Updated: Opera & Small Screen Ads

Nov. 29th 2012 | by Stefan Schuster

The last few updates since the new version have all been about smoothing out all the hard edges of such a big new release. Today though, we release the first of a few coming updates that will optimize, improve and add new features.

We are really happy the way Mind42 runs now. After the last update (addressing the lost session problem) it seems most problems are solved now. We rarely get any real error reports anymore - everything seems to run smoothly. But of course a lot of feature requests and optimization ideas.

The first bigger thing we addressed is the ad size on small screens. Some people reported that the ads are taking up a fourth of their screen. Turns out, they are right. The square ads we are using are 200px wide, and the design adds an additional 60px on that. The resulting 260px really are one fourth of a 1024x768 screen. Our ads are designed to be non obtrusive. That's why they are in an optically differentiated area to the right, to not affect the actual app usage in any way. But too much is too much. So starting today, screens of 1024px and smaller will receive ads that will only take up 180px instead of 260px. That's nearly 8% more space for the actual app and we hope this makes it better usable in that cases.

The second bigger change is the compatibility with Opera. The Opera browser was never officially supported by Mind42 in the past, but more or less worked without problems. With the new version though some new bugs made Mind42 more or less useless in Opera and we received some feedback about these issues. While we still don't officially support Opera, it should work again now.

The rest really are only small changes or changes behind the scenes. Pressing Tab or Shift-Tab while editing a node text will now directly create a new node, which allows faster creation of new branches. The public map embed snippet sometimes showed the full mind map editor within the embed frame for the mind map owner, that's fixed too. And after the creation of our new Facebook and Twitter accounts last week they now should be all correctly linked to from our page. We are already working on the next improvements, so stay tuned.