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FreeMind's brother (also open source java)

2004-02-26
2004-03-02
  • HelgeM on the mailing list

    Hi FreeMinders!

    Wow, this was quite an discovery for me. I am curious if somebody here is aware of FreeMinds brother. His name is "TG LinkBrowser". Apache Software License.
    He has little features but VERY cool mindmap browsing. (Animated! Neverless very fast.)

    You can test a non-editing web applet it here:

    http://www.touchgraph.com/newLB/TGLinkBrowser.html

    Since it is also written in Java I wonder if the brothers might merge one day. If I imagine the result, a big smile comes to my face. The development of TG LinkBrowser seems to have stopped: The last release was January 15, 2002.

    --

    You can download the full application here:
    http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/touchgraph/TGLB_SRC_120.zip

    Just start "TGLinkBrowser.bat" and you will can do editing. New nodes are made by draggging from the selected node.

    --

    Project page here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/touchgraph/

    Curious for your thoughts about it,

    :) Helge

    PS: There is also a big brother of FreeMind (also open-source), called KAON, which displays ontologies, which seem like mind maps on drugs to me. They are used for formal knowledge representation.
    Homepage: http://kaon.semanticweb.org/
    Wikipedia's explanation of ontologies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_\(computer_science)

    Kaon Project page:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/kaon/

     
    • Richard Ries

      Richard Ries - 2004-02-26

      TGLB looks interesting, and the price is right (!). Have you looked at The Brain? http://www.thebrain.com
      It seems similar to TGLB, but is more polished.

      As to KAON, I looked at their site, then hit Wikipedia. The language is English, but the meaning is beyond me! I _think_ they are using 'ontolog*' in place of 'knowledge base', but I may be wrong 8-< .

      --Rich

       
      • HelgeM on the mailing list

        thebrain is not open source and therefore there will be no synergies between it and FreeMind.
        TouchGraph LinkBrowser on the contrary might just be a different display mode in FreeMind one day. You hit a button and you see your FreeMind map rendered with TouchGraph... that would be cool.

         
        • HelgeM on the mailing list

          "TouchGraph" is the open-source graphics library which renders the maps for the "TouchGraph LinkBrowser".

          The following thread sounds like it may not be too difficult to render FreeMind maps with TouchGraph:

          > has anyone worked with importing data, particuarly data from SAS into a touchgraph browser. and if so how did you go about quearying it?
          >> TouchGraph has a nice XML interface. Write a script to export the SAS data to an XML file, and voila! Open this XML file in TouchGraph.
          (From: http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=2057541\)

          ----

          This is really cool:Google's "related"-Websites rendered into a kind-of mindmap. Do it for Freemind.sourceforge.net! Go here:
          http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

           
        • Richard Ries

          Richard Ries - 2004-02-27

          "thebrain is not open source and therefore there will be no synergies between it and FreeMind."

          (1) As a user, it doesn't currently matter to me whether a program is open source or not. ;)

          (2) TGGL ("Tiggle"?) looks crude when compared to thebrain. TGGL would not suffer from a little polishing up.

          (3) A "tiggly" FreeMind would be nice, and even nicer if there was a quick way to hop to the "home node" (or whatever the very first node is called), especially if the hoisting of TGGL is employed.

          --Rich

           
          • Marc Brooks

            Marc Brooks - 2004-02-27

            > (1) As a user, it doesn't currently matter to me whether a program is open source or not. ;)

            Well, it does to this user.  :)  Besides, if thebrain is not open source, how would one go about integrating the two?  Given the viral nature of the GNU license that Freemind uses, it's a touchy thing to try bundle the software together without everything becoming GNU licensed.

            Marc

             
    • Michael Harwerth

      Looks very appealing, I especially like the "Hints" feature and the way to mutually expand/collapse branches. On the opposite hand, the free floating nodes are somewhat confusing, I'd rather like them the way it is done in FreeMind.

       
    • John Bergsma

      John Bergsma - 2004-03-01

      Could someone spell out for me how to go about taking a Freemind map and showing it in Touchgraph?

      Do I have to learn XML to be playing at this?

      Thanks,
      John

       
      • HelgeM on the mailing list

        Hi John!

        I think you will have to learn Java and have a look into the TouchGraph library. When they say that it is easy to read XML-files, I think they are thinking of "easy for Java programmers". I don't know how to do it. I would love to do that too.

         
    • John Bergsma

      John Bergsma - 2004-03-02

      Then I'll have to leave it to the smart people, and I will wait here patiently till they share.  They are a generous lot when it comes to freemind I find.

       

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