Unfortunately I have been so far unable