3. More on nodes

3.1 Adding, editing and deleting nodes

A step-by-step guide on how to create nodes can be found in the "Getting Started" section. So here is just a short summary. Nodes generally can be created as children or as siblings of the selected nodes. The buttons to create new nodes are in the left column of the menu and show a single arrow for a child node, and a forked arrow for a sibling node. Keyboard shortcuts to create children are "Tab" and "C" and to create siblings "Shift-Tab" and "S".

To edit the caption of a node you have to enter the edit mode of the node. This happens by double clicking the node text or by pressing "Enter" while the node is selected. The entered text will not break automatically if it gets to long, but you have the possibility to manually add a line break by pressing "Shift-Enter" while editing the text. To cancel the node edit mode you can press the "Cancel" button or press "Esc". To apply the edited value you can press the "Apply" button or press "Enter".

Deleting nodes also works using menu buttons or keyboard shortcuts. The delete button shows a red X and is placed in the left column of the menu as well. Keyboard shortcuts, while the node is selected, are "Del" and "Backspace". The root node can't get deleted. Deleting a node, which has children, will delete the children as well - deleting a node will always delete the whole branch beyond this node.

3.2 Sorting and moving nodes

After creating some nodes you probably have already recognized that the nodes get layouted automatically. This principally happens after a very simple automatic system. For the basic layout Mind42 just checks how many children the root node has and the puts one half of them on the left side, and the other half on the right side of the node. For all the other nodes the children will get aligned vertically.

Mind42 applies the layout automatically. But this does not mean that you can't decide in which order they should be shown. Initially every new child automatically becomes the last child of already existing children, and new siblings automatically get placed after the selected node. To change the order of already existing nodes you can reorder them using Drag and Drop. Just click on the text of the node you want to reorder and while holding the mouse button down move it to the desired position. An indicator will show you where the node will be placed when releasing the mouse button.

Info: The reorder indicator does not show the accurate position the node will have after dropping it, it only shows before or after which node the current node will be inserted. This means, that if you move a node to another position of the root node, the indicator will not accurately show on which side of the root node the node will be placed. For example placing a node at the bottom of the left hand root node children could make the node to topmost child of the right hand side children.

As already mentioned the layout gets calculated automatically. But this doesn't mean that you have no influence on the layout at all. It is possible to add spaces to the layout to visually delimit certain topics. To do so you can grab the move icon, which appears while moving the mouse over a node. The way this works probably seems weird in the beginning but there is a logical behavior behind this. Start experimenting by moving a node left and right. As you'll see the node will follow your mouse cursor where possible - so no surprises here. The next thing you could try is to move a node, which is surrounded by siblings on the top as well as on the bottom. If you now move the node a little bit up and down, you'll see that not only the node follows your mouse, but also that the opposing node will move too. E.g. if moving a node down, any node above it will start moving up as well. This is because you actually don't move the node, but add a space between the nodes. You can add a space to the top by moving the node down, and add a space the bottom by moving the node up. This is the same way the free mind mapping application Freemind works.

3.3 Node attributes

To visually enhance text nodes, Mind42 offers various attributes you can add to your nodes like colors, links and icons. In the following sections we describe how they can be used. The following attributes only apply to regular text nodes - not to the root node or image nodes. The attributes can be found in the middle column of the node menu.

3.3.1 Colors and Fonts

To change the appearance of the text itself you can add color and font attributes to your nodes. You'll find a settings panel for these attributes by clicking the first button of the middle column of the node menu - the one with the color wheel and the "A" on it. On the left hand side of the panel you'll find font options, on the right hand side you'll find the color options. Let's start with the font options.

