For starters, I decided to bake the FreeMind Flash Browser into a gadget. You can now embed your FreeMind-generated MindMaps into a Google Gadget with my FreeMind Flash Browser Google Gadget. Feedback is welcome - hope you find it useful.
One caveat/limitation. Flash security policy will prevent crossdomain loading of your MindMap. Specifically, the gadget code is hosted on a *.gmodules.com domain. However, most users will wish to upload/embed MindMaps to their Google Sites (sites.google.com) or another Google domain. At the moment, this will not work as Google does not host a Crossdomain Policy file at its root. It is this policy file that allows Flash to load movies across Google's domains. I've posted an inquiry on the Google Sites Help Group to see if there is any traction towards enabling such a policy.
For now, what works for me is:
- Upload the MindMap to a hosting account you have control over.
- Create a crossdomain.xml policy file:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy
SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain="*.google.com" />
<allow-access-from domain="*.gmodules.com" />
<allow-access-from domain="*.googlecode.com" />
</cross-domain-policy>
Upload the file to the root location of the domain under which your MindMaps are hosted, i.e. http://mydomain.com/crossdomain.xml - Specify the fully qualified url to the MindMap within the FreeMind Flash Browser Google Gadget initLoadFile setting, i.e. http://mydomain.com/mymaps/mindmap.mm. The gadget should be able to render the map.
4 comments:
Hi,
First, hearty thanks in creating a mindmap flash gadget. It should be a lot useful to people like me who use googlepages and mindmap.
I am hosting my pages in shankarpdy.googlepages.com
I have a mindmap and have uploaded into map.mm. When I click the properties, it shows http://shankarpdy.googlepages.com/map.mm
But when I add the google gadget it does not recognize map.mm
I also have added crossdomain.xml
My crossdomain.xml (which I uploaded into shankarpdy.googlepages.com) looks like this (not able to post full text)-
"allow-access-from domain="*.googlepages.com"
Any clue why it did not work? Is there any tweaking I need to do in xml file.
I don't think the crossdomain policy can sit under a subdomain, i.e. shankarpdy.googlepages.com. Adobe documentation:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00001621.html explicitly states that the crossdomain.xml has to live at the root of the domain serving up the file. That's the rub.
For the crossdomain.xml to live anywhere else you actually have to specify the location of the file within the flash code itself as described here:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/00001622.html#250063. Unfortunately, this doesn't sound like a robust solution for a widget.
The only way I've been able to render MindMaps into Google Sites is to host both, Map and Crossdomain on a domain I have full control over. Specifically, if my domain where I have root access is http://mydomain.com, the crossdomain.xml goes under the public_html folder or the equivalent so that http://mydomain.com/crossdomain.xml is accessible for the browsers. The MindMap.mm itself is also hosted somewhere on that domain so that http://mydomain.com/some_folder/MyMap.mm is accessible on the web.
As I mentioned in the post, I raised this topic on Google Site help group: http://groups.google.com/group/sites-help-suggestions/browse_thread/thread/b0d9627603f69c74/76a83d0f40ea3b0e?lnk=gst&q=crossdomain#76a83d0f40ea3b0e. Looks like it has not received any attention. Feel free to add your vote and offer comments, perhaps it will help revitalize the discussion.
Yury you are a life saver!!
This gadget is great, an absolutely must have for project pages. I really needed this, thanks a lot!!!
BTW, do you also get troubles with the notes? I cant see the "on-mouse-over" info, not in the menu and not in the notes embedded within nodes. Any ideas?
greetings from Paraguay
PS: that crossdomain thing almost had me... lucky for me I found your blog with the solution =)
Maybe putting a little help on the gadget to inform users about that map url limitations (I just added it from the googleSites itself, and didn't se any instructions there of how to get it running)
great work!
I am getting:
Flash plugin or Javascript are turned off. Activate both and reload to view the mindmap
all research says that there is a new version of the swt file. How do I update. Oddly it works in IE 6.0 but not in Firefox 3.5 :-(
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