With summer vacation kicking off we thought we could celebrate by either sipping nice cold drinks on the patio of or building or by releasing a whole slew of feature goodness. As tempting as the cold drinks are right now, we opted for the feature. So here is your introduction to what was released today. Trust me there is a lot, and I think you’re going to be very excited about it.

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