Lots of great news: Beta 16 ready for release, Cooperation with Freeplane team, Docear receives funding, …

There is lots of great news.

Beta 16 is about to be released (Preview for Blog readers available now)

The last Beta was released in March, quite a while ago. We were really busy with preparing the relaunch of SciPlore MindMapping as Docear. However, we also had time to finish Beta 16 with two really nice new features and lots of improvements and bug fixes. This will be the last version of SciPlore MindMapping. The next release will be a Beta version of the all-new Docear. Before releasing Beta 16, we would like to ask you – our Blog readers – to test it. If you should find bugs during the next two days, we will fix them before releasing Beta 16 officially. All bugs discovered after that deadline will be fixed in the first Docear Beta scheduled for September.

Here is the change log:

• New: Bookmarks and comments in PDFs are renamed when the linking node in a mind map is renamed
• New: PDF can now be opened on the page where the bookmark is (only Acrobat)
• Improved: Recommendations are now also based on selection in incoming window
• Improved: Recommendations can be deactivated
• Improved: Smart Update is default update mechanism now, instead of Thorough Update
• Improved: Import Highlighted text is selected by default
• Improved: Zotero and Mendeley BibTeX file support should work now more reliably, also under Linux
• Improved: Layout of recommendations changed
• Fixed: Under some circumstances CPU load of the software was 100% even if nothing was done Fixed: Null pointer exception when last opened mind map was closed
• Fixed: Some users could not open PDF links out of a mind map
• Fixed: Mind Maps were destroyed in some cases when the user was using a proxy server
• Fixed: Exception under MacOS when monitoring folder was updated
• Fixed: Monitoring did not work for some users

Download Beta 16 Preview here, and report problems as soon as possible in our new forum for bug reports. Also, feel free to tell us your ideas for new features we can integrate in Docear

Cooperation with Freeplane

This weekend, the entire Docear team went to Munich to meet Dimitry Polivaev and Volker Börchers from the Freeplane team. As announced earlier, it was clear that Docear and Freeplane wanted to cooperate but it wasn’t sure in which way. This weekend we met to figure out the details and I have to say that I really enjoyed the meeting. Dimitry and Volker are two amazing software developers who created a really great piece of software that is just perfect for our purposes. In addition, it was a real pleasure to meet with them and discuss our ideas for the future of Freeplane and Docear.

Working together with the Freeplane team

The outcome in short: Docear will be developed as a independent Add-On for Freeplane. That means you will be able to download the complete package (Freeplane+Docear) from our website but you can also install Freeplane updates whenever you like (until now, you had to wait for us, integrating a new version of FreeMind to our own code). Also, the Docear team will closely work together with the Freeplane team to assure that developments of Freeplane will not contradict the interests of our users. And, the Docear team will also engage in the development of basic Freeplane features such as an enhanced search function. We also will use a common repository for our code.

Originally we planned on working together on Saturday and Sunday, but the meeting went so well that we discussed all the points on our agenda on Saturday already. This meant, we had plenty of time left to visit Munich and its pubs 🙂

The Freeplane and Docear teams having a beer in “Löwenbräu”. From left to right: Dimitry (Freeplane), Stefan (Docear), Volker (Freeplane), Christoph (Docear Volunteer), Marcel (Docear), Joeran (Docear)

Docear team receives funding for one year (100,000€)

During the last years only a few hours a month could be spend on the development of SciPlore MindMapping because we had lots of other work to do. This has changed since July 1, 2011. We (that is Stefan Langer, Marcel Genzmehr, and I – Joeran Beel) got a scholarship from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology for one year, worth 100,000€ (~143,000 US$), to work full-time on the development of Docear. Our goal is, to develop Docear into an academic literature suite helping you in all aspects of literature management, i.e. literature search, literature organization and literature creation. I would like to stress, that we are extremely happy to have this scholarship as there are no strings attached. It’s not a loan we would have to pay back, and it’s not an investment from some investors expecting a huge return on investment. It’s almost like winning in a lottery because we can just focus on developing a great product during the next year and we will have enough money to pay our rent and food. After the year, we hope we will be able to continue the development of Docear in a similar way as Zotero is doing it, with research grants and funding from non-commercial organizations.

We plan to release Docear’s first public Beta and new website in September 2011. However, feel free to use already now our new forum for bug reports, general questions and submit your ideas to our idea tracker. More information will come soon :-).