At the top of the font options you'll find buttons to make the text bold, italic and underlined. Below these buttons you'll find "Small", "Medium" and "Large" buttons to specify the size of the text. By default every node is bold, and the size depends on the level of the node. By level we mean how many children the node is away from the root node. Direct children of the root node are in level 1, their children are level 2, their children level 3 and so on. By default the first level children use the large font, the second level children the medium font, and all higher level children use the small font. Changing the font size of a node only changes this rule for the node where you've added this attribute; no other node will be affected. Unlike the font styles: when e.g. making a node italic it will "inherit" this style to all its children. So the font styles always apply to the whole branch of the selected node - of course you can overwrite this default behavior by setting a font style of the children as well.

Colors behave like the font styles just mentioned. By choosing a color from the color grid you assign a color to the node, which gets inherited to its children. The default behavior of the children is to inherit their color, so assigning a color to them also changes this. To change their behavior back to default there is the "Default" button at the bottom of the color grid available - So you don't have to set the nodes to the color black if you want to remove the color, you can press the default button to make the nodes inherit their color again. If your not satisfied with the colors available in the color grid you also could click on the "More color" link at the bottom to bring up a color wheel, where you can pick an arbitrary color.

Speaking of style inheritance, which is the default behaviour, it is also possible to not inherit node attributes. In the dialog you'll find a "Pass on style" checkbox which determines, wether the style you apply to the current node will be passed on to it's children with the default style. If unticking this checkbox only the current node will be affected by the changes. By using this option you can for example colour a single node red, without colouring the whole branch.

3.3.2 Links

To add a certain resource to a node you have the possibility to add a link to a node. You can link to an URL (any web page address), an e-mail address or another map you've created. To open the "link panel" just click the globe icon of the node menu. The link panel has three tabs: "External", "Email" and "Mindmap" which we'll now describe in detail.

The "External" tab is used to create the previously mentioned links to URLs. So just paste any web page address you want to link into the input field with the label "Link this node with:" and press the "Apply" button or press "Enter" to create the link. Besides entering URLs directly you also have the possibility to search for interesting links on a topic using the popular tag search from del.icio.us. At the bottom of the external link tab you can to search del.icio.us using your node text as tags, or to enter tags manually. If the search brings any results you can either open the link by clicking the link text, or assign the link to the node by clicking the little disk icon to the left of the link. After a link got assigned - by entering an URL or searching del.icio.us - the link panel will close and a preview bubble of the link will open. The preview bubble is attached to the "globe" icon, which appeared right of the node text by creating the link - the so-called link indicator. You can close the preview bubble by clicking the link indicator of the node, or by using the red cross at the top right of the bubble itself. You can access this preview bubble at any time by clicking the link indicator. To follow the link itself just click the link within the preview bubble.

E-mail links, which can be created by switching over to the "Email" tab, basically work the same way. Just enter an e-mail address into the input field and press "Apply". Of course there is nothing like the del.icio.us search for e-mails, but they share the same sort of preview bubble.

And last but not least you can link to other mind maps as well. Also this type of links basically works the same. By selecting the "Mindmap" tab in the link panel you'll get a list of mind maps you could link to, and by assigning a link, a link indicator with a preview bubble will appear right to the node. But in this case clicking the link within the preview bubble will not open your mail application or open a new browser window, but rather load the mind map within Mind42.

While you can add as many links to a node you want using the globe button, removing and editing links works using the link indicator or link bubble. To edit an exisiting link, either right click the link indicator to view the link dialog in edit mode, or click the pen icon in the preview bubble. In the link edit dialog you can change the link, or remove it from the node using the "remove link" link at the bottom.

3.3.3 Icons

The third button from the middle column in the node menu is the icons button (the one with a start on it). Clicking it will open an icon panel with multiple groups of icons. By clicking one of the icons you assign it to the node. Such user assigned icons will (unlike the Mind42 generated icons like the link indicator) appear on the left hand side of the node text. You can assign as many icons to the node as you like. But as mentioned initially, the icons are sorted into multiple groups - so what's the meaning of these groups? By clicking one of the icons to the left of the node text you can cycle through the icons of this group. Sounds complicated - let's look at an example. We assign the number icon "1" to a node. By clicking the assigned icon we can cycle through the group of number icons. So clicking it once will bring up the icon "2", then "3" and so on. It works the same way for the flag group and for the progress group - and finally all the other icons are in a group as well. You can assign multiple icons from one group to a node and cycle through them individually.

