Freeplane

After using the FreeMind mind mapping software for many years, navigation had become sluggish with a single mega map keeping my ever growing notes... Looking for some tips how to best split up the data map or if other people have similar problems and maybe someone is working on making the software faster or smarter, found out one or two of the core developers forked the project and created Freeplane based on FreeMind.

Loading the 2010 stable version 1.1.3 (FreeMind 0.9 is from early 2011) the sluggishness just disappeared. Good job!

Only thing is I had to configure Freeplane under Preferences to always save the folding information!

BTW, nowadays I use this Mind Mapping tool 99.99 percent as a kind of knowledge base or How To list. It is very quick to navigate (now again ;-), and when copy pasting things into a Unix terminal each line gets copied with a line ending, so before something gets ironed out in a little program shell script I can just keep some commands in FreeMine/Freeplane for later copy and paste usage.

For ToDo lists however I use and need something with a calendar, not for planning when to do what (that never worked for me as things always take their own time and everything else has been just wishful thinking on my side), but to pop up when I have to be reminded to focus or start with something (or to push something back).

OK, here are the links in case Google's servers are down today:

Freeplane
FreeMind

JavaNCSS

JavaNCSS is a little Java source measurement tool and open source project that I started some 12 years ago. It's the personal software project of mine that got the most traction and is still in some use, even thought I stopped developing in Java myself and had very little time to keep up with the support and development work that was neccessary.

With lot's of effort did move the programm to support the new Java 1.4 grammar back then, but still, some esoteric open bugs with new grammar features like annotations remained.

Then some people using the tool in their project (Sonar) and a vivid maintainer of the popular Maven build tool showed up, wanting to move things forward. With the help of Simon Brandhof and Hervé Boutemy the project got opened up, first Simon helped giving JavaNCSS an all around infrastructure (at Codehaus.org, which also hosts the JRuby, Jetty, and Groovy projects), with mailing lists, a public bug tracking system, and a source code repository that allows multiple people to work in parallel on the software. Then Hervé worked on the code to bring it into the Maven world, allowing other people and projects to include and invoke JavaNCSS easily through this popular build infrastructure.

Both changes had the effect that we got a lot more input from the user community with explicit error reports AND contributed code solutions! Over the years I had always gotten individual error reports and particular fixes, but this had all been hidden for the other users before a release and notably a bottleneck had been that changes to the Java grammars are very very tricky and time consuming without the experience. Now we got important and difficult grammar fixes contributed by Sébastien Reynaud. Freddy Mallet even made a prototype of a whole new architecture and grammar system based on the visitor pattern.

Yesterday we released the third version since these changes took place, but it has been the first one where all code changes have been done by Hervé (including test cases) with major bug fixes supplied by Sébastien!

Happy to see JavaNCSS opening up and to get a life of its own, thanks to all the people now and over the years who have given it their support...