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New MindTree HTML and Clipboard Features

Lindsay has been traveling the world for work a lot lately.  This week she’s in Vegas, and I’m home taking care of Claire, which means I have a lot of time on my hands late at night.  So, I’ve managed to do a bit of MindTree development.

A lot, actually.  But I don’t have much to show for it yet.  I’m actually working in the trunk plus 3 separate branches at the moment - a branch for Addins, a branch for a major dependency refactoring, and a branch for WPF.

But I’ve also managed to do some cool stuff in the trunk, and I just put it out there.  You can download the new build from http://mindtree.winstonfassett.com/wiki/MindTreeDownload.

HTML Editor

I’ve added the ability to store HTML as an attribute of any node.  So, MindTree just became an HTML snippet manager.  I’ve been using Google Notebook for this, but mainly because I couldn’t do it in MindTree.  You can open the HTML Editor from the View Menu.

It seems to work about as well as most HTML snippet managers.  It can handle images and a whole lot of HTML, but it doesn’t preserve a lot of style and doesn’t show Flash stuff.

NOTE: If you want to edit the HTML, you just need to double-click in the editor and it will become editable.

I’m using an open source control for displaying editing the HTML.  It’s pretty decent, but let me know if you see any quirks.

My ultimate goal is to be able to display HTML in the MindMap nodes themselves, but unfortunately, the performance is just horrible.  I actually did write it that way to begin with, and things were horribly slow.  Browsers are pretty darn sophisticated and it takes a lot to render HTML.  Some time in the near future, though, I may take a crack at a “mini-HTML” node that can handle a subset of HTML, like bold, italics, etc.

HTML Clipboard Support

When you copy / paste snippets of HTML, we get some interesting contextual information, i.e. the URL that the clip came from.  So I added the Paste HTML Snippet command under the Edit Menu.  If you have copied HTML from somewhere, this command will create a new node with a hyperlink to the original source, and the HTML snippet will be stored in that node’s HTML attribute.

Export Support for HTML Snippets

As I said, the HTML snippets are stored in a node attribute called “HTML”.  (You’ll see it in its “raw form” if you look at it from the Outline View).  So, I modified mm-to-html.xslt, which is included in the installation, so that it includes any HTML snippets inline.  It turns out that this is very handy.

Check out this HTML export from the mindmap in the pic above.

Paste Linked File Node

Another interesting (but awkwardly named) new command is called Paste Linked File Node.  It will take whatever is in the clipboard, prompt you for a place to save it, and then create a node that links to that file.

Currently it works with Text, HTML, Files, and Images.

For example, if you copy an image from your browser and then select Paste Linked File Node, MindTree will save the image locally and create a node with a link that you can click for easy access.

As I mentioned this also works with files.  So if you copy a bunch of files in Windows Explorer and then “Paste Linked File Node” in MindTree, it will create nodes with shortcuts to all those files and folders.

Drag / Drop Support for Files and Folders

As mentioned above, you can now easily create links to files and folders when you paste them from the clipboard.

Similarly, I’ve added drag/drop support so you can just drag files and folders into MindTree and it will create a linked node for each of them.

Note: This is different than FreeMind’s “browser mode” (which I’m not particularly fond of).  MindTree will be oblivious to any changes to those files/folders once you create the linked nodes.

Tags: MindTree, Projects