We are excited to announce that we are going to ship MindNode 7, our next major update, early next year. MindNode 7 will add Visual Tags - a brand new feature to bring more context to your ideas. With this release, we are also introducing a new Free Editor and customers can unlock our full feature set with our new MindNode Plus subscription. For all existing MindNode 5 and MindNode 6 customers, MindNode 7 will be a free upgrade.

We will share more information about our new tagging feature in the coming weeks. Today I’d like to focus on our motivation behind changing our business model and what it means for the future of MindNode.

What we learned from MindNode 5 and MindNode 6

Over the last two years, we released two major updates: MindNode 5 was a paid upgrade and MindNode 6 was a free upgrade. When we started working on MindNode 7 we knew that our next release would be a paid upgrade and we closely looked at our experience with the recent updates.

While MindNode 5 was a very popular release with our customers, we weren’t happy with how our new upgrade mechanism worked. As the App Store has no native support for paid upgrades, we tried to work around this limitation, by using differently priced In-App Purchases. This sounded like a great solution on paper and worked great in our tests, but we ran into many issues in real-life situations. Our discount mechanism had to launch a previous version of MindNode to check for eligibility. This did not always work as we had imagined it and resulted in a bumpy experience for some customers.

With this in mind, we knew that we didn’t want to go down the same path again. A subscription-based model showed the most promise to meet our customers’ needs as well as our own when we mind mapped our options.

There are several reasons why we believe subscriptions are the right choice for the future of MindNode.

With subscriptions, we can deliver updates to our users much more frequently. In the past, we had to hold back completed new features for over a year until we had finished all other features that made up a major update.

Going with subscriptions also decreases the entry price for new customers. This is particularly useful for people who may only need MindNode occasionally, for example, a freelancer who is kicking off a new client project.

It also makes pricing much more predictable. New customers no longer need to wonder about the right time to purchase MindNode, since there will be no more paid upgrades that might unexpectedly surprise them.

A subscription-based model also gives us more flexibility in what we can offer to our users. MindNode can be unlocked on macOS and iOS with a single subscription (this is not possible with one-time purchases on the App Store) and we are exploring how we can offer family and business licenses in the future.

Finally, we have to take into consideration that MindNode is a constantly evolving product, which we want to continue working on. Subscriptions provide us with a stable roadmap for the future where we can continue to adopt new Apple technologies in a timely manner, work on supporting collaboration and expand into new platforms.

We are fully aware that a subscription might not be the best solution for all of our users. This is why we are launching a new Free Editor together with MindNode Plus. Instead of a viewer of MindNode documents, our free version now also allows basic editing operations like adding nodes, reordering and folding them. In the Free Editor, we will also continue to support all import and export formats, so your data is never locked in!

When we considered subscriptions, we also made sure we found a good solution for our existing users. As a loyal customer, you will receive MindNode 7 for free and keep access to all its features in the future, even without subscribing to MindNode Plus. Furthermore, you will continue to receive bug fixes and minor enhancements.

MindNode Plus will launch together with MindNode 7 in early 2020. We will offer a monthly and annual subscription. Initially, the monthly subscription will be priced at $2.49 and the yearly at $19.99 (local prices will vary based on taxes and currency conversion).

I understand that every adjustment in a business model can be confusing or irritating. We’ve tried our best to make this transition as smooth as possible and hope you will continue to support us in the future. We’ve prepared an extensive FAQ and if you have any more questions, please contact us.

We are excited to announce that we are going to ship MindNode 7, our next major update, early next year. MindNode 7 will add Visual Tags - a brand new feature to bring more context to your ideas. We are also launching MindNode Plus, a new subscription.

MindNode 7 – Visual Tags and Business Model Changes

It’s that time of the year again when many of us are updating our iPads & iPhones to the newest version of iOS. While most of the attention is usually given to the new system features Apple has created, developers are also excited to take advantage of new tools and features they can integrate into their apps. And we’re no exception. We’ve been working hard the past three months to make sure MindNode users can benefit from and enjoy what iPadOS and iOS 13 has to offer. Here’s what we’ve been able to create for MindNode 6.1.

Multi-tasking has been a slowly evolving feature of iOS. Starting with being able to have apps running background processes and to the unveiling of a split-screen multitasking mode two years ago. This year the next step is the arrival of having multiple documents open simultaneously from a single app. What this means for you is that now you'll be able to have MindNode open in multiple spaces on your iPad, enabling you to work on multiple mind maps simultaneously.

MindNode users will know we’ve had support for Dark Mode for a while now. However with iPadOS 13 there’s a subtle change in how it works - thanks to systemwide support for Dark Mode. Now you can have Dark Mode active when your iPhone or iPad goes dark, based on the time of day or your system settings, or you can have MindNode’s appearance adapt to the theme of your mind map.

