Preview of Docear’s (Web) Collaborative Mind Mapping Tool to be presented at HTW in Berlin

Since March, Docear offers a simple web-based mind map viewer, developed with some of our volunteering students, and supported by the Freeplane team. On next Friday, July 12th, at 10:30am the students will present their final work at the HTW in Berlin. You are sincerely invited to join the presentation and be first to see Docear’s new collaboration and synchronization feature. The work is not yet ready to be released to the public but we hope to completely finish the work in the next few months. However, even the preview is really amazing! Compared to the current online viewer the new “Docear Web” offers lots of features. First of all, you can edit your mind maps online and not only on your own but together with your colleagues. The collaboration works both with your local desktop Docear and with your web-based Docear. That means, you can just start Docear Desktop as you are used to and colleagues of you may work on the same mind maps you are editing either on the Web or with Docear Desktop as well. Collaboration is in real-time, similarly to Google Docs. In addition, there is a Dropbox-like utility that synchronizes all your data between different devices (and the Web). As said, not everything is already fully functional but the preview version has at least all the basic features and gives you a very good idea what to expect for the final version.

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Preview of the Docear Online Viewer

A few month ago we announced to develop an add-on allowing researchers to collaborate on the same data. Well, we haven’t finished this completely yet but the first step is done. In the past few month we developed an online viewer that allows you to view your backuped mind maps in your web browser. Right now the viewer is only capable of displaying very small mind maps but it’s our highest priority to improve the performance so you can also view larger mind maps. In addition, the online viewer displays only the basic elements such as nodes and edges. Other features such as attributes are not yet displayed but, again, we are working on it :-). Of course, this is just the beginning. As a next step Docear Online will allow you to edit your mind maps online. The following step will enable you to work simultaneously with different researchers on the same data either in your browser or with your desktop version of Docear.

docear online preview

To have a look at the preview version of Docear Online, go to https://my.docear.org and log in with your Docear user name and password. You will be able to view all those mind maps that have been created with the desktop version of Docear and that have been backuped with it. Simply select your mind map in the upper-right corner in the menu. To activate the backup function start Docear Desktop and open Tools->Preferences->Online Services->Manage Docear Service Settings.

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