To get an embedded map you’re going to:

* Create a map
* Create a presentation of the map
* Get the embed code
* Embed the map on your webpage or blog
* Explore the map with the embedded map player

To get started, create or open a map in Spinscape. Then go to View > Presentation Mode. Create a presentation of the map by adding slides of the desired views of your map. Click on the clock icon to extend the time frame designated for a slide. Edit the presentation by deleting slides or dragging to rearrange the order of slides.

When your presentation is complete, create an embedded map which captures the presentation to embed on a webpage or blog. The embedded map is an interactive map as well. This means you can stop the presentation and explore the map manually.

To create an embedded map:

* Go to File > Embed Map
* Edit the width and/or height, if needed
* Select Autoplay and/or Repeat, if desired
* Click the Get Code button. which automatically copies the embed code to the clipboard

To share an embedded map:

* Open your webpage or blog editor
* Paste the Embed Map code where desired
* Save the changes/Update the page

View your webpage or blog to see the embedded map presentation. Click on the magnifying glass to zoom in or out. Use the map player controls to manually advance through or pause the presentation. When the presentation is paused, it becomes an interactive map for you to explore. The embed button on the map player displays the Embed Code so others can share your map on their site.

The Embedded map player in Spinscape is an interactive map viewer so you can share, view, and explore a map outside of the application.

Watch our quick video tutorial now! (2min 36sec)

Try It Here! Example of an Embedded Map Player:

Inbetween consulting, conferences, and the daily life of a software company, we managed to pour through Spinscape requests and we got quite a few of them scratched off the to-do list.

We added quite a few new features this month. We hope you dig them.

Notifications

In accordance with our plan to continue rocking the collaboration features, we added real-time notifications. We noticed that occasionally we will be working on a map and someone will share something with us. If we don’t happen to check our email frequently, we’ll miss the fact that a map was shared until later. Worry no longer, Map Sharing Notifications are here!

Now you can work away and if someone shares a map with you, you will get a message on your screen to let you know that a map has been shared. It will even give you a button to click to open that map so you can dig in and collaborate with the person that shared it.

Encryption

While we’re all upstanding citizens, we realize that we are hosting your data. Now we have always gone to great lengths to keep your data safe, but to give you a little more piece of mind, we included an Encryption feature this month. Simply go to File / Encrypt map and enter a password to encrypt the map you are working on. All the data in the map will be encrypted and only people with the password you entered will be able to open and read it.

Note that with bigger maps it will take a few seconds to a few minutes to encrypt all the data. Performance will be a bit slower as well, but the feature is there if you want.

To decrypt the map (remove the encryption), you just go to File / Decrypt Map. When you do that, everyone that is currently in the map with you will be kicked out momentarily while the data is updated in the database.

Focal Presentation Mode

This one is really cool. If you haven’t seen Presentation Mode yet, I highly recommend you check out some of the tutorials on it.  In a nutshell, you create a map.  Then go to Presentation mode.  From there you can move the map, zoom in and out on nodes, and create slides of the map states that make sense for you.

So for example, the map I’m using to create this blog is called July Features Blog.  It has nodes called Notifications, Encryption, Focal Presentation Mode, etc. So when I want to present this information I would go to Presentation mode and first collapse all the nodes into the central node.  I would zoom into the central node (July Features Blog) and I would click Add Slide from the toolbar at the top.  You will see a preview thumbnail to show that the slide has been added.  From there I would expand the nodes so you can see Notifications, Encryption, etc.

Now, I want to focus the viewer on Notifications so I may just zoom in and center on the Notifications node. (I embedded this map into the blog so you can see it in action. See below.) Similarly when I get to Encryption in my presentation I would pan the map, zoom into Encryption and continue with the dog and pony. It’s as simple as that.

Now on to the new feature. We have actually combined our Focal Mode feature with Presentation mode.  So now, if you want to talk about just Notifications, you can double-click on it in presentation mode and all you will see is Notifications and its children. This really helps you focus on the nodes you want to focus on when you present. Check out the example embedded below.

