Last month we’ve been working on refreshing the mind map view (a Dynalist Pro feature) .
The prototype has been there all the time (look at this jumpy screenshot from three years ago!). This time around, we made a bunch of improvements:
The nodes no longer jump around
Markdown and links are properly rendered
Zoom in and out with your mouse wheel to see the big picture
Breadcrumb on the top
Go back and forward in browser history
Mind map view is encoded in the URL
How to use
You can open the mind map view from here (Pro account required):
And voilĂ ! You have a mind map version of your document!
If you need some Dynalist Pro trial time to give it a try, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@dynalist.io. We’re happy to help!
Next steps
There are lots of improvements we’d like to bring to the mind map view.
To list a few of them:
Make it use the font you choose in settings (coming soon!)
Switching document while in the mind map view doesn’t work yet
Make items in mind map editable
Display color labels and headings
It’s an experiment, after all, it’s by no means a standard outliner feature. So whether we would continue to develop things on this list would depend on how the mind map view is received.
That means, if you have any feedback or ideas on how to make the mind map view more useful, feel free to let us know! Thanks so much!
I’m sure this is a really anticipated feature for some folks, but I have to say I’m disappointed. Your resources are limited like everyone else’s, and there’s a large backlog of features & enhancements that need to be made to the core functionality before getting into the whole mind map field, which will now bring its own set of bugs/suggestions/features.
I have at least 10 issues that would tremendously improve my daily QOL in the main product, about tags, formatting, search, navigation, and links, very core areas. Most have already been posted, but I need to re-summarize. This mind map seems like the type of thing to do when all that is addressed. Again, that’s just my usage, but I have to advocate for features that I need as a user.
Zooming in/out messes with the centering. It may be to a reasonable default, but for me it shoots everything down to the lower right corner and I need to drag it all back.
Once in mind map mode, if I select another document from the file pane the mind map of the original document stays present.
Clicking on a node with no children has a drastically different effect than clicking on a node with children. I’m not sure what it should do, necessarily, but the current action seems unnecessary, given that zooming into that node will give an empty page (since it is a leaf).
Looks pretty cool! I will play around with it in the coming days. One thing that I immediately missed: Images are not shown in the mind map! This would be very important for me.
Update: we have fixed the trackpad zoom sensitivity issue and the switch document issue! It’s out in the web version, and will be released to desktop apps this weekend.
If you all implement the clone item feature, the mind map view would be useful for visualizing which parents connect to the cloned item. Until then, I find that the list view is more intuitive for visualizing strictly hierarchical information.
The main improvement for me, beyond being able to add new items directly onto it, would be to be able to drag the current items around, so you aren’t forced to have a left->right fixed tree structure – the current incarnation gets unwieldy pretty quickly as document size grows
(Edit: Also part of the value of mind maps can be spatial i.e. all THIS stuff goes in top left quadrant, all THAT stuff goes in top right etc)
I would propose a “radial” view in addition to the “outline” view. Start first item at 12:00 and lay them all in a circle going clockwise. This way you get more wider balanced view of info in the list. The outline is too analogous to the list view itself.
This is not untrue, still developing the mind map view further, making it editable for instance, will be a huge step forward. I dare to speculate I am not the only one who would appreciate it. This is not to stir anything up, just to voice support to Erica & Co in their plans and efforts.
There’s lots of factors that go into priority which will be hidden to us, including how easy / quick something will be, and even how motivated / what ideas the staff have for how to implement something, and that’s fine, they’re not robots. I do think with a monthly fee that involves an expectation of steady improvements but as long as the company is responsive and in the long run is steadily implementing things people ask for, then all is good, and these guys are the best company I’ve seen for this.
