Sunday, May 4, 2008

Labyrinth - mindmap tool for maemo

Hi all!

Short preamble at first. Recently I've become a fan of mind mapping. I visited Exception #07 developers conference in March and there was a guy who did his presentation using not well-known tools like MS PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress but he used totally different approach, Mind Map. It's the way of brainstorming or displaying your ideas just the way like human brain works - not one by one like sheets of paper but radially with multiple links and forms. It's much better than scrolling page by page during workshop, for example.

For daily use my choice was Java-based Freemind - big, but powerfull and available for Linux, Mac and less popular systems like WinXP, etc . But I wanted something small and modest to use on my Nokia N800. So I've done some search and found nothing. So I(as python/bit C/C++ dev) did some search among apps written in python and found Labyrinth - http://code.google.com/p/labyrinth/

Really don't understand people who use tons of autotool/autoconf code + python script just to install 10 .py files. But I've finally managed to release an alpha-quality port of Labyrinth for maemo - http://labyrinth.garage.maemo.org/ , available also on maemo website - http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/labyrinth/

Note! It's not ready yet for `production` as I took dev/trunk version from
the original website to have more powerful application with curves and
more export formats supported. If you are interested and want to contribute
either to application itself or to maemo port in particular - you know now where to go.

Here is what it looks like:

14 comments:

  1. Yeah! I was looking for app like that for my n800.

    But.. cannot run it - ImportError: No module named gnome :(

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  2. Hm, I did not tested installation procedure with "python2.5-gnome" lib removed/not installed. I thought labyrinth would not install then.

    Thanks for the bug, I'll recheck this in the evening. But now you have to install python2.5-gnome library using "apt-get" or Application Manager.

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  3. Looks solid - consider a input text button to pop up an input dialog for those w/o the n810's hw keyboard.

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  4. 2Geist:
    Already in progress. Just need some time.

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  5. strange, i can't run it at all. when i click it's icon nothing happens

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  6. same here. i click it and nothing happens.

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  7. Could you please star it from Xterm manually?

    type "labyrinth" command and press Enter.

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  8. Awesome! many thanks for the port

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  9. I'm not a developer yet, but I appreciate how nice this program is. What pre-maemo source is this built off of? I ask because I downloaded and ran v0.4 from http://www.gnome.org/~dscorgie/downloads.html to Ubuntu 7.10 and created a map, exported or straight copied it to my N810 and it appears the .map format is changed. I can modify it to open on the Maemo version. Are there any converters? If I delete from >"thought" to strength="#" at the last thought w/ leafpad the map opens fine. Again, thanks for this portable powerpoint altenative! :)

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  10. Well after more playing around, there is definitely more going on than removing a line or 2, because I continue to get self.recursively_add_thoughts(1.child, 1.child.model_iter). I guess my crash course begins here. :) Even so, this app rocks so I'll invest some time. Thank you.

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  11. 2CarrotRevenge:
    I used trunk version(0.5) from projects' svn. You can find my modified packages in garage.

    It's not working now with ./configure, don't do it, I've temporarily modified some Makefile.in and configure until I learn how to use autotools :( Anyway I feel not right at all about using autotools for python project.

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  12. Hi Eugene - I'm not in a position to help you develop this but I wanted to express my thanks and encouragement for you taking this further to be a solid MindMapping program on the N810. Not sure what else I can do except say "Many thanks"! - Richard

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  13. 2 RichardM:

    Thank you for these words. It's an honour to do something for Open Source.

    P.S. I actually feel guilt for users of N800(me included) for leaving them without virtual keyboard support. Which I'm going to fix this weekend.

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