Mind42 API & maintenance summary

Oct. 7th 2013 | by Stefan Schuster

As some of you might have noticed, yesterday we performed the previously announced maintenance which introduces our new Mind42 API. More information for interested developers can be found in the last paragraph, but first let me summarize some unfortunate events that occurred during the maintenance.

The maintenance started as planned at 8am UTC. Mind42 was completely back online around 11am UTC, so it took a little bit longer than expected. We updated a lot of internal dependencies which always can lead to some troubles. As an example, the drop down menus didn't work any longer on Firefox browsers after the update. We already fixed this concrete bug, but if you find something like this don't hesitate to contact us so that we can fix it.

Unfortunately, I also have to report about some data loss. All new users who signed up between 2am and 8am UTC, as well as all new mind maps and changes to existing mind maps in the same time frame are lost. This is not a direct consequence of the applied updates, but an unfortunate coincidence. One of our hard drives reported an error around 2am, and of course we used the maintenance window we had scheduled (this is the coincidence) to change the broken drive. The drive is of course mirrored to prevent such problems, but for yet unknown reasons all changes between the failure of the drive and the start of the maintenance window have not been persisted on the still working mirror. We are very sorry about any inconvenience this might have caused to some of our users, but hope that the possible damage is pretty limited due to the fact that this occurred on a Sunday morning.

Moving on to more positive news: Our new Mind42 API. Starting today interested developers can request access to the beta of our new API. It's based on the oAuth2 standard and allows mobile app developers as well as other web app developers to access all of the core functionality of Mind42. So if you ever wanted to connect some workflow to Mind42, like automatically creating new mind maps based on some third party data, or programmatically inserting new nodes to existing mind maps, this is now possible. Or maybe you want to fill the gap and start working on a Mind42 compatible mind mapping app for iPhone or Android - also that is possible. Head to our new developer page to get information on how to participate. For now this is a limited beta, so that we can collect feedback on what to improve from the first developers. But don't let this stop you and apply for the beta with your ideas.