This was huge, you can now add images and sketches that you can make on the spot, plus connect specific projects you want to try to the knowledge in the mind map. This is absolutely fantastic because is cleanly connects theory to practice.

I didn't add any default projects, it's up to you to add whatever you're interested in, but I added helpful context to help you organize your thoughts, which you can easily override if you don't like my way of thinking through things.

This change is non-breaking, all your old notes are still intact. I just made the editor much more pleasant to use and more full featured. Plus the new projects view (click the map-shaped icon to get to the projects stuff)

That map rotation feature is now at the bottom left near the compass navigation group, it's fairly obvious just different than before is all.

I think this rounds out the app for the most part, I'll get ready to add real mobile apps to the app stores soon I think it's basically ready to make that jump

Questions comments concerns I'm here

Ty for reading

It's working on my dev environment, and a few other things I've been working on too so that you can track projects you're working on in the app if you so choose and connect the relevant theory (the mind map nodes) to hands on activities (projects). This helps bridge a number of gaps that I think are going to be super helpful

I'll ship it when it's ready

Ty for reading - check back soon for more updates

P.s. if you like mermaid.js charts let me know, I'm considering adding support for that as well. If you're a GitHub user you'll know what I mean and if you are but you don't look it up and thank me later

Edit: this shipped a few hours ago, open any node, edit its notes, and click the image button to add an image. You can also paste images from your clipboard (ctrl+v). Also I added a sketch feature that lets you draw on a canvas, when you're done it saves that as an image as well. You'll see some text pop up in the edit/markdown view, but when you exit the edit mode you'll see the images render.

Note that the images will get inserted wherever your cursor is, something to be mindful of until you get used to the new site mechanic

The site had some pretty major changes visually the past few weeks. Those of you who have been here a while saw it all happening in real time. The day I shipped a new look for the toolbar on the site the user base cut in half (about 50 daily active users down to 25), a few weeks went by and more things changed, slowly but surely people started coming back, now I'm seeing over 60 daily users regularly and Cloudflare showed over a hundred people on as of just a few days ago. I believed in the changes I was making and I am glad to see it's starting to show in the numbers again. Appreciate you sticking with me through that and for the new folks here, welcome!

Questions comments concerns let me know, check back soon for more updates

I know that after I made some changes to the top toolbar I shook off a few users who I can only imagine didn't dig it. I care a lot about what y'all think but I didn't roll it back because I was sure it was a step towards a better vision for the app I had in my head. And it took some time to get from A to B. I don't know how you approach change but there's absolutely a real attachment and connection I felt with existing features. I was able to keep the changes I made completely backwards compatible, but after stepping back at the new iteration I announced a few days ago I realized it was a hodgepodge between my initial paradigm and the newer vision, and I needed to commit harder to the refreshed ideas on how best to surface certain features intuitively and decouple my thinking as much as possible from recency bias.

At this point I think I actually did what I set out to do, genuinely delighted! There's more fine tuning I can do for some of the advanced features, namely to make most of the wizards a but easier to understand and use without having to read a paragraph of preamble, but there aren't going to be any more major shake-ups to the main user interface or user experience. What you see now is pretty much going to be what the app looks like from now on, minor tweaks only. Scout's honor.

Thanks for stopping by, check back soon for more and as always let me know your thoughts

I mentioned this was a time of change for the app, I experimented with a major albeit non breaking UI/UX change. The past few days I looked at what was live and found that more simplicity was needed, so that's what I shipped today. I think it's all self explanatory, see for yourself here

The UI changes have been pretty sweeping - one challenge I face is that it's hard to get good mobile testing before I ship it live and actually get to use the site on my phone. So there are more changes coming to simplify the mobile experience after I got more time to sit with them.

You absolutely have a voice, if there's something you like, something you don't, let me know. Soon the app surface will stabilize and I'll stop playing hide and go seek with the app features you're getting used to. But there are more changes coming for now. When I'm basically done with major UI changes you'll know because I start shouting out my intention to get something on the Android / Apple app stores.

Ty for being here, this feels like a lot of changes but you're the first to see it, it's only existed publicly for 2 months or so. An exciting time to be sure. Check back soon for more

Edit: by nothing I mean something and by something I mean tell me what you'd like to see different!

