simple text file but it also doesn't require edit and presentation on different places/apps.
nice work! doing quick graphs is very easy when you use paper and pen, but it's always been a pain to do with a computer!
I assume this tries to be simple enough, but maybe it would be nice if we could have some extra, quick formatting, like dashes, like in lists (-) to stack elements, or other symbols for different layouts, quick access to colors, etc. I know handling multiple layouts and auto-placement with springs simulation can be tricky, but hey... in any case, thanks again for the work, hopefully it inspires more people to work along these lines!
This is really slick. I never knew about (the now defunct) text2mindmap.com, but it seems like something I would get a lot of use out of for doing quick brainstorming sessions. Thanks for sharing!
Very nice. But are the "File" and "MindMap" menu items supposed to do something? (like export the file). On both Safari and Chrome they don't seem to have any behavior.
Same. Tried in Safari and Chrome. Upon inspection, looks like something is going wrong with the styles. Changing .dropdown-content{position:absolute;} to position:fixed; brought them back for me.