To remove an icon from a node you can simply right click it. If you want to remove all icons of the node you could open up the icon panel again and use the "No icon" button at its bottom.

Tip: Using the icons you could use nodes as simple tasks. You could add a number icon as priority, and a progress icon to represent the progress. By clicking the progress icon you can advance the progress because using the icon group cycling the next progress icon will appear afterwards.

3.4 Node text

Now, after we've covered the text node attributes, we can continue with additional information you can add to every node, to text nodes as well as to the root node or to image nodes. One of these attributes is the node text - not to be confused with the node caption (which we've called node text most of the time as well). You actually can add free form text (with formatting) to every node within your mind map. There is a separate editor for this in a tab on the right of the Mind42 interface. If this editor is open it will show you and allow you to add text for the currently selected node. After you've added such a text to a node, a text indicator will appear to the right of the node caption. Hovering with your mouse over such an indicator will show you a preview of the text, and clicking it will open the editor for this node. To remove the text (and with the text the indicator) just delete all the text from the editor.

Info: Sometimes the indicator won't disappear although it seems that all the text got deleted. This could happen if there is still a space or a line break within the editor.

As a disclaimer regarding this feature: Mind42 is no full-fledged word processor. This is really only intended for short texts and notes, not for whole documents. If used too extensively it could make your document very large, which cause long loading times and slowed down overall performance.

3.5 Attachments

Another thing you can add to every node regardless of its type are attachments. The idea behind attachments is the same as behind the Mac OS Dashboard, the Windows Sidebar, Google Gadgets or Konfabulator widgets: attaching little widgets/gadgets/mini-applications to a dedicated area. In the case of Mind42 we currently have three types of such attachments: Notes, Wikipedia articles and Todo lists. But unlike the previously mentioned desktop solutions we offer more than just a single place to attach these widgets. In Mind42 there is an attachment panel available for every node.

To open the attachment panel you have to click the paper clip icon, which is always in the rightmost column of the node menus. A grey overlay will appear and you'll get a list of attachment types at the top of the screen. By clicking one of the attachment type icons you can create a new instance of this attachment for this node. You can create multiple instances of every attachments type for every node. After you've created the attachments you can move it on the panel by dragging it on the title bar and you can delete it by clicking the "X" symbol in the top right of the attachment. To close the whole panel without deleting the attachment just click somewhere in the grey area or use the close button at the bottom of the attachment panel. After you've added attachments to a node a paper clip indicator will appear to the right of the node (remember: icons to the left of the node label are user defined icons, icons to the right are attribute indicators). By clicking this indicator you can open the attachment panel for this node as well. The indicator will disappear after all created attachments on that panel have been deleted.

The note attachment:
With this attachment type you can add short texts to the node. This little notes don't support any formatting or elements like images and links. They are ideal to attach some additional information to the node, which is not worth a branch for the node.

The Wikipedia attachment:
Using the Wikipedia attachment you can add references to Wikipedia articles to a node. At the top of the attachment you'll find a search bar where you can search for specific articles. In the area below the articles will be shown. Within this area you can use Wikipedia as normal - you can follow links, search different articles and so on. If you found what you want to link to the node you can press the "remember this page" link at the top right of the attachments. While you are on the remembered page this link would be replaced with a "home" icon.

The todo attachment:
The todo attachment offers the possibility to add multiple todos to one node. As mentioned in the icons section (3.3.3) you could simulate todos by using icons. Like this you would only be able to make a node to a single todo. Using this attachments you can specify multiple todos. When initially creating the attachments you'll see a new todo line within the todo table by default. You can enter its progress, priority, due date and description and press the disk icon on its right to save it. To add another todo line you can use the "Create new todo" link at the bottom of the attachment. To edit an existing todo just click the row. To delete a todo you can use the "X" icon while editing the todo.