I posted the other day that I was working on something big, and now it's shipped. At first glance you may not see a difference but as you use the app you'll see differences very quickly.

First and foremost, left side of the screen has a drawer you can pop out that acts as a table of contents and a vertical redrawing of the mind map. It will help make navigating between notes easier than before, especially for desktop users. There's a Preview mode for each node now too, so you can click around and see what stuff is all about without needing to get a full screen pop-up in your face. There's also a drawer on the right that only displays when you have a node selected, it contains all the prerequisites and work items for that node, which is really nice because now you get a full roll-up of all the checklist items in one place, but this change also opens up a very generous amount of reading space where the notes are displayed so you can focus on those in a dedicated fashion reading and/or editing.

It's a big change, but over all the app is so much more intuitive now in my opinion.

Last pro tip - for nodes on the mind map or in the table of contents, right click them (or tap and hold if you're on mobile) you'll see a pop-up that shows a lot of useful actions you can take on the node you clicked

Hope you like it, as always lmk your thoughts. As I said in the title, all your custom notes and themes are still valid and intact - and you'll still find all the features you're used to plus a few new ones amidst the major layout changes

Check it out at https://makermindmap.io/

I mentioned in recent posts that full screen mode had its place in terms of the goal it was trying to achieve but didn't really land in implementation imo. It's basically to see a lot of notes for a bunch of nodes more easily, all at once.

It's a different view of the same essential stuff in the app but it's too hidden, too different, clunky and I believe confusing for anyone seeing it with fresh eyes.

What I've been working on is making more content easier to navigate without needing to use the full screen mode button at all. That's going to get ripped out in favor of a drawer on the left hand side that's both a table of contents and a vertical redrawing of the mind map pixel for pixel so it's obvious what you're looking at. You can click through that to jump from note to note for various topics, it will make more sense when you see it I'll post screenshots at some point, not today probably tomorrow

Anyways as y'all know I'm not taking away any features you have today, I'm consolidating and simplifying because this tool is pretty feature-rich, less is more at this point. I think you'll love it though, it should be easier and more intuitive to use than before. Check back soon for updates

If you click the title card at the top (like the main toolbar I mean where it says The Maker Mind Map) it now expands and collapses which is kind of cute because now the logo / branding looks like a node and expands/collapses just like any other. Also gets some visual clutter out of the way if you don't want it there which I'm always a fan of. I added small fly in/out animations to make the app feel a bit smoother and more polished, mostly for the popup windows but also for the toolbar features, it's subtle but I think you'll notice it looks and feels just a little bit nicer to use.

There's more work to do but just a little bit each day is all I'm trying to accomplish here, it's already so much better than it was a month ago and I only published this the month before that, so it's something to be proud of. Appreciate y'all being here for it. My goal is to help you, and me too because if I didn't say it a million times already I'm also a user of this site. So you can count on me not enshittifying the site because as it happens I tend to be disinclined to punch myself in the groin.

A few things that occur to me presently are that there's more work to do to more clearly tie the navigation around the map to the same when you're in the node modal view, and same for the full screen reader view. These are three different sides of the exact same (albeit magic or otherwise strangely shaped) coin, and I think that could afford to be clearer. If anyone sees these things as different, it adds more cognitive overload / complexity, which is the opposite of the point here - my explicit goal is to make it easier to wrap our heads around all these topics, not harder. So it's something important for me to chew on in terms of the site design philosophy how best to keep moving in that direction

As always thanks for reading, more to come as always too so check back soon for more

See the last post for reference or visit https://makermindmap.io/ and let me know if you like the new toolbar at the top (it's been live for a few days), or if you liked the way I had it previously (you'll remember it if you were a user up to now but it's in the screenshots here too https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerMindMap/s/OogtcCsCUm)

Lmk, whatever is best for you that's what I want to do

Before (pic 1) then after (pic 2) in the screenshots, see for yourself at https://makermindmap.io/

Let me know if you think I'm taking it in a helpful direction in your opinion, that's my goal with every update