Quick Entry is an easy way to jot down your thoughts in an outline format and instantly transform them into a mind map. With MindNode 6.1 we’ve added the possibility to save your Quick Entries as drafts, so that you can keep working on them until you’re ready to send them to your canvas. Quick Entry Drafts will be coming to our macOS version soon in an upcoming update.

Siri Shortcuts is an easy way to automate tasks that you regularly perform by asking Siri to do them. These tasks can be something Siri learns about your behavior, or workflows you create on your own. With iOS 13 Siri Shortcuts have become even more powerful, by allowing users to add parameters to their shortcuts. What this means is that you can now tell Siri to open a new MindNode document with a title, some text, or the current date already filled in.

Try a shortcut out for yourself! Next time you've finished a team brainstorming session use the following shortcut to quickly send your teammates a copy of your mind map. To start add the Export Document action from MindNode's shortcuts and change the parameters to last opened document and choose the file format you need. Make sure that the export goes to Clipboard. Next add the Send Email action from the Mail app shortcuts and change the parameters to send Clipboard to your team's email addresses and enter your subject.

With iOS 13 Apple also greatly improved support for Apple Pencil and annotations in general. MindNode 6.1 takes advantage of this in two different places.

You can now add drawings and annotate images directly in MindNode. In annotation mode, you can easily scribble a few comments on your attached images, quickly draw a supply and demand graph for your economics class notes, or start sketching your next backyard project.

The second improvement is related to screenshots. When you take a screenshot using the Top/Side button and Volume-up button combination you can now get a screenshot of the entire mind map. Annotating and sharing a mind map has never been easier.

While we were getting these iPadOS & iOS 13 features baked into MindNode 6.1 we also were busy squashing bugs, fine-tuning existing features and adding a few others as well. Check out our full release notes for more details.

MindNode 6.1 is available now on the App Store.

MindNode 6.1 is now available! Check out what we've built in our latest release and how we're integrating new iPadOS & iOS 13 features into MindNode.

Multi-Document, Dark Mode and more – MindNode for iPadOS 13

My name is Thomas Dori and I'm a digital strategist who combines his 3 passions - contemplation, communication, and coding - into one business.

Is there one situation or project in which mind mapping helped you the most?

Digital Marketing (Strategies) is a very broad concept. Especially, when you are not working in this field every day, it can quickly feel overwhelming. To help my clients and me see the bigger picture including all the opportunities and necessities I start every project by presenting a mind map that gives a clear overview of what needs to be considered before and while doing digital marketing. We then use a copy of that mind map as a checklist to keep track of what we already thought about and what still needs to be considered. The final result is a clear vision of what the client’s company currently stands for, where it wants to go, and what needs to be done to get there.

How did you get your thoughts out of your head and into a mind map?

My current mind map for digital marketing is probably the millionth version of what it used to be several years ago. It started with the wish to have an overview of types of media (owned vs. shared vs. earned vs. paid). I continued to work on mind maps about branding, personas, social media marketing, and content marketing - and thought "Why not merging them into one huge mind map?" After moving everything around for hours and making it as MECE (mutually exclusive & collectively exhaustive) as possible, I tweaked the wording to get some nice acronyms (BRACES + 4C). The final but also essential step was the styling. I used the brand colors of my agency „Anwert" and the gorgeous stickers that MindNode has built in. Although I love the Auto Layout feature, I used the manual layout in my mind map because I wanted to give some nodes a bit more spacing than others.

How did it feel to finally see all your thoughts in a mind map?

Relieved. This mind map is like my external memory, and every time I look at it, I'm delighted that I have spent so much time to build it. It's like a cheat sheet that helps me to remember everything.

Once you were done with the mind map, what did you do next?

My mind map for digital marketing will never be final. It is the core of what I'm doing in my business every day. And like my business adjusts to new knowledge, trends and customer needs, so will this mind map. But even though it's a living document I use it all the time for myself as well as to support my clients in their (digital) marketing efforts. Most of the time people are stunned by how graspable such a complex topic becomes in a mind map - and how beautiful MindNode makes it look.

Where can people find out more about you and your work?

"Most of the time people are stunned by how graspable such a complex topic becomes in a mind map." - Thomas Dori

How Thomas Shows Clients the Bigger Picture – Creating a Marketing Strategy

My name is Teddy Svoronos and I’m a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. 

MindNode is the app that I use to begin the process of developing new classes. When staring down the barrel of a new class session, there is a seemingly infinite number of paths I could go down - huge numbers of topics, examples, and in-class exercises that could conceivably be incorporated into the class. MindNode helps me turn this complexity into a plan. I can group ideas into categories, which then link to one another in ways that gradually emerge as a class plan.

