I was able to make it over to The Hive last night to see Juan "the hard core super star Degrafa Guy" Sanchez present Degrafa at the RMAUG. I just made up that name, but it fits, so he's welcome to it if he likes.

Dave and company have a new home at The Hive, which is a very sweet co-working facility here in Denver.

Juan's session was well timed, i had spent a good chunk of the day figuring out how to skin a link button. Turned out livedocs was spot on with it's example (go figure). But after watching Juan skin a button, I was wishing we had Degrafa in the project I'm on. I did think about using it, but figured that was a decision to be discussed before I committed a whole new library of code.

So my solution, worked well enough, but the Degrafa way is killer.

In a Skin file...

<code>

<fills>
        <SolidFill
            color="#936"
            id="myFill"/>
    </fills>

    <geometry>
        <RoundedRectangleComplex
            state="upSkin"
            width="{awidth}"
            height="{aheight}"
            bottomLeftRadius="10"
            bottomRightRadius="20"
            topLeftRadius="15"
            fill="{myFill}" />
        <RoundedRectangleComplex
            state="overSkin"
            width="{awidth}"
            height="{aheight}"
            fill="{myFill}" />
    </geometry>
           
</GraphicBorderSkin>

<code>

There's some AS at the top, but that's the jist of stateful skinning of a button. degrafa FTW!

Useless, but cool. Such is the life of most cool visual tools it seems. That said, I stumbled on this little gem when loading my twitter homepage, and they had an add for "find out what's new" or something. At any rate, check it out.

I just found it two minutes before posting, so I haven't played much with it, but when you click a friend's little tile, it zooms into it, and shows what they posted, kinda neat.

The whole thing draws pretty damn sweet when it loads.

I've been tinkering with the highrise API for a while now, building a simple little 'people viewer' in Apollo (AIR is such a gay name, sorry), and have had a good time playing with different ways to get my data from highrise.

It's been a lot of fun building the app, I'll probably start posting screen shots and code soon, it's still very far from a "useful" app, so it'll be a little while longer.

I haven't even scratched the surface of Apollo coolness yet, I can't wait to actually have this app be more than a 'Flex app in a window' which is all it is right now, honestly.

So after my first post on the topic, i got several comments on other web 2.0 mind mapping tools. I've played a little more with each, and have some thoughts.

As a frame of reference for my comparison application is inspiration. I used it for years. I only stopped because... well I'm cheap and didn't want to spend another 80 bones for the mac version. However it's a great app, that I loved using, despite it's rather kid like "my first application" UI.

So first up. Bubble-Mind

bubble-mind is probably the closest in look and interface to Inspiration. the nodes are draggable, you can branch, move, manipulate, etc each node, organize the nodes however you like.

There's a nice little macro-view so you can see your entire map, even when you're zoomed in.

You can edit the content of each node very nicely.

I give bubble-mind a nice thumbs up. Very easy to use, and since I had to register to get in :) I might even keep using it.

Next up... Sprouts

definitely not as grown up, but that's stated, "This is pre-alpha, so a lot of features are missing and stuff may break."

while the UI is stil very much Flex Halo, some things are kinda cool, the floaty motion is nice, up to a point. nodes drift and move as you manipulate them, adding new nodes causes the map to adjust, and such. however if you're anal like me. that's less cool. I like my Map to be just right, if it's movin' all around on it's own, I'd probably burst a blood vessel.

What you see here, is not how I had it arranged. and you'll see in the next shot, what happens when you delete a node.

Can't wait for the pic? Well what happens is the orphan node seems to run off on it's own, almost off the stage entirely. If there's a way to reconnect it, i didn't find it. Stranger still (and part of the whole, moving around is cool to a point thing) is that moving the orphan near the other nodes, repels them.

I think Sprouts has potential, and as an experiment it's really cool. I've built things like that, less on the practical more on the "can I do this?"

I'll check sprouts later, see how it's grown.... get it? sprouts... grown... like a real plant.... wokka wokka wokka.

I give Sprouts, a thumbs sideways.

last up.... MindMeister

Since it took a whie for my account activation email to show up, i played with the demo on the homepage. It's quite nice, and it's AJAX, how about that?

off the bat, I liked the user experience, it's very un-html/javascript. I'm impressed. you can drag a node at another and it will attach to that. there's an expand/compress (+/-) button to collapse branches, it's a very mature and user friendly UI.

The keyboard shortcuts are pretty slick to, very desktop app, click a node, hit tab (on Mac, it's INS on the PC) and a new child node is created.

Once I got my activation email, I was able to delve into creating a mind map, or rather playing with the prebuilt 'my first mind map' that is provided. The toolset provided is quite rich, I liked all the options that it allowed me.

The only thing that didn't 'work' for me was the moving of nodes. You click and drag a node name (the text of the node) and the text moves, but the node and it's branches don't until you let go, at which time they re-draw. Obviously that effect is hard to accomplish in javascript, i understand, and it's a really inconsequential thing, but compared to bubble-mind it's a noticed loss.

MindMeister also gets a thumbs up. I didn't read much of the how-to's so I'm not sure why they need my Skype ID, but that was weird.