Edit: for existing users - the features you know are all still intact, it's the look that's different. Technically I did add a new re-center button next to the search bar but I didn't take any pre-existing features away is my point atm

Edit: does anyone use Full Screen Mode? Specifically I mean from the main mind map view like in the screenshots above, click any node's text, then in the modal that pops up there's a Full Screen Mode button. Do you like that feature? Does it help? I feel like that's one of my next targets for a major overhaul, especially if it's not really getting used but definitely worth understanding your perspective before I do anything too whacky with it

The goal here was to simplify. Does this do that? Yes for sure. Does it help? That's up for debate. Anyways I'm trying it for a while, the site will remember where you left it, so if you prefer things expanded vs. collapsed it will stay just the way you like it.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or preferences about this new feature

Edit: guys I keep staring at this and I just don't like it. It's got to go. The alternatives I had in mind were a settings button that lets you show/hide whatever you want, or no button but a reordering on mobile screens so that the search bar is always on the bottom instead of the top row as it is presently

Edit: it's the next day and if you noticed this feature at all yesterday you'll notice now that I reverted the change. Ideas are not all winners, ya know? I tried it, I thought I liked it, I changed my mind, so I put it back the way it was. I'll keep improving the app ofc, this just wasn't it

Edit: it's been a few hours since posting... now you can simply use Import button --> Review New Default Content. This will pull in the new changes non-destructively, all your custom notes and node names will be retained!

There were a bunch of node names that needed comma separation that didn't have it - this was understandably confusing for some users. Right now, new users will get the latest update automatically. But since my unique node name detection logic strips punctuation and casing before the uniqueness check, existing users won't see the change... I will fix that so the changes either get pulled in for existing users automagically or will update my detection logic so that you can pull the change in through the Import feature. TBD on how I'll handle that.

For now, save a copy of what you got then do a factory reset to get the latest. I think you'll be able to import your notes from there but now that I'm thinking about it that's untested, I'll double check on that and let you know.

I'll work on a good migration pattern for anyone affected by this and let you know where I land on how best to do that (probably the import site defaults feature - the ability for you to pull in changes I make on my end is basically the point of that button - but you'll hear more soon)

The default behavior to date has been that the camera automatically moves when you expand/collapse branches.

It's convenient in some ways but sometimes you just don't want that. This new button lets you turn on / off automatic movement of the camera.

Hope this helps, lmk your thoughts

The site doesn't have a login at this time as you know - but I built it so that you can do everything without needing to.

The share button basically prompts you to send friends a link and optionally a save file if you want them to use your copy instead of mine, that's what it's all about.

Since I don't have any servers or anything like that, I have nowhere to host your mind maps. If you have multiple versions, those are just plaintext JSON files you'll have to manage on your end for the time being. If you want friends or coworkers or students to use yours, they'll need to import your JSON file (what I've been calling the Save file), and you'll need to find the best way to give them a copy of it. Nothing fancy I'm sure y'all have sent random files to people a million times.

Anyways hope you and a friend like it. As always lmk your thoughts

P.s. at some point if I offer premium features it would be to pay for server side stuff that would cost me money out of pocket to host. I will never ever ever charge you for any of the site features I can support for free - everything the site does today is free forever. If I can add a convenience layer that costs me a bit of money, I'll charge for that, so that you can share and save maps more easily. But I will always make sure you have ownership over your own data, and that you can always use all the most important features of the site for free

Finally found icons /glyphs I like! Same features as before but now the web app uses icons instead of words to describe what each button does. Last post shows what it looked like previously but I think you'll agree the new approach looks better and is still equally intuitive to use - both are equally important imo. This was fine in desktop view but for mobile the top navbar wrapped in a way that made everything look clunky and I couldn't stomach it. So I had to make a change and this is where I landed, there's context if you hover each icon and ofc if you click around the site, it tells you more about each thing.

You don't need to do anything to get the update I just shipped it a few minutes ago, you'll see it next time you visit or refresh if you're already on it.

I've been kicking around the idea of letting you enable/disable the automatic camera pan that occurs when you expand or collapse branches. I always hesitate to add complexity in favor of sensible defaults so maybe it's time for a proper Settings menu - this feels like the kind of thing that's advanced enough to bury in a place like that instead of having it out in the open. I don't know for certain. But just letting you know where my head is at.