I start by creating as many Main Nodes as possible - using ⇧-Enter to dump all the ideas that pop into my head into a messy group of unstructured ideas. As I do this, I often start seeing connections immediately, so I’ll drag them on top of one another, or creating connection lines between them. If there are images, examples, or tables that I want to reference, I’ll drag them onto the map as well.

The best part is the transition from feeling overwhelmed and without structure to seeing a concrete set of steps to move forward. The mind map ends up being the starting point for further content - handouts and slides and such - but the map is always visible and always guiding how I conceptualize the class.

You can find out more about me on www.teddysvoronos.com or on my Twitter profile.

Teddy's Public Policy Class Mind Map
References: Kleinberg, J., Lakkaraju, H., Leskovec, J., Ludwig, J., & Mullainathan, S. (2017). Human Decisions and Machine Predictions. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(1), 237-293.

How Teddy Turns Complexity Into a Plan – Preparing a University Course

My name is Eric Bowers and I'm a Mortgage Loan Originator, business owner, writer/blogger.

That would be working on writing my first novel, the forthcoming The Mayor of Blackout County. My issue with the project was that I had the basic outline in my head, but needed to create more of a timeline so that I didn't get lost within the milestones of the story. I ended up creating a horizontal timeline using Vertical layout with angular branches, which was a great help in creating visual indications of my progress along the story line. 

I began, as I often do, with the Quick Entry feature. I input the main goal of what I was trying to accomplish, which was, "Write novel". Quick Entry seems to be at the core of what MindNode represents to me; a literal canvas upon which I can just let my mind wander. I entered a few major milestones into the outline entry area in Quick Entry, and then clicked "Create Mind Map". As the weeks and months went on I was able to add to the mind map using my iPhone and iPad or of course, my MacBook. It's important that MindNode is installed everywhere so that when inspiration strikes I have captured my thoughts.

See here for the map for the novel. It's not overly useful because I have folded up the details as it has the entire story contained there in milestones and major events. One thing to note: I created a separate theme for this particular mind map, to coincide with the overall feel of the story...that's a hint, but it always puts me in the right mindset.

In a word: relieved. I thought,"There. Now you have no excuse not to write this novel, because the elements are in place."...and what was funny was I just began writing, checking off tasks that I had assigned to various pieces of the story. Getting the main points out propelled me forward as a writer.

Because it obviously contains spoilers, I only showed the mind map to my wife who exclaimed,"Wow that looks great! What app is that?" (I'm not joking, either. She hadn't used MindNode for a while and was impressed with the layout capabilities).

How MindNode Propels Eric Forward – Writing a Novel

For many years our website was only an afterthought. We pride ourselves on sweating over every single detail in our app, but we neglected all other channels of communication with you.

Last year we embarked on a journey to change this. As a first step, we updated our onboarding emails earlier this year. These are the emails you can subscribe to when you first launch MindNode. The 3-email-course takes you from how to create nodes to how you can style your documents and while doing so teaches you a little bit about Apple Strudel - a typical Austrian dessert. You can subscribe to this course on our new Learn page or preview the first email here.

While working on our new onboarding emails, we also started a project to revamp our website. The goal was to no longer present MindNode as two separate apps (with dedicated feature pages), add focus on how you can use MindNode (something that comes up a lot in support emails) and to find a fun & delightful design that better fits with the app.

A lot of team effort went into creating our website, but it wouldn't have been possible without the fantastic work and collaboration from our graphic designer Isabella Thaller, our web designer Thomas Strobl and marketing consultant Thomas Dori. 

I hope you like our new website. Let us know what you think.

My name is Rosemary Orchard and I'm a developer by day, and a blogger and podcaster by night!

It's hard to pick just one, any complicated idea starts out as a mind map for me to let me get to grips with all facets of it. I'm currently working on a course to help people learn JavaScript to use with apps like Drafts and MindNode has been extremely helpful letting me keep track of and organise all my ideas.


I usually start in quick entry mode on iOS. My iPhone is usually the device in my hand so I start listing things there, then I jump into the mind map as the ideas slow down, and add to what I have and rearrange things.

Depending on the mind map I can feel anything from awed to overwhelmed! In this case I feel rather daunted by the tasks ahead, creating a whole course, but also calmed because I can see where everything is and what I've already completed is marked off.

I shared my mind map with a few friends for feedback before tweaking it. Then I printed it out on A3 paper so I could stick it on my wall! It's colourful and a great reminder of my goal right now.

"Creating a whole course, but also calmed because I can see where everything is and what I've already completed is marked off." - Rosemary Orchard

How Rosemary Teaches JavaScript – From Awed to Overwhelmed

What do you do when your ideas become overwhelming? When you need to concentrate on just one thought? These were some of the questions our team was asking itself nearly a year ago, and resulted in the development of Focus Mode.