Embedded Player Improvements

We have made a few improvements to the Embedded Player this month. We have added some tags and a description to the player to help with SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimization).

Basically your map name will be embedded on the pages along with any tags you have added to the map. The bots can then look for keyword and title information.

The zoom feature in the embedded maps now works better across different browsers. Some day hopefully all the browser companies will follow the same standards. For now, it just makes life for us developers a bit trickier.

Analytics

This is a biggie. We have a Facebook Analytics package that is now completely integrated into Spinscape. We’ll post some videos of this one soon.

Assign task to email

We listened to our customers and added the ability to assign tasks to people even if they aren’t Spinscape users yet. Just share the map or node with the email address of the person you want to share with and you will see that email address in the node Task Manager drop down list of people that you can assign tasks to.

Miscellaneous

As always we continue to look for bugs and other improvements that will make your Spinscape experience better. To that extent we have fixed a bunch of gremlins that have sprung up. No doubt there are a few more of them. If you spot one, please report it in the Bugs section of our Support Forum and we’ll do what we can to squash the little bugger.

Parting Words

Just a word of thanks to our existing customers. We really appreciate your business. Spinscape is a labor of love for us and it is something we truly believe in. We’re small, but we have great ideas and we put those ideas into practice. (I hope we have proven that!)

First off, your old maps are safe. No worries there. However, the way you look at mind mapping, research, organization, and collaboration will definitely be changed after you see some of the stuff we’ve thrown in.

So the most obvious thing you’ll see is a new cleaner website. I finally feel like we’ve gotten it pretty right. The site is straight forward. If you need support go to the support forum, we’re monitoring it all the time. If you want to see info on new features click Blog. You’ll see we have categories there that explain what we are adding. (may need to give us a few days to completely catch up with that one) To order a product or to see the packages we have available click Products. We even improved the Gallery of public maps so please check it out.

The thing about the website I’m most excited about is the profile section. We have what amounts to a tag cloud on the landing page. Each tag is a profile of a role or type of person that uses Spinscape and how they use it. The more people check out a role, the bigger the font will get. Click on a profile tag and it will take you to the full profile where you can see demo maps, videos, and some text about how that person works. If you have a profile idea, shoot us an email with a link to your video, your map, and the text you want and we’ll review it. If it rocks, we’ll throw it in the site.

This leads me to the first feature I want to share. Embeddable Map. Very stoked about this one. You can now post your map in a web page. It’s like a “lite” version of the app. Once the map has been embedded, users can expand/collapse nodes, zoom in and out, and pan anywhere in the map they want. They can even share that map with others by sending the embed code. Users can play the map like a YouTube video, they can advance “slides” manually, or they can just snoop around the map.

Next we have Focal Mode. Focal Mode is a must for large maps. It’s quite simple yet powerful. Often times with a mind map you want to focus only on a single branch. Focal Mode to the rescue. Just double click on the node you want to focus on and it will become the central node and all you will see is its children. Beautiful thing is you get a trail of breadcrumbs at the bottom of the screen so that you can navigate as many levels deep as you want and yet always know where you are…but wait there’s more.

When you have insanely large maps, Mind Maps, Visual Maps, Concept Maps, whatever you want to call them, the usefulness breaks down a bit. Soooo…we decided that a lovely extension to Focal Mode would be Map Linking or what you will hear us call Quick Jumps. Imagine I’m the owner of a company. I have a map that lists all the different departments, finances, goals, people, roles, bios, strategic directions, etc. That map can get pretty huge. So what we have done is enable users to create smaller maps and link them together. So in this example maybe I have a global map that just lists departments and some high level information. Then, I also have a separate map for each department that lists the people in that department and their bios. I could actually link that map to the global map by simply dragging the map from the explorer palette onto the node. A little orange arrow will pop out of the node and then any time you want to follow the link you just click the orange arrow. When you follow the Quick Jump or Map Link, you will see a breadcrumb at the bottom of the screen so to you it looks like you have just entered Focal Mode on one big map. No worries if you’re a bit confused, we’ll have videos on all this shortly.

