Earlier this week, Mindjet announced that it has acquired the developer of the Android mind mapping app Thinking Space and has relaunched it as Mindjet for Android. According to Mindjet, several key employees of the developer, including its founder, have become Mindjet employees and will continue to help push the company’s mobile mapping efforts forward.
Considering Mindjet’s announcement earlier this year that it planned to increase its focus on mobile applications, this announcement didn’t come as a surprise to me. Several months ago, a reader of this blog asked me if Mindjet was planning to launch a mind mapping app for the Android platform. I answered that I was not aware of such a project, but it would make sense if the company was planning such a move, considering that it was an obvious gap in their mobile product line. I further speculated that, rather than create a new app from scratch, it would probably acquire a developer of an existing Android app, as they did with MyMind to create the Mindjet for iPhone and iPad apps. That’s exactly what happened.
Misleading download statistics?
According to TechCrunch.com, Thinking Space’s Android mapping app has been downloaded more than Mindjet’s apps for the iPad and iPhone combined by more than 3 to 1: “To date, there have been roughly 325,000 downloads of Mindjet’s iPhone and iPad apps. Thinking Space has actually seen more success with its Android app, clocking more than 1.1 million downloads.” These numbers may be misleading, however: The writer at TechCrunch may not realize that Mindjet acquired the technology for its iPhone and iPad mapping apps from MyMind, may have neglected to include their downloads in this total.
In addition to the growing number of Android-based smartphones, Mindjet for Android will also work on the many inexpensive tablets that utilize this open-source operating system – an area of significant growth. According to Mindjet’s new product page for this app, it will work on any device running Android OS 2.1 or later. As with the new iPhone and iPad apps, Mindjet for Android supports MindManager’s native .MMAP file type as well as round-trip editing – which means that map attributes created in MindManager are preserved after editing in the mobile app.
Unique features
Based on a view of Mindjet’s overview video for its latest product addition, several features of Mindjet for Android stand out that aren’t offered on their iPhone and iPad apps:
- Gestures enable you to access common features quickly. This should be a real productivity plus when you’re creating mind maps on an Android device.
- Text tags are keyword searches that you can set up in the app’s file view. They appear as tabs across the top of the file list, and enable you to quickly locate mind maps that contain those words. Nice!
Here’s the video:
[youtube sNQVKv8wMcU nolink]
What’s next for Mindjet for Android?
Presumably, Mindjet will add support for its Connect workspace product in the coming months. It will also be interesting to see how this app evolves in the coming months, as the former Thinking Space app gets further integrated into Mindjet’s longer-term product road map. Perhaps there will be a rationalization of app features between the Apple iOS and Android platforms over time, so all of Mindjet’s mobile apps will work the same. For example, Mindjet for Android could adapt the clever pop-up “pie menu” that it inherited from MyMind, and is currently used on the Mindjet for iPhone and iPad apps. That would make sense. Otherwise, Mindjet must promote two completely different sets of features for the two platforms.
Mindjet for Android is a free download from the Android Market.
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