It’s now been a few months since we released MindNode 6, and many of you have had a chance to experience it for yourself. We’ve been happy to hear from plenty of our customers about how Focus Mode has become a part of their brainstorming process, from helping them put a spotlight on the details, to presenting just the right part of their mind map to their audience. Your feedback has been indispensable, and we’ve already been working on squashing bugs and looking into how we can make Focus Mode even better.

To shed some light on how we work, we spoke to one of our engineers, Michael Schwarz, & our designer, Harald Eckmüller to gain some insights into what goes into making a new feature.

Michael’s motivation came from wanting to find the solution to a problem: “It was a challenging task, and as I have many large mind maps, I liked the idea of focusing on the sub-content”. With the challenge set, the first step was imagining what the feature would look and feel like. Even though the idea seemed straightforward, focusing on one particular branch and make the rest of the document less distracting, the nature of the tree-structure of mind maps raised a lot of questions that added a layer of complexity.

Harald explains: “Mind maps may have content all over the canvas with naturally occurring clusters. These draw more attention visually, so should they be de-emphasized more when focusing elsewhere? How much of the surrounding of a given branch do you need to clearly see to be able to work with it? When you start focusing on a branch with a node three tiers removed from the main node, do you need the path all the way up to the main node with the focus, or is this too much context?”

To answer these questions a few different approaches were tried out, at first with paper prototyping and static mockups, and later creating an entire Swift Playground to quickly tweak parameters like opacity, blur, hue etc. One of the earliest implementations was a “hoisting mode”, elevating a subsection of the mind map into a separate document. This seemed too disconnected, leading to a “presentation mode” which showed more context. After seven iterations the final result was a dynamic mixture of both approaches, using the zoom factor as a way of presenting more or less surrounding content.

An early version of Focus Mode (above) showing a different approach of presenting the unfocused nodes compared to the final version (below).

As development continued new questions were appearing all the time - from designing the user interface and interaction to how other features like undo & redo were impacted by entering Focus Mode. Michael and Harald elaborate:
- How can you effortlessly get into and out of Focus?
- How does an unfocused node react to a mouse cursor?
- Where do you refocus if you delete all of the focused nodes?
- Do you re-enter Focus Mode if undo/redo is triggered?
- How does keyboard navigation work?
- What is selected when you use a shortcut like select all?
- How can you make the feature discoverable, yet keep it easily at hand for more pro users?

Indispensable to finding a way through this maze of issues was the support of our fantastic QA team and our beta testers. Trying something new meant we had to learn what works and is right for our users. We combed through our support requests for inspiration, conducted interviews, and collected as much feedback as early as we could into the process to find the right solution.

What Harald and Michael both learned from working on Focus Mode was the importance of prototyping and creating an environment where the designers and engineers could play with and adjust the feature and quickly collaborate. With something as nuanced as Focus Mode the limitations of static design mockups became apparent very early on, and revealed the need for more dynamic tools. Simultaneously working in an environment with flexible project management allowed the ultimate goal to be changed as much as necessary. And what have they been able to do with the fruit of their labor? Harald and Michal explain in their own words:

Harald: “I do a lot of narrative design for interactive fiction in my spare time, and being able to throw all my thoughts into a document, then sort it, and eventually fine-tune my thoughts into a workable narrative idea is a process that produces huge mind maps. All the characters, places, events, plot-relevant objects, groups and what not can make it hard to concentrate on a specific part. Don't get me wrong, I need that creative chaos to find unexpected connections and come up with plot-twists that are interesting, but having the option to simply push away all the distraction and focus on just one scene is extremely helpful to me.”

Michael: “I use it most of the time to present the content of a large mind map in smaller pieces. It’s also useful during joint brainstorming sessions to ‘lock in’ into a special subtopic.”

Focus Mode is available now in MindNode 6 on Mac and iOS.

We’d love to hear how it’s become a part of your mind mapping flow and what you love, hate or would change about it.

Pro-tip: Refocus quickly from one node to another using the long press gesture on iOS or Option-click on Mac.

What do you do when you need to concentrate on just one thought? Learn how this question lead to the development of Focus Mode.

Learning to Focus – How we created Focus Mode

MindNode 6 is now available on the App Store and Mac App Store. MindNode 6 comes with a brand-new Focus Mode, Sticker Search, and the ability to hide Connections.

It also brings Multi-Select, improved External Screen Support, and customizable Panels to iOS.

And we added Traditional Chinese as our 14th supported language! MindNode 6 is a free update for all MindNode 5 customers.