3.6 Image nodes

Alternatively, to only using simple text nodes, you also could add images to the mind map. This works by converting text nodes to images nodes. The idea behind this is, that you rapidly outline your map using text nodes, and afterwards you could polish your map by converting some of the text nodes to images. Mind42 doesn't provide a way to upload images - but you can link to any image URL from the Internet. To do this you either have to enter the image URL directly and press the "Apply" button, or you can search for an appropriate image in the Google, Yahoo and Flickr databases. The search field is positioned directly beyond the URL input field and is prefilled with the text the node had before it was converted to an image (this supports the rapid outline idea). The search will show you four results per page, and you can choose one of the found images by clicking it. Remember, Mind42 doesn't provide these images - they come from Google, Yahoo or Flickr and therefore it could be that it isn't allowed to link some of the images. This could lead to images not loading correctly. Also note that using too many images could lead to long mind map loading times.

Once you've selected an image you can resize it by double clicking the image. A resize handle will appear in the lower right corner of the image, which can be used to resize it via drag and drop. If you reduce the size of the image a magnifying glass icon will appear above the image. Using this icon you can view a full size version of the scaled down image. When resizing an image by default its ratio will be preserved. To change this behavior you can hold down the "Ctrl" key while the mouse button is pressed.

It's also possible to convert an image node back to a text node. When doing so the resulting text node will have the same attributes it had before it was converted to an image. This includes the node text, its colors and so on.

3.7 Copy/Paste

Since Mind42 is a regular web page the system wide copy/paste mechanism for text strings works for every part of Mind42 where you can enter text. By default there wouldn't have been any possibility to cut/copy/paste whole branches within Mind42, so we had to implement such a feature ourselves. Using the cut/copy/paste icons in the left menu bar you can cut/copy/paste nodes and branches within Mind42 - but since Mind42 can't access the system wide clipboard this really only works within Mind42. You can't paste branches from a text file into Mind42, and the other way round you can't copy a branch from Mind42 into a text editor.

To cut or copy a node inclusively its children just select it and press the cut or copy buttons. Alternatively you also could press "Ctrl-X" or "Ctrl-C". To paste the copied content just press the paste button or press "Ctrl-V" while a node is selected. This will create the pasted content as a child of the selected node.

Attention: If you've copied something from Mind42 as well as a text string, "Ctrl-V" will have different effects in windows. If you were editing the text of the node the text string would get pasted. If you've just selected a node the Mind42 would be pasted.

Info: Since Mind42 is not using the system wide clipboard it's also not possible to copy/paste branches between multiple windows of Mind42. But it's possible to copy a branch from one map, open another map in the same window, and paste it there - at least as long as you don't close the application in the meantime.

3.8 Undo/Redo

Mind42 also implements an undo/redo system, which lets you reverse the actions you've taken on your map. You find the undo/redo buttons in the left menu bar - also the common keyboard shortcuts "Ctrl-Z" (Undo) and "Ctrl-Y" (Redo) work. Currently Mind42 saves the last 100 steps made - of course only as long as you don't open another map or close the application. When you've undone an action it will be stored as a redo. You can redo the undone actions only as long as you don't make new changes to the map. It's like traveling back in time. When you've traveled back using the undo function you can go back as long, as you don't change anything in the history. During collaborations you only can undo the steps you've done: This could lead to actions, which can't work anymore. For example if you've edited a node and want to undo the change, but your co-collaborator deleted the node, this won't work.

The undo/redo system really only covers the last 100 changes you've done on a currently opened mind map in the current editing session. If you're interested in viewing and restoring whole older versions of a mind map take a look at section 5.5.