XMind

Brainstorming and Mindmapping!

Another important thing we would like to share with you is:
Our website, XMind.net has been revised successfully.

Here I list some major changes of our website:

1. More attractive Home page: More friendly and good-looking design. You will find the target information easily.
2. New website with many improvements, especially can work fluently on any browsers.
3. New Downloading: Save your time, be nice, considerate to you. Two editions, one Package only.
4. Better viewer for your online maps: Make every effort to build perfection.

At last, on this Thanksgiving Day, we also would like to take the opportunity to thank you, our friends, thanks for all your support, thanks for being with XMind for so long time. We believe that with your support, your understanding, your patience, XMind can get better and better. We are so deeply grateful to all of these, and we will take this as our forward momentum!
Wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving Day!

November 23, 2009 — XMind, a leader in mind mapping, visual thinking and collaboration software, today announced XMind 3.1, a major release of its award-winning product. New XMind will be more accessible to a broader audience and more powerful for professional users.

Here let’s know about the changes in this powerful new version:

New Features

1. Default Theme, now makes it easy to use your favorite theme and even your own designed theme in new maps.
2. Brainstorming Mode, help you get sparkles easily and save more time.
3. Powerful Search, now works among all workbooks, which means you can fast find out useful information in all open XMind files.
4. Relative Link, lets XMind be able to your assistant to manage files better.
5. Export to PDF(Map), offers another option to share our maps with the world.
6. Sorting Topics, helps us review the whole plan handily.
7. Enhanced spellchecker, could be our great assistant in work. It not only tell us which is wrong, but also what the right is. Another good news is that we can add our own dictionary file(.dict) into XMind.
8. XMind has the new online update system.

Fixed bugs

1. Fishbone: If changing map’s structure to fishbone, add summary to a topic, drag and add more topic into this summary, click print, the layout is chaos. When reopening this map, the layout will be chaos too.
2. Extract Theme: If we extract a theme(named theme 1), close and reopen xmind, then extract another theme(its name will be the theme 1 automatically,), change its name (like to be theme 2).Now when we reopen XMind, the theme 2 is lost.
3. Context Menu: Only in the first sheet of the first workbook, select a topic and right-click mouse, you can see the full context menu(including markers, and structures).
4. Upload map: If we add some special theme or style to a map and upload it to http://share.xmind.net/, then download this map and open it, all special theme and style will disappear.
5. Import XMind 2008 file: If the map has wallpaper, that wallpaper will lose after being imported.
6. Import FreeMind 0.9: Some Freemind 0.9 files can not be right imported into XMind.
7. Extract style: Sometimes, your extracted style will disappear after re-launching XMind Pro.
8. Export dialog and others works well on Ubuntu, esp 9.10.
9. Copying multiple lines which begins with “Tab” will cause XMind crash.
10. Some other bugs fixed.

Improvements

1. You can open XMind files via double-click on Mac OS.
2. XMind works fluently on Mac OS 10.4.
3. Improve the Spell Check in XMind.
4. Improve the Find and Replace.
5. Improve the Notes.
6. XMind Pro users can use XMind Pro offline.
7. Some other improvements.

Want to know more? Download and try Now. It’s our honor to hear your voice.

As I wrote before, all the XMind Pro features that I listed can benefit Project Management a lot. Now, let’s step into another important feature, Presentation Mode.

First, I want to spend a little time talking about meeting. Undoubtedly, meetings run through the whole project. How to get our meetings effective during Project Management? Is there any good approach to have a meaningful meeting? Presentation Mode in XMind Pro is entering to its stage.

Let’s take project status reports for example. How to express your project status clearly, how to make your co-workers get fully understood of what you are talking about? The answer is to use XMind Presentation mode, which can help you to present your thought perfectly to others according to the map you drew.

As we know, XMind is a great and powerful visual thinking tool to help us to organize our ideas, plans, and tasks. And visual thinking tools are naturally good at communication. To enhance this advantage, XMind Pro brings the well-designed Presentation Mode. The Presentation mode allows us to browse maps with a minimum of distraction.

Press F5 to enter Presentation mode. Now the map appears on the whole screen rather than in a window. And only the central topic is highlighted on the center of Window. See as follows:

With the Arrow keys, we can navigate in Presentation mode fluently. While we are focusing on the current topic, we can also have a glance of the topics mentioned before:

There also is a hidden button panel in Presentation mode. Moving the mouse to the bottom, we will see it, which has six buttons. They can help us navigate the topics, zoom the map, highlight all topics, and Show Sidebar.

In this sidebar, we can see the outline of all opened works, enjoy the powerful filter, and enable audio notes. This sidebar should be remembered esp. while navigating a complicated map.

With this presentation mode, our audience can easily concentrate on the selected topic. At the same time, they can also read the topics we have navigated. This is the point. From the beginning, XMind shows all things as a whole.

From the task percentage, the difficulties you met when implementing the task, any other improvements in existing tasks, next major tasks, the estimated completion date, all the listed stuff can be arranged orderly, can be presented clearly. In Presentation mode, with arrow keys,  you can show them one by one. Then, your team members can see all the other stuffs you listed as a whole. Meanwhile, your customers could understand your clearly. Everything you present keeps their integrity, but have their own emphasis as well. Presentation mode in XMind will help you do better project status reports.

What about trying XMind Presentation mode to assist your Project Management, it won’t let you down.

It is obvious that Visual Think really can do something helpful to Project Management. XMind, as a great Visual Think/Brainstorming Software, can also benefit our Project Management via its friendly design, many powerful but easy-using features. In the coming several blogs, we’ll focus on how to make full use of XMind in managing projects.

Of all the features that XMind owns, Taskinfo, Gantt View, Powerful Filter, Map Merge, Presentation Mode, Fishbone Chart, Spreadsheet chart, Multiple Sheets/Workbook, Brainstorming mode/Timer* do play important roles in Project Management. Here goes the first one: Taskinfo and Gantt View.

When running a project, there are numerous things need to organize, such as: steps in the whole project, business requirements analysis in measurable goals, financial analysis of the costs and benefits, task assignment, task priority and so on. Therefore, how to get all these things done is not that easy.

Now, you may need XMind, a visual think tool. Suppose that in Executing Stage of a Project, drawing a mind map is very necessary to carry out all the things planed to do, such as business requirements, functions as it was intended, acceptable quality standards of the product, time and budget constraints, and all others aspects. Then we need to list all tasks, and each task has a start and end date, has its own priority and progress. It’s time for us to use Taskinfo. We can select the task and choose the start/end date, priority, and progress percentage for a certain task in the Taskinfo View, and even add the person in “Assigned to”*.

Everything is in order. Click “Show Gantt Chart” under View menu, we will easily check all these tasks and detailed information. Gantt Chart in XMind is a special Viewer illustrating a project schedule, showing the timelines of the tasks, ordering all tasks with their priorities. When does this task start, when does it end. Which tasks are urgent, should be done at once, which have not to. What’s the progress of a task. Moreover, moving a mouse to a task, we will see who are in charge of it in the future. Here, we can understand fully at one glance. I guess it will be a better idea for us to use this view to communicate/discuss with other members than just watching it by ourselves.

Apparently, you may be aware of that Taskinfo and Gantt View can do better performance when they work together. That’s definitely true. Finally, it seems that arranging and managing your tasks is not that hard.

How Effective and valuable approaches for Project Management, would you like to have the experience by yourself? Just do it, don’t be hesitate. Whatever you think of them, please make your voice heard.

*The features, Brainstorming/Timer and Assigned to, will be available in the coming version.
**Taskinfo and Gantt View are both available in XMind Pro only.