Our brand-new Focus Mode puts a spotlight on one part of your mind map and fades out all the rest. It minimizes distractions and - at the same time - ensures you don’t lose context. The path to the main node is always visible, and when you zoom out, surrounding nodes will slowly fade in. This unique perspective enables you to easily refocus on a single area of your idea.

To help you reduce distractions even further, we also added the ability to - independently of Focus Mode - hide all connections on your canvas.

Stickers are a great way to give your documents clarity and personality. As our library grew, it became harder to find the right Sticker for your thought. With the search field in the sticker picker, you can now quickly find the perfect sticker in no time.

Styling, editing and rearranging multiple nodes at once just got a whole lot easier. Select multiple objects by touching and holding anywhere on the canvas. Alternatively, long press the canvas to start a rubber band selection. And in case you're using an Apple Pencil, touch the canvas with one finger and move the pencil to start a rubber band selection.

Big ideas need space, and with an external screen, you get a different perspective on your ideas. Using the feature "Lock Viewport" in the settings, you can lock the zoom and scroll position on your external screen to always keep one part of your document in view. You're now also able to use Quick Look to view images and configure the resolution of connected displays.

MindNode's most important task is to support you exactly where you need it. This applies to every (UI) element of MindNode including panels. Drag and drop your favorite actions from the Actions Panel onto the Panel's quick actions slots. On iPad, you also got the ability to drag Panels to the other side of the screen now.

MindNode is now fully localized to Traditional Chinese. With this addition, we now support 14 different localizations: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English (US), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (Spain), and Swedish.

Besides adding features that give you more focus we also wanted to make the transition between the iOS and the macOS versions of MindNode as seamless as possible. This is why we also decided on changing some of our keyboard shortcuts. Yes, for your muscle memory, it will take some time to adapt, if you were used to the old shortcuts. But trust us, in the long run, you will enjoy being able to use the same shortcuts on your iPad and Mac. We can sincerely say this because everybody in our team went through the same process.

MindNode 6 is a free upgrade for all MindNode 5 customers. If you are using MindNode 2 for Mac or MindNode 4 for iOS, we offer discounted upgrades for MindNode 6.

For more details please have a look at our release notes:

If you tried MindNode 5 before and want to retry MindNode 6, you can reset the trial using the following links:

More Focused Than Ever - MindNode 6 Has Arrived

MindNode lets you format text in various ways.

You can use different font types, make text bold, italic or underlined, or use strikethrough.

Under the hood, we save your text and its formatting using a markup language called HTML, the same used for websites.

HTML makes it easy to display the same formatted text when sharing MindNode documents to myMindNode, our web service for viewing your mind maps in a browser.

Since MindNode 2 we have been using a component called Ashton to transform formatted text to HTML.

Ashton stands for AttributedString to HTML Transformation and we open sourced it a long time ago.

Up to MindNode 5.1, Ashton required a lot of extra work to compensate for differences between iOS and macOS.

First, it converted the platform-specific text to an intermediate format, which is then converted into HTML, as illustrated below.

Using this method we were able to share more code between iOS and macOS when converting between the intermediate format and HTML.

Back then this was a sensible decision. The platforms had a lot of differences and a layered approach was a suitable solution to tackle this complexity.

Since then, both platforms have evolved and the differences in the text system shrunk significantly.

Therefore, we decided to rewrite Ashton without the overhead of an intermediate format, speeding up the loading and saving of documents in MindNode, simplifying the process diagram.

The rewrite was undertaken in Swift, which we expected to give us an additional performance boost when compared to the former Objective-C implementation. Surprisingly, after testing our first rewrite approach we experienced a significant slowdown despite having removed the intermediate conversion phase. After analyzing the performance in more detail, we discovered that Swift’s string manipulation methods were substantially slower than the previously used Objective-C implementations. But we didn't stop there. We further refined our rewrite, by diving one abstraction level deeper into Swift String handling and used the character view directly for parsing the input. Consequently, we were finally happy with the results of the rewrite.

Measuring the speed of both implementations showed the following results:

AppKit Implementation: 0.13 sec (2236% slower).  

The results show, that we were able to improve the reading performance substantially. 

Reading text from a MindNode file is now twice as fast as before 🎉. 

Interestingly, the writing speed slightly decreased compared to the old implementation. 

This was a result of slower AttributedString reading performance due to the use of Swift. Nevertheless, as consequence of the ongoing performance refinements on the Swift programming language we expect this time to go down in future.

From a user's perspective, the reading speed which affects document opening performance, is far more important than the marginal writing slowdown, when closing a document. 

Additionally, we improved other aspects of the Ashton component.

We fixed a longstanding bug which led to removed leading and trailing newlines and also improved the text color parsing, removing small visual differences in color perception across macOS and iOS.

