The idea of developing a mind mapping tool came nearly 1 year ago. The need of it looked pretty important and logical in the way of continuing the story that our firm is trying to present to its clients: project management, decision making, representing ideas, representing solutions in a more “human” way.
The “development” road of the DropMind started on an AJAX basis meaning JavaScript, XML, and HTML. The proof of concept was made but the visualization seemed like a big problem using this technique. We wanted our tool to have a powerful visual impact on the users, in order to rich the core of the mind mapping theory and the real use of the mind mapping techniques.
So at that time, Flash was the undisputed leader on the market for building this kind of RIA 2.0 Web-oriented applications, though Microsoft was announcing his “horse” for the RIA race – Silverlight. The decision was very hard to make because we didn’t know how serious Microsoft is with this technology, but on the other hand, we wanted to try new things and to explore the power of Silverlight, though it was still in the 1.1 alpha version. The research went well, proof of concept also, so we started developing our solution in Silverlight hoping that Microsoft and its Silverlight team will provide us, and the whole development community, with additional features as time, goes’ by, and make the Silverlight a real RIA development platform competitor.
After the decision about the platform was made, the development started and there was no turning back. “Luckily”, the Microsoft Silverlight team took their job very seriously, so as our DropMind application evolved, new releases from Microsoft were delivered – beta 1, beta 2, RC, and the official 2.0 release offering “stuff” that we needed and implemented in our app. So at the time being DropMind is in its beta stage, coming very soon to the commercial release as Microsoft announces their new Silverlight 3.0 beta ….