Pervasive Smothering

About Freemind

FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. It is licensed under the GPL and is very easy to use. It is available for almost all operating systems. Freemind’s mind maps use a .mm file extension.

About the Freemind Browser (Applet)

The Freemind Browser is a Java Applet that can be placed in web pages to display a Freemind Mindmap.

About the Gadget

This Google Module takes two URLs as input: one is a Java Applet, the other is a Freemind Mindmap. What it does is place your mindmaps in a standards-compliant (.html) way.

Adding the Module

In your Google Personalized Page, click on ‘Add Content’ and add the module by URL: http://rolandog.googlepages.com/freemind.xml. Or, click this button:

Requirements

Hosting

This module requires the two files to be hosted, freemindbrowser.jar and a *.mm file (these two, for example: freemindbrowser.jar, Polietileno.mm). Both files need to be in the same domain name. The java object won’t work if they’re on separate domain names.

You can upload the .jar file and your .mm files to your site or to your Google Pages account. If you use Google Pages, you can use this .jar file to avoid having a lot of identical .jar files.

If you don’t have a place to store your files you may use The File Hut, since they allow direct hotlinking of files. If you decide to use The File Hut for hosting, you can use this .jar file in the field.

Java

This Google Gadget requires you to have at least the Java Runtime Environment v.1.4.

Usage

Place the .jar file’s URL in the first input field, and the .mm file’s URL in the second input field. Then click Add. You can add multiple mind maps and also delete them. Clicking on the ‘edit’ section will allow you to establish a ‘default’ value for your .jar and .mm file URLs. That section also lets you set the height of each object that is created (use an integer, something like 300).

Test Drive

You can test the freemind viewer, before adding it. Here is the Gadget’s screenshot:

Questions?

You can email me at rolandog@gmail.com, or you can go to the ‘Dissecting the Freemind Viewer‘ page, where I documented the issues I had while writing this module.