Based on this work we were able to enhance our Markdown import to now support bold and italic formatting.

Ashton 2.0 is extensively unit tested, which gives us great confidence in making additional improvements in the future, without worrying about accidentally breaking expected parsing behavior.

We are happy to announce that Ashton 2.0 is now open source as well, you can find it on GitHub.

Ashton is released under MIT license as part of IdeasOnCanvas’s open source effort.

Learn how we speeded up the loading and saving of documents in MindNode.

A snappier MindNode Part 2 - Text Persistence

At first blush, the last couple of MindNode releases may have seemed minor - focusing on bug fixes and smaller improvements. Though if you dig deeper, and take a closer look, they have been huge. A lot has changed under the hood and depending on the size of your documents and the tasks you usually perform, you might have noticed that MindNode now feels snappier, more responsive and overall much faster than previous versions of MindNode for iOS and macOS.

In this blog post, we will take you through some of the changes to MindNode's code base and architecture, the changes that allowed us to make big performance improvements during document opening, text editing, node dragging and node resizing. Before we start, let's take a look at the final result.

Software today is very complex. There are many factors that influence both the measurable, as well as the perceived performance of the software we all use and love. In fact, performance tuning is a common task for many software engineers - and it can be equally frustrating as well as very satisfying. Finding the fixes for performance issues can sometimes feel like the famous search for the needle in the haystack. While issues might be complex and very diverse, the root source of many performance problems falls into one of a few buckets. Let's take a look at the most common problems and some ways to solve them.

Being lazy might not be a trait, that you'd attribute to fast and snappy software. Funnily enough, it can be one of the most effective solutions to performance problems.

Whenever a result is computed, which isn't actually needed at this point, unnecessary work is done that slows down the device. So being lazy is a good thing - the goal should be to only compute what is actually needed. While this may sound trivial, it's far from trivial in big and complex software with ten thousand lines of code or more. At this size, it can become hard to reason about the code, especially if functions have side effects. 

One common example of potentially unexpected side effects can be seen when using Key-value observing. Key-value observing, or KVO, provides a mechanism that allows objects to be notified of changes to specific properties of other objects. Speaking in simplified terms, in Object-oriented Programming we try to mimic real-world objects. These objects can have certain properties and defined behavior, just like real objects. An object car can have properties like color, amount of fuel and max speed and behaviors like accelerate() and break(). Whenever the amount of fuel of our car drops below a certain threshold, we would want to know. KVO is a technology that allows us to observe the amount of fuel of our car, and get notified when it changes.

In MindNode we use KVO a lot. Whenever, for example, you change the color of a node in the inspector, the canvas gets notified of this change and knows that it needs to redraw the node with the new color - exactly what we want. But what if we change the color of many nodes at the same time, like for example when we apply a new theme? The way KVO works is that we get notified about the color-change of every node in our document, potentially hundreds or thousands. If we now redraw the canvas on every change, this is a lot of redundant work. It would be much more efficient to first change the color of all nodes and then redraw the canvas only once. 

This is exactly the approach that we took in many places lately. By reducing KVO, providing a batch API and deferring work to a later point, we were able to speed up many operations like dragging around nodes on the canvas.

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.  

A cache stores (usually expensive-to-compute) data, so that future requests can be served faster. In its essence, using caches is another way of being lazy. Instead of computing a result every time we need it, we can cache the result and instantly return it on subsequent requests. Caches can dramatically improve the performance of many tasks, but they come with their own problems. Whenever you cache a result it increases your memory consumption. The result can become outdated. So you need to make sure to correctly invalidate your cache, or you'll be served wrong results.

Ashton is our open source solution to convert between rich text and HTML and it's used heavily during saving and opening of documents. It can convert between an NSAttributedString, the object that is used to represent rich text in iOS and macOS, and an HTML representation of the same text. This conversion is rather costly, so we looked into ways to speed it up.

A node's title, converted by Ashton, can look like this:

<p style='color: rgba(109, 109, 109, 1.000000); font: 20px \"Helvetica\"; text-align: left; -cocoa-font-postscriptname: \"Helvetica\";'>What will make this week a success?</p>

While parsing the HTML description is slow and expensive, in a typical MindNode document many nodes look the same. The text itself, which is unique for this node, is "What will make this week a success?". Everything else describes the formatting of the node - which is exactly the same for many other nodes in the document. Once we realized this, we were able to speed things up with a cache by using the whole formatting string style='color: rgba(109, 109, 109, 1.000000); font: 20px \"Helvetica\"; text-align: left; -cocoa-font-postscriptname: \"Helvetica\";' as the key for our text formatting cache.

If every node in a document is formatted differently this cache is useless and actually slows down document loading. For typical documents, however, our tests showed a 25-30 % speed increase when opening a document.