New views. Yeah, we couldn’t leave our spider view alone so we came up with two new views. One is kind of a new and improved spider that makes better us of space. We call it the Compact Spider View. We have also created a view called Wiki View. Wiki view is another example of a way to see a lot of data the way you want to. By entering Wiki view you get more of a flat, text based layout. The cool thing here is that you can open and close each individual section of the node to reveal the notes, attachments, links, and so on. Some people are going to spend a lot of time in this view. We have disabled editing in this view for now, but fear not, it will be there at some point.

Continuing with the “Maps can be less useful if they are big” concept, we also added a new palette called Map Tree. When you open the Map Tree palette you will see a hierarchy of all the nodes on the map. If you click on one of them the map will center on that node. If you can’t find a node, click the little filter icon on the bottom of the palette and start entering characters. Spinscape will find it for you and then if you click the node that shows up in the results, Spinscape will center on that node.

Visual Stuff. What would a release of new features be without adding some new visual eye candy. We now have the ability to create relationships in Spinscape. Yup, you can make arrows, lines, curves, and some other relationship designators. You can make them fat, thin, dotted, dashed…you get the point. We also added different connector styles and borders to the mix.

Spell Checking. Our education friends have been politely asking for this one for some time. Well, it’s in there now.

Localization. We’re now supporting new languages as well. Right now it is just a few, but the engine is working and it is just a matter of translating the rest.

Finally, if you haven’t tried us out yet because you don’t want to fill out the 5 lines we have in our Sign Up page, you can now log in by using your Google, Yahoo, and Facebook credentials.

There’s much more to this version. We really hope you will dig it. If you do, please don’t hesitate to use the “Like” button on this page or to forward a friend to Spinscape.com. We’re small, but very passionate about creating killer tools for finding, organizing, and sharing information.

Have a great summer!

Mark

Spinscape Product Manager

Spinscape is a web-based mind mapping application for online collaboration and information sharing. Find, organize and share information necessary for research, projects, planning, brainstorming, writing, and more!

Our auto-discovery plugins reach outside of the application to find and retrieve information. Through the Plugins palette, search popular resources like Google, Wikipedia and the ESV Bible. Access your own files from Google Docs and Spreadsheets and AmazonS3. Select and add information directly into your map. Instantly populate your paper or project with a wealth of information, which links back to the site for easy reference.

How many mind mapping applications do you know of that let you put a YouTube video right in your map? In Spinscape 2.0, you can embed widgets in a node. We’ll have more offerings later, but for starters you can embed a YouTube video. Simply paste the embed code from your favorite YouTube video in the widgets field in a node. The video will automatically appear as the node lid and you can play the video right in Spinscape! Spinscape is not just for information sharing, but for sharing videos, images, links, documents, and more.

Check out this quick video (1min 24sec) to learn more:

Spinscape is a web-based mind mapping application for online collaboration and information sharing. Presentation mode lets you create a slide show of your map. Use the presentation tool bar to add, reorder, and delete slides. Then simply select play to view your seamless slide presentation. Invite map collaborators to view your presentation and they can follow along with our web-based screen sharing feature.

Spinscape is a web-based mind mapping application for information sharing and online collaboration. Our interactive Farmland view lets you get a better grip on a big map. Your map displays full screen. Groups are designated by different colors. Higher level nodes appear as larger blocks. Hover over a node and it’s children are highlighted. Double-click a node to see a deeper view of your map. Simply follow the trail of nodes above to quickly get back to a larger view.

Our share button lets you share maps and nodes in three easy steps. Choose what you’re sharing, who you’d like to share with, and the sharing permission. Drag and drop a username from your Contacts or type in an email address. Create tag groups of users and drag and drop a tag for group sharing. Go in at any time and add, edit, or delete sharing permissions.