Dear all,

many of the new features of the coming release have required a lot of 
working hours for getting the next version work. Personally I have 
implemented the following tasks:

* Filters and Attributes,
* SimplyHTML and its use as a rich text editor,
* New implementation of Layout and Painting.
(The last package have required intensive testing phase, which started 
with release of the beta10, and now the most bugs are removed.)

Now I was able to concentrate on a smaller problems. This weekend I was 
investigating and fixing problems with undoing and redoing of actions 
with multiple line contents. After many hours of intensive work I could 
fix the items. If you want to see the bugs, just produce some plain text 
node with multiple lines and try to undo and redo the operation in say 
beta12. After that try to insert a structured plain text with miltiple 
lines having different amout of the leading spaces. Try it with the root 
node and a not root node as a paste target. Try to undo and redo the 
operations. All these things did not work until the improvements I have 
done now.

In the last time my attention was pointed to the use of FreeMind as a 
tool for presentation and documentation.

The first problem was that the selected nodes were the worst readable 
nodes on the map because of their gray background. I have addressed this 
problem adding different options for the colors. This working package 
was very small compared to the all previous tasks, and it is solved now. 
The solution opens many new possibilities for using of FreeMind for 
performing presentations and moderating discussion - always when the map 
is intended to be shown to many people using a beamer.

I was impressed by the return which can be achieved by relatively small 
amount of work. That's why I have declared this feature the most 
important feature of the whole release.

And now I would like to address some other issues which can be done 
relatively quick and safe. This issues are important if the map should 
be given to other people. I see following issues here:

1. In order to insure that the map have the same look on all computers, 
there is a need of the option to save its default map background color, 
node background color, node text color, node font family and font size 
with the map itself. I started with the map background color and have 
seen the lack of the other features.

2. I missed a way to add some nodes not visible connected to the other 
nodes. So I would like to introduce the invisible edges, which would 
make a kind of headings or remarks inside of the maps possible.

I see that developing of such new options would lead to the new delay of 
the final release. Such delay would be minimal, because implementing of 
all those things do not require any significant amount of work compared 
to all the tasks mentioned above. One there are introduced, these 
options are able to open completely new ways of using the FreeMind to 
many people. And if they were not introduced in 0.9.0 the most of the 
people would have to wait until the next major release, although I could 
implement all them in one weekend.

Let me sum up.

All of us have done a lot for the new release.
All of us want that the release come soon. The new features I have 
proposed can not course any significant delay, because they require only 
small amount of work. Only some small steps more have to be done.
Such steps can not course a significant delay of the coming release, but 
they can help many people to use FreeMind for the tasks it could not be 
used else.

That's why I apply for making the improvements before the release 
candidate for 0.9.0 is published.

Dear team,

if you still have another opinion, you could just ignore my point. 
Should ignoring the others be our way to manage the project?
I have spent so much time for FreeMind that I do not think  anybody 
could say ma that there is no time for a discussion about a question so 
important to me before the decision is taken. Surely you can just ignore 
my opinion. Think about whether your time is worth doing it.

I send a copy of this post to the open discussion forum too, because I 
would like to get the community feedback about the discussed issues.

Best regards, Dimitry

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