If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Improve It.

These were just a couple of changes, that we performed lately. By focusing on performance and bug fixes we were able to make MindNode's code base ready for MindNode 6 and the upcoming challenges. Rest assured that along the way, we have been working on some amazing new features, that we plan to release this year.

In this blog post, we will take you through some of the changes to MindNode's code base and architecture, the changes that allowed us to make big performance improvements during document opening, text editing, node dragging and node resizing.

A Snappier MindNode  Part 1 - Performance Tuning

As we celebrate MindNode's 11th birthday today, we have a very special surprise for you: MindNode 6 ships next month! It will add a brand new Focus Mode to MindNode. Also it's a free upgrade for users of MindNode 5.

When working on the nitty-gritty details of a broad concept, you just don't want to see the bigger picture. Instead, you want to concentrate on the one area you're currently working on and hide others. Focus Mode allows you to do precisely that. It puts a spotlight on a particular part of the mind map and fades out all the rest. With no more distractions, you can focus on letting your ideas grow.

But there is more! Ideas are unpredictable, and you can never know when inspiration will hit you. To that end, we made it easy to refocus on a different part of the mind map. With Focus Mode you can always follow your train of thought.

Focus Mode is only one of the new features that will ship as part of MindNode 6 next month. MindNode 6 on iOS will also add Multi-Select and a greatly improved External Screen Support. Furthermore, we added the ability to hide Cross Connections, and you can now search for stickers.

MindNode 6 will ship on April 24th, and if you have a license for MindNode 5, you can upgrade to MindNode 6 for free.

MindNode 6 ships next month, will add a brand new Focus Mode and it will be a free update for MindNode 5 customers.

MindNode for Mac is now available on Setapp. When you are already a Setapp subscriber you can find MindNode right in your Setapp app.

Setapp is a subscription service for Mac applications. For $9.99 /month you can use all apps included in Setapp without an additional charge. And best of all, some of the apps MindNode integrates with, are already part of Setapp:

- Ulysses: a text editor using the TextBundle format. This means you can exchange documents between MindNode and Ulysses.

- Marked: a Markdown previewer which allows you to preview your MindNode documents using Marked (File > Advanced > Open in Marked).

- TaskPaper: a simple text-based to-do list app. MindNode supports importing and exporting TaskPaper documents.

MindNode for Mac is now available on Setapp, a subscription service for Mac applications.

Today we released MindNode 5.2 for macOS and iOS. This update adds Dark Mode, Continuity Camera, a resizable outline, and improved automation including Siri Shortcuts. You can get this update on the App Store now.

You may have noticed that we are supporting a dark interface on iOS for quite some time now. When you switch to a dark theme on iOS, MindNode's UI automatically turns dark. With macOS Mojave and the system-wide Dark Mode, we are now also supporting Dark Mode on the Mac.

In MindNode's preferences you can decide whether you want to adopt the system's default appearance or configure MindNode's appearance for yourself.

Improved Sidebar – See Everything You Want To See

Since earlier this year we had the ability to resize the Notes sidebar. Today we are bringing the same feature to the outline in MindNode for Mac. If you have a large screen (or even if you don't), you can now give the outline a lot more space to see all your ideas at a glance.

When we updated the sidebars to support dark mode and resizing, we also took the time to refresh the overall design. In MindNode 5.2 we carefully updated the layout to use headers and we moved outline search to the bottom of the view. This gives the window a more balanced look.

Continuity Camera - Adding Images Just Got Easier

One easy to overlook, but really neat feature in macOS Mojave is Continuity Camera. With this feature you can use your iPhone or iPad to scan document or take a photo. This feature is now also available in MindNode. If you take notes during presentations this is a great way to snap a photo of a slide and put it right into a node. Or if you use MindNode to learn for your exam, you can scan the pages of a book to store it with your notes.

Automation and Siri Shortcuts - Tie It All Together

One significant new feature in iOS 12 is the integration of Siri Shortcuts. They allow to trigger actions using a Siri phrase and to build complex workflows using Apple's Shortcuts app. MindNode 5.2 adds the ability to launch Quick Entry; open, export and import documents using Siri Shortcuts.

This enables you to build workflows which export a document in MindNode and send it to iMessage for example - all by just using your voice.

To go beyond shortcuts, we also made these actions available via URL Schemes on both - iOS and macOS. This is only the beginning and we hope to add many more automation actions in the future. So please let us know what you want to build! You can learn more about URL Schemes in our User Guide.

Other Enhancements – There Is Even More

This release includes many other enhancements, including custom app icons on iOS, new stickers (Apple, Cake, Clock, Pie, Tree), and a new dark mode optimizes theme Steel). You can learn all about MindNode 5.2 in our Release Notes:

MindNode 5.2 is available for iOS 11 and later as well as macOS High Sierra and later. With this release, we are no longer supporting macOS Sierra.

