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:

Ashton 2.0.0: 0.0055 sec.
Ashton 1.0.3: 0.013 sec (136% slower).
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 here: Ashton. Ashton is released under MIT license as part of IdeasOnCanvas’s open source effort.

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.

Common Performance Problems

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.

Batch Processing & Deferring

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.

Caching

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

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.

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.

Focus Mode – Focus on your ideas

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.

MindNode 6 – New Free Update

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 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.

Try Setapp for Free (7-Day Trial)

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.

Dark Mode - Focus On Your Ideas

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 for Mac Release Notes
• MindNode 5.2 for iOS 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.

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 5.1 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 for iOS Release Notes - MindNode 5.1 for Mac Release Notes

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.

MindNode Newsletter:

• 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.

myMindNode:

• 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

How to Automate Achievement in Three Easy Steps

In the first post of this series I talked about how goal setting makes achieving your dreams totally inevitable. After that coin dropped for me, I started asking around about how to effectively track my progress. Because if I can track it it's science and I know how to science. I am a meticulous tracker IF things are quantifiable. Problem: Most personal goals are anything but. (Cue hysterics.)

Take a deep breath and let's review some terms:

A dream is a certain feeling, or lifestyle you want to achieve, or the legacy you want to build. A goal is a teeny tiny step on the path to achieving your dream. You have broken down your dream into goals.

This means that you can not be off track, if you are setting the right goals. You do not need to know how far along you are to achieving your dreams, all you need to know is that you are progressing. Do you trust yourself to have chosen the right goals?

Good.

Here are three things you can do to automatically achieve your goals :

Track Habits

You want to track completion of your goals. And one of the best ways to achieve anything is with habits, the automatic completion of a repetitive task. I learned this when my friend Primoz showed me his system, he tracks his habits in an excel sheet. 

As an example, to become a recognized authority on any topic you need to know how to speak and write effectively and authentically. Practicing writing and storytelling are habits that would support that goal. Of course you could dedicate a whole day each month to writing and storytelling with the goal of ending up with one good story to tell, but it would require much more initial cognitive effort and be less effective than five minutes every day.

Do you think you could come up with a good turn of phrase within seven tries? Most of my writing gets less than two edits. If I spent five minutes a day for one week working on one sentence it might actually be brilliant, effective and memorable. Within a month I would have four such phrases. Can you imagine doing this in one day? No, me neither.

Habits automate reaching your goals. Choose things that if repeated will accumulate into big wins.

Choose the right circumstances

The other side of the habit coin are processes and circumstances.

You could set yourself the task to write 5000 words every day and then struggle to complete the task, or form the habit. You could also see what environment actually supports you in a creative writing flow.

My husband writes really well in the mornings in a café with a background noise of people. I prefer afternoons on the sofa with a dog snuggled up on either side.

Choosing an environment and a time that makes your task easy will mean you do it. It might not always be 5000 words, or always be a text worth publishing, but on the other hand sometimes it will be.

And the more often you do it the more likely you are to get good at it. Trust yourself to get things done without micromanaging yourself. Fix your environment to support valuable tasks.

Take notes on what works and how you spend your time

Depending on how you see yourself you might falsely assume that you are totally getting a lot done, or nothing at all. Neither is likely to be the full truth. Writing down how you spend your time and under what circumstances allows you to track reality and draw conclusions about what works for you.

Going back over notes like these in a weekly, monthly or yearly review allows you to set better goals for the next time period and shows you how you are getting closer to achieving your dreams. These little course corrections and process adjustments bring you closer and closer to smooth sailing.

On this day ten years ago I released MindNode to the public. Like so many things it was born out of my own need and my own struggle with linear thinking.

This Is Why

I've struggled with focus and successful completion of a project my entire life. Over the years I've dreamed up many ideas for products, or projects, but I've always had a hard time when it came to actually developing the idea into something concrete. I tried collecting my ideas in Moleskine notebooks, outlines, text documents, and many more, but the challenge of forming my thoughts into a fully developed idea, and then into a real thing, was hardly ever met. I never seemed to be able to grasp the big picture and forgot important details along the way. You can say I was - and still am - a very unstructured person.

Enter Mind Mapping

What helped was when I discovered mind mapping, more than ten years ago. For the first time I had a concept that allowed me to collect thoughts in an unstructured way and process them visually in a way that is so much more how my brain works, than everything else I tried previously.

I started to use pen and paper to visualize my thoughts and this is what started my path towards developing MindNode. So for me, MindNode, at first, wasn't the product I was ultimately aiming for, but a tool to enable me to clear my thoughts for other ventures.

Today I start almost everything with a mind map - even this post. At first I collect every single thought. This includes thoughts that initially seem completely unrelated, thoughts that contradict previous thoughts, or thoughts that are seemingly only a different way to phrase a previous thought. I even mix and match German and English words in the same thought. My initial brainstorming mind maps are always a "mess", but this is how my brain works. I learned to accept it. Even better, I discovered that writing down literally every single thought frees my mind to discover new connections. As MindNode has grown from a simple thought, to a small app, to a business, this initial brainstorming step is still the core of MindNode.

Becoming a Team

When I last wrote about how MindNode came to be (The road to MindNode 1.0), a few freelancer helped me with certain aspects of the app like design and coding. Then almost five years ago I hired my first employee and the company has grown ever since. Only last year we doubled the number of employees to six and we are currently looking into hiring a backend developer to help us bring brainstorming to teams.

MindNode is no longer my baby, but the combined effort of a motivated team of people who share a common passion: helping you, our users, develop your thoughts into something alive in the world.