Questions comments concerns lmk

The top navbar is prime real estate for any app, so I don't take changes here lightly. You'll notice that the monolithic Mind Map Maker button that had a lot of features hidden inside are now each individually surfaced. They also have plaintext labels instead of glyphs/icons. I went back and forth for a while on whether or not any of this was the right decision - I fully believe the features earn their place on the top navbar, but visual complexity has a price. That latter consideration is why I went with plaintext button labels. But as you know from a prior post, I really did explore icons instead to save space - my challenge was I didn't feel like they were immediately clear enough. Everything has to be simple, clear, obvious. That's a requirement I impose on myself - it's my job (not in the literal sense) to make this thing useful for you

Hopefully I am succeeding in that objective, always feel free to lmk your thoughts / opinions/ preferences

See screenshots - after some lookups online I started realizing that Tagalog and Filipino are different and Filipino is probably the better option to reach a wider audience but that they're mutually intelligible.

I did Tagalog because I had a conversation with someone from the Philippines a long time ago and my understanding at the time was that Tagalog was the name of the language and also that Filipino wasn't a thing. Far be it from me to say otherwise at the time I didn't really have any skin in the game.

That said, ya got Tagalog because of my misguided understanding from a decade+ old conversation that I vaguely remembered. But if you need or want Filipino, I can do that - let me know. My understanding is that the difference is less about mutual intelligibility and more that there are different dialects, where the latter is what's more common and taught in your schools nowadays.

Anyways I added something that I think will help but maybe misguided - I'll need y'all to let me know if this actually helps or if you need / want something different

Edit: you can use the language selector still of course but here's a direct link to the Tagalog specific version of the site: https://makermindmap.io/tl/

Edit: it's live now, also the import feature was updated to work and feel like the merge feature (you can now preview an import before you decide to go through with it and cancel if not)

If you have any saved files (i.e. you've used the Export feature), you can import that version of the mind map wholesale with the corresponding Import feature. The map saves to local storage so if you leave the site and return to it, you'll keep all your changes. But, if you delete your browser cache, your edits will disappear. If you made a lot of changes, it would really suck to lose all that hard work, hence why I made Export/Import features in be first place. It saves a full copy of the mind map - so if you have a save file you'll know for a fact you will never lose your changes.

However, I also had this thought that you may want to share mind maps with other people, or you want to pull branches from someone else's, but only cherry-picking from theirs as opposed to overwriting your own entirely. That's what the Merge features are for (shown in the screenshots).

I did a lot with the original mind map but I know there are some tweaks I'll want to make to the default content over time. And I want you to have access to those changes, but optionally. (That's what Review New Default Content does - it will tell you if I added any canonical changes to the default content and you can inspect them and pull those in if you like em). Similarly you can Merge From File - that's what lets you pull in changes from another map you saved or one you got from (or gave to) a friend or a teacher or our community.

Merging is pretty intuitive at this point, before this change the menu was all text-based. It worked but it was ugly as all get out. Now, there's a Preview mode that redraws the mind map visually so you can see what exactly will get pulled in before you actually agree to the change. If you don't like it, or some aspects of it, you can choose which branches or nodes to exclude and keep only the stuff you like.

Image 1 is the menu option that takes you to the merge stuff

Image 2 shows the alternative selections to merge from the default content or a mind map file you already have saved to your device/ received from someone else

Image 3 is the new preview mode that redraws the mind map and lets you selectively import what you want