Today we released MindNode 5.2 for macOS and iOS. This update adds Dark Mode, Continuity Camera, a Resizable Outline, and improved automation including Siri Shortcuts.

MindNode 5.2 - Dark Mode, Continuity Camera, Siri Shortcuts, and More

When we released MindNode 5 last year we switched from a paid upfront to a freemium business model. MindNode 5 is a free app on the App Store and the full version can be unlocked using an In-App Purchase (IAP). Considering the constraints of the App Store, this model gave us more flexibility by allowing us to provide you with a free 14-day-trial, discounted upgrades and a viewer-only version of the app.

When we changed business model we were aware that this model also had one major downside: We were no longer able to sell to businesses and education institutions as In-App Purchases are not available on Apple's Volume Purchase Program (this program allows to purchase bulk licenses of App Store apps). We had high hopes that Apple would eventually resolve this oversight, but the Spring Education Event and the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) passed without hints that this might happen in the near future. Talking directly to Apple representatives at WWDC, we realized that we need to find our own solution to this problem. We considered several options, had to dismiss our preferred option due to App Review concerns, but for iOS we finally have a solution that you can start adopting today.

MindNode 5 – Volume License is a new paid upfront version of MindNode 5 that is now available on the iOS App Store. This version is fully feature equivalent to MindNode 5 and we plan to update both versions with the same features going forward. We still think that our standard app is the best solution for most of our users, but if you want to purchase MindNode 5 through Apple's Business and Education Volume Purchase Program, or if you need Family Sharing support, this is the version you should get.

The volume license version is currently only available for iOS. For macOS, we are looking into providing a direct download version through our own web store. Though, we can't share more details at this time.

MindNode 5 – Volume License is now available on the iOS App Store for $14.99.

MindNode 5 for Volume Purchase Program is now available on the App Store

We released MindNode 5.1 earlier this week. It's our first major MindNode 5 update and we focused on increasing the overall performance and stability. When manipulating nodes and connections, all interactions are now smoother and more responsive. This is especially true when working on large documents. Also opening and saving documents is considerable faster compared to the previous version.

MindNode 5.1 also includes several other enhancements. On macOS you can now set a global keyboard shortcut for Quick Entry, configure the default file format for improved compatibility with third party sharing services and the ability to resize the notes sidebar. 

On iOS we've added the ability to import supported file formats directly from within the app and the possibility to remember your favourite colors in color picker.

Your can find the full release notes here:

MindNode 5.1 increasing the overall performance and stability

I know you've probably heard a lot about this in the last few weeks and might even be sick of it. For us this is really important though, and we think the changes are actually really good for you, our customers. So this is our bit:

Due to the new GDPR regulations coming into effect, would like to inform you of changes to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

You can find the Privacy Policy here. It includes information on our apps, the website, the newsletter and the myMindNode service. *myMindNode* is a web service that allows you to share your MindNode documents on the web.

As before you can unsubscribe with the link at the bottom of every email. Your data will be deleted within 2 weeks.

Due to a migration of newsletter providers last year, we lost the opt-in documentation for a large number of our subscribers and needed to re-document consent. We sent out a second opt-in email. Unfortunately we messed up the link and not everyone got to confirm the subscription that might have wanted to. If this is you, please subscribe again at the bottom of this page.

In compliance with GDPR you can now request a data takeout that will contain all your myMindNode documents here

To delete your myMindNode account follow this link

If you have any questions, please message us at support@mindnode.com.

Read about the key changes to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

GDPR Updates to Privacy Policy for MindNode, Our Newsletter and myMindNode

Blog

MindNode 7 – Visual Tags and Business Model Changes

Multi-Document, Dark Mode and more – MindNode for iPadOS 13

How Thomas Shows Clients the Bigger Picture – Creating a Marketing Strategy

How Teddy Turns Complexity Into a Plan – Preparing a University Course

How MindNode Propels Eric Forward – Writing a Novel

Welcome to Our New Website

How Rosemary Teaches JavaScript – From Awed to Overwhelmed

Learning to Focus – How we created Focus Mode

More Focused Than Ever - MindNode 6 Has Arrived

A snappier MindNode Part 2 - Text Persistence

A Snappier MindNode Part 1 - Performance Tuning

MindNode 6 – Focus on Your Ideas

MindNode Goes Setapp

MindNode 5.2 - Dark Mode, Continuity Camera, Siri Shortcuts, and More

MindNode 5 - Volume License

MindNode 5.1 - Performance Update

GDPR Updates to Privacy Policy for MindNode, Our Newsletter and myMindNode

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