Desktop Strategy

Pocket Mindmap is a powerful application for mobile use. Due to the nature of the Pocket PC and its UI, it is as usable as a notepad for taking notes, and it is far more useful when it comes to order and structure your notes or communicate them to other people. Its export capabilities even allow you to use the information for presentational purposes very easy. However, there is still time to spend on a full-blown Workstation (a.k.a. Desktop PC). Using Mind Mapping on it is very powerful too. Current desktop applications for Mind Mapping are very sophisticated and powerful packages. Combining the power of both worlds is what we want. An ideal picture would be a seamless integration – working with you Mindmap documents on the Pocket PC and, after transferring them to the desktop, working on the same files with the desktop application.

There are several ways to achieve this to different degrees of integration:

1. By creating powerful Import and Export functionality to support file formats or a common format to interchange data.

2. Build in support of the native file format of the desktop software into Pocket Mindmap.

3. Build in support of the native file format of Pocket Mindmap into the desktop software.

4. Create a Pocket Mindmap version for the desktop.

Commitment

JKRB is definitely committed to create a solution that spans the work on the desktop as well as on the Pocket PC. While it is not a good idea to reinvent the wheel and since we are living in a communicating world, today’s technologies should enable us to create the possibility to exchange information between different packages in the required seamless way. That is what we evaluate now. Due to different feature sets and philosophies of the packages there is cooperation required to reach the desired degree of integration. This is also something we are going to evaluate. We also know that time matters. Therefore, we have developed a short time strategy for our product, which includes some intermediate steps:

1. Documenting and opening the internal file format of Pocket Mindmap.
It is easy to work with the data and create desktop applications using or creating Pocket Mindmap documents, since its format is XML.
The documentation will be on the web server during the next days as a w3c xml schema.
This format enables third party programmers to create conversion tools and add-ins for other applications.

2. We constantly extend the set of export and import functionalities of Pocket Mindmap.

3. We create a desktop companion for Pocket Mindmap, called PMMPartner. This program runs on your Windows desktop and acts as a viewer and exporter for the maps. It is able to export to different data formats and applications. People who do not own Pocket Mindmap can also use this application. It will be free of charge and freely distributable. PMMPartner is released now and supports data exchange with Mindjets Mindmanager (versions 4.0 and 2002 (4.5)). The brand new Version X5 of Mindmanager supports XML now, and we are working to integrate this with an upcoming version of PMMPartner and Pocket Mindmap itself.
For more information on this companion, please subscribe to our Newsletter or stay tuned on the web server.