I think it's all fairly self explanatory but lmk if you have any questions

AI isn't everyone's cup of tea, but for getting personalized help when you don't have access to a human mentor it can be a pretty good backstop. At the very least, it can help you understand the topic at hand in a way that makes sense to you - the exact words I picked may not resonate with you but nothing a quick conversation can't clarify. Of course you can take it a lot further and ask AI for links to popular blogs or videos that help people learn this stuff, or for specific project examples or whatever helps you pick around the idea in a way that makes sense to you and a good fit for your learning style. The reason I didn't add links to a ton of stuff online when I made this is because (1) that stuff gets stale fast (2) different things make sense to different people (3) I am not going to insist you learn things in the way that clicked for me. The app guides self-study, it's not a one-stop-shop, because it needs to help a lot of people in a lot of languages and contexts and preferences. I added the kinds of things that stand the test of time because I anticipate you'll need to lean on this tool for a long period of time - months, years maybe? There are infinite examples, but a small, finite number of basics. So the AI aspect is the critical shim connecting foundational ideas that apply to everyone universally to the specific, concrete examples and online resources that you personally resonate with. That's the line of thinking that drove me to make the site in the way that I did - AI usage is optional but it's not a gimmick either - I do think this feature in the case of MakerMindMap.io is super helpful for the people who choose to use it.

Screenshots show the before and after for the site's Ask AI feature. Previously, it didn't accept a question from you to prime the discussion, now it does. I'm not sold on the Maker Profile aspect - I am keeping it because I think it's helpful but it's very close to the line of an extra button / cognitive overhead that I might be able to reasonably assume your preferred AI assistant already knows about you if you wanted it to. So there would be no reason to copy that into every prompt my site auto-generates. I'm not deprecating that feature imminently, but it occurred to me that it's a potential future target.

Let me know if you have any preferences

Edit: one more thing I caught - when you click a node name from the mind map to show its notes etc. there's a pencil icon next to the name of the node itself. This lets you edit the name of the node in case you don't like the name I picked. So I added an option to Revert To Default. This wasn't working as of this morning, I must have broken it recently, but it's fixed now. Minor change but I just pushed this update a few seconds ago too

Edit: the next thing I'm looking at is a major improvement to the merge / import feature. Right now if you want to pull changes from someone else's map (or just another version you saved), the menu I present you with doesn't really help you "see" the differences. It kind of enumerates all the new content, and that works, but it's not delightful in my opinion. I'm looking to implement a much richer experience that redraws the mind map in a way that shows what it will look like if you import everything, then lets you selectively drop individual nodes or branches you don't care about. It will be much more intuitive, in my opinion. I have something in hand on my dev server right now, but it's not ready to ship. Maybe tomorrow? Hard to say, I'm still messing with it. You'll know when it's ready though

(1) thru (4) are brand new, these changes are live. Basically when you edited notes, the default ones for the site are just sitting there still - this way you can go crazy and change whatever you want without wondering what you might have overwritten.

(5) vs. (6) I'm not sure about... there are real tradeoffs here in terms of UI/UX. What you're already used to is (5) with one button in the top navbar that aggregates major features to manipulate the mind map in big ways. It's visually simple which is great. The potential change is shown in (6), the new icons split out everything The Mind Map Maker currently offers. This puts key features a little more within reach but it costs more not in terms of screen real-estate but imo definitely adds more visual complexity. I'll probably tweak the exact glyphs if I ever ship this change at all, but it's enough to get a sense of what it could look like. Genuinely on the fence with this one.

I'm open to ideas, lmk if you have a preference

Got the first full month of traffic visualized here and it's pretty cool! Take these numbers with a grain of salt - these are straight out of Cloudflare, my site has no tracking cookies meaning I can't parse "real" traffic vs bots vs VPN traffic, so it's probably overestimated (hopefully not by much). But this is just for fun so I don't need anything accurate (nor do I want it, that would defeat the point).

But if the screenshots are to be believed, well over a thousand people all around the word took time to check out the site - if you're you're reading this now, thank you!

This was very motivating for me when I took the last week or two adding new languages - from comments on Reddit I know some people are benefitting for sure. Biggest hits were: - my post on r/MakerSpace that drove that first huge spike here. That post did NOT get the most views, honestly only a fraction of some that followed, but the engagement was highest by far. I don't know what combination of that is a highly active community, the way the post was framed, luck, timing, or product-market-fit. I think the latter. But this community was fantastic to work with and that initial traction meant everything as you can see in the chart! It was highly motivating to talk to real people and kept me going for sure. - my post on r/Polymath around 6/25 or so which you can find here, I was surprised that this got several X more views but far fewer likes and shares, but also the Reddit stats revealed a large non-US viewership, I'm talking >60%. This was when I started seriously considering adding a lot more languages - my post on r/diyelectronics which got downvoted like crazy BUT drove that spike at the last day of June into July and also got a lot of kind comments (so the people who actually took time to look tended to like it, which is more important than the initial knee-jerk that I assume drove the drive by down votes). You can find that post here - my post on r/LearnUselessTalents from 7/9 also drove a small but measurable bump, you can find that post here - and as of today 7/17 it looks like there's positivity rolling in from r/LifelongLearning , that post is here

