Well it’s finally here! The velvet ropes are coming down! The long awaited first official release of Spinscape is here!

As of July 1st, you will no longer need an invite to get into Spinscape. We appreciate the patience of everyone in the Spinscape trial community while we sorted out the features that were most important to our customers. If you’ve been one of our private beta testers, you no doubt have seen quite the evolution…

At this point, maybe a little journey down memory lane would be appropriate…

We started with little more than an idea….

…but we came in with the committment that we were going to use Scrum and agile software development to continue evolving Spinscape.

So we started with some rough prototypes…

And we quickly learned what worked and what didn’t work.

It turns out it is difficult to make sense of information when it looks all tangled!

So then we decided to go with more of a radial approach. Which made info much easier to see.

Issue here is that when maps get big, or there is a lot of text in the nodes, everything gets thrown out of whack!

We went away from the circle nodes. This was some of our early Zoom prototype work…

Now we started working on making the nodes prettier…

From here we made a giant leap and made everything look good. We used the accordion on the right to house information. It was an improvement, but we really wanted to treat nodes as more abstract containers and the accordion wasn’t going to let us do that.

Now we mocked up the container idea where you basically zoom into the information. Here was my super crude depiction of the inside of a node. Warning: For the squeamish, you may want to look away…you are about to see the early innards of a node.

Note there is the beginning of the dock over on the right. Sure it ain’t pretty yet, but we were evolving!

Now the elite members of our closed beta should be familiar with the image below. It was what we were calling the Cartman release. (long story…actually, not long just boring. )

There were some really good nuggets in here! I was going to insert an image from a map I created, but our dear friend Aliza Sherman from www.webworkerdaily.com made this killer map so I thought I would paste it in here.

We couldn’t leave it there, after all, Spinscape is always Evolving! So, this brings us to where we are now. Another stop in the evolutionary ladder of an application that set out to make life easier for the masses. Behold…Spinscape has arrived!

Again much thanks to those brave souls that have been helping us test this bugger, and for those of you that have offered insights as to how you are using Spinscape, we are eternally grateful! Please continue to participate in the Spinscape community. We have a lot of ideas for the future and we will be bringing them to you one month at a time!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 9:30 am by Mark Salamango and is filed under General Spinscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. Sheldon Smith Says:
   July 1st, 2008 at 10:46 am

   Awesome to see the progression/evolution of Spinscape. Great idea and it’s come a long way already! Just the last two months that I’ve been working in Spinscape, I’ve seen some serious application changes and feature implementations…for the BETTER. Scrum–the monthly sprint thing–is so cool. Good to know I can look forward to Spin evolving and improving on such a regular basis. Keep up the good work!

2. Spinscape enters open beta testing, but still needs a lot of work - Mind Mapping Software Blog Says:
   July 2nd, 2008 at 12:30 pm

   […] with visual mapping/personal information manager tool I told you about in March , recently completed its closed beta testing phase . Anyone can now go to the Spinscape website and sign up for a free 30-day trial of the open beta […]

3. shredfactory Says:
   July 3rd, 2008 at 9:53 am

   Hey Chuck, glad to see you checked on our progress!

   I just wanted to clarify a few things about your post.

   I completely agree about moving the parent and having the children follow. This is a feature included in the July sprint and will be available August 1st.

   Admittedly we have focused more on the collaboration and plugin aspects of Spinscape and less on trying to make it exactly like every other mindmapping application. In fact lately, I have been describing Spinscape more as a Visual Collaboration Platform that has aspects of mindmapping because it is not just a mindmapping application.

   I also agree about the renaming nodes comment. It is another “feature” we have in our backlog that we hope add soon.

   Expanding and collapsing branches actually does work by clicking on the + and - as you would expect. You no longer have to drag nodes into the parent. You may be thinking of the old version.

   With respect to your “Add to Spinscape” - Map - Node comment…I’m sorry that was confusing. We have talked about other terms to make it more clear. The idea is that we allow you to add “auto-discovered” information as a new node or to the selected node. So Map means add information as a new node in the map, and Node means to put it in the selected node…basically a merge function. I suspect that “Add to Spinscape New Node - Selected Node” may be clearer.

   Again, I thank you for keeping us in mind and for keeping up with our progress! We take all input seriously and it helps us to plan the direction of Spinscape. We introduce new features every month. Many are guided by comments we get from people who are using Spinscape to solve their problems. We unveiled Spinscape to the public this month so more users will have a hand in our development through their feedback.

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