Archive for the_time('F Y')


25 February 2009 in .Net & Mindscape | Comments (1)

WPF Flow Diagram

Yesterday we shipped our WPF Flow Diagrams product – a really nice component for creating beautiful flow diagrams in your applications. They can be interactive, read-only, exporting to PNG/JPEG/BMP, serialized, deserialized, customised with new node types, and a whole heap more.

WPF Flow Diagram in use screenshot

When we release a product I always like to put up screenshots (something that was hard with LightSpeed 1.0 since it was just an assembly at the time!). We also try to show some corporate personality is put up one or two fairly absurd but fun screenshots. Ivan has taken the cake this time with his flow diagram highlighting the mating rituals and life cycle of Penguins. Not to mention his awesome over the top use of WPF 3D to show a diagram tilted and with spotlights flashing (unfortunately the flashing isn’t visible in a static image, but it looks great when you do see it – especially since you can edit and work with the flow diagram while all that’s going on!).

If you’re developing a modern application and need a sexy WPF Flow Diagram, check it out :-) I appreciate any feedback.

– JD

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 based on 207 user reviews.


15 February 2009 in Business | Comments (5)

I was pleased to see that Mindscape was named the #2 start-up in the New Zealand Top 10 Start-up awards. It’s always nice to get recognised for the work you are doing and I’m thankful to those that voted for us as well as our supporters and customers who have helped us to where we are :-)

Published on the New Zealand Herald Website:

Mindscape was founded in February 2007 by John-Daniel Trask, Jeremy Boyd and Andrew Peters with the intention of creating software products that “didn’t suck”. Tired of software feeling slow and bloated, they set about creating the tools that they, as software developers, would love to use tools that were small, blazingly fast and effective.

Recognising the skills of the founders, Microsoft got in touch with Mindscape and enlisted their help to develop BackgroundMotion a technical best-practice open source application to aid other .NET developers worldwide in understanding how to best architect modern Web 2.0 websites on the .NET platform. This initial development work helped aid early profitability on top of the small seed capital the founders had provided at launch. Since this time Mindscape has released three products for software developers, continued to grow profits and revenue and has customers all over the world – including Fortune 50 companies.

Mindscape has achieved all of this with only three full-time employees and no external funding. They’ve been profitable since inception and continue to develop both the product and consulting sides of their business.

Average Rating: 4.6 out of 5 based on 189 user reviews.