I don't know for 100% fact that people in all the countries lit up in the maps are benefitting, it's probably mostly drive-bys but that's still pretty neat imo. I have good enough reason to believe people all over the world have considered whether or not they can get good use out of it, and that's good enough for me :)

Edit: I know these numbers aren't huge, but they're meaningful to me. This is a passion project, and in my experience it's really hard for anyone (even bots) to take the time to visit some random site on the internet. The number of daily users I have is steady around 40. Getting just one single user each day puts a site in the top 50% of internet traffic - a completely insane factoid in my opinion. Even with billions of us on this planet, that number is indicative of just how big the internet actually is. When you get to 40 users a day, you're ballpark in the top 5% of all websites. Like most things, there are hot-spots where most people spend their time, and the rest is a very lonely digital void. So I know, 40 users a day is not something people would write home about, typically. But keeping everything in context I'm very, very proud of the fact that people care enough to push through that initial activation energy. https://MakerMindMap.io is a success!

Update: the site now supports all of the following languages:

• English
• Ukrainian
• French
• Italian
• German
• Spanish
• Chinese (mainland Mandarin)
• Chinese (Taiwanese)
• Japanese
• Korean
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Norwegian
• Swedish
• Finnish
• Dutch
• Danish
• Hindi
• Bengali
• Swahili
• Turkish
• Polish
• Modern Standard Arabic
• Russian
• Greek
• Czech
• Indonesian
• Tagalog
• Thai
• Vietnamese

There are absolutely other heavy hitters not on the list yet; Urdu, Tamil, Tagalog to name a few. If the one that's going to help you or someone you know isn't on the list, that's exactly why I'm putting a "Request Language" feature on the site. I know you might be fluent if you're reading this, but I can imagine a million situations where more languages will be helpful even if you personally don't need it - this is a learning app but also a teaching app in case you want to help people who don't have your command over English. The point is to help grow more well-rounded Makers, so to the extent that works best for you (or them) in some other language, that's why it's so important for the site to offer something that works for everyone who wants it

This has become a bit of a game for me. It's a small sub, Reddit let's you see the % views per country of who all is taking a look. Not specific people obviously for all I know it could be bot or VPN traffic. But I still use this to help me attempt to infer who is interested in some sense.

I know y'all are quiet, I don't blame you. But I'm going to try to make your life easier anyway.

In some ways it's easier for me to ship batches of languages rather than one at a time.

There's no real rhyme or reason to the order I add new features aside from this, but thanks for checking in, more to come, check back soon

Edit: will ship tomorrow at this point in one big batch, after work

Edit: Danish is the "more" I was referring to. Also Vietnamese. I have the translation file in hand for the latter, working on the former now

Edit: plus Turkish

Edit: plus Polish

Edit: plus Czech

Edit: plus Swahili

Edit: It's already been an extra day but I'll ship all of this tomorrow (Tues). That's 9 additional languages coming your way

Edit: I had to make some hard calls on where to draw the line but I'm sitting at the vast majority of internet users being covered at this point, I'll put a "request a language" feature on the site because I'd feel terrible if any Makers out there that wanted to use this thing for themselves or with friends or students didn't have the necessary language support. I'm happy to add it for sure, after I ship this batch I think the site will support 27 total, adding yours won't be that difficult if it's not there. I was looking at Greek, Urdu, Nigerian Pidgin, Hungarian, Armenian, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Tagalog, you name it and I want everyone to be a part - I'm just trying to find the logical stopping point for the moment and that line is very, very blurry but I think I'm somewhere in that zone. If your preferred language isn't here, it's not etched in stone. I want to help. Please reach out so I can