Shutting down Xmind Cloud

[Juha Metsäkallas]

Here are my thoughts about shutting down Xmind Cloud, but first a disclaimer. I am not a Xmind Inc. employee, nor have I any contact to a deep throat inside Xmind Inc., I'm just a fellow user, who hopefully understands something about software development and software business.

If your mind map fits a screen of a mobile phone or a tablet, maybe a mind map is overkill for that task. Wouldn't a simple to-do list do the work? You need more screen space to create and edit the maps – to get the big picture. Where you might need a hand-held device, is to make small last minute adjustments before a presentation. For that purpose there seems to be Lighten, which is announced to support "Xmind Zen files". Yes, I know that Lighten exists only for iOS, and before all Android users begin to whine about that, wait and read on.

What are these "Xmind Zen files"? Well, Xmind Inc. says that they've been spending three years writing a new graphics engine called Snowbrush. A graphics engine is that part of the application that produces the visual map. Xmind Zen is said to be fully compatible with the current Xmind, which I understand that way that file format isn't going to chance ,at least now, but Snowbrush just renders graphics in a different way. Note that the Xmind file format hasn't changed for a while.

Why is Xmind Inc. changing the graphics engine? Remember that the current Xmind is base on Eclipse, a software development platform, which certainly is not developed with graphics intensive tasks in mind and therefore might not meet current needs that Xmind Inc. may have on fancy new graphics. There might be another, more pressing reason for the change: Eclipse doesn't exist for Android. While you of course can develop for Android using the Eclipse software development platform, you can't run Eclipse on Android. Android devices lack the hardware and necessary Java libraries to do that. I can't help thinking that Lighten has been the test bed for getting rid of Eclipse's graphics engine, to test Snowbrush. Could it be that Snowbrush is platform independent? I bet, it is! Once the glitches in Snowbrush has been ironed out, Xmind Inc. can use it to write Xmind for MacOS, MS Windows, Linux, iOS, Android – perhaps even for LCARS.

Ok, but the cloud? There is a lot of talk and sheer hype about cloud these days. The term "cloud" is ambiguous, it can mean many things. When talking about Xmind Cloud it means two things: storage and software, or to use those abbreviations that the information technology field is so full of, StaaS (storage-as-a-service) and SaaS (software-as-a-service). You need to keep in mind that those are two distinct things.

As a side note here, one may also wonder what's the role of Xmind Share. It was never meant to be a collaboration platform (the url changes with every update) nor does it provide a way to view the maps (the preview is just an image of the first sheet). To me it seems like a show room for fellow and potential users of Xmind, a show room to display what can be achieved with Xmind, and a way to share your maps to those visiting the show room. Nothing more, nothing less.

Back to Xmind Cloud... From a cloud storage perspective Xmind Cloud has failed. Just take a look at Xmind Support Center, many users have had issues with reliability: errors on uploading and downloading, loosing parts of maps or whole maps getting corrupted. Besides running a StaaS business of their own can't be profitable for Xmind Inc. There are big players (Dropbox, Apple's iCloud, Google's Drive, Microsoft's OneDrive, Amazon's S3 etc.) out there, that surely can beat Xmind Inc. both when it comes to price and quality of the service. Those companies provide software that seamlessy integrates with your computer's file system, a folder that automatically synchronises a local file to the cloud and vice versa. There is no need to have special "Google Drive integration" in Xmind, since once you have Google Drive installed on your computer, any program that can save, can use it. Same applies to any of the forementioned companies' cloud storage services.

Xmind Cloud is more justified, if you think it as cloud software, a web-browser-enabled way to display maps. There is certainly a need to display maps so that many people can see it simultaneously. If the meeting is taking place remotely, you can use your presentation software (GoToWebinar, Skype, TeamViewer etc.) to display your desktop installed Xmind. Or use AirPlay by Apple or Miracast by Microsoft (anyone actually using it?) to display maps in the meeting room. That transition of the graphics engine might also explain, why there hasn't been a new version of the portable Xmind: they haven't had the resources to compile it. Maybe we see a Snowbrush-powered portable version, a Snowbrush-powered cloud software that can display content from Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive or wherever you can reach with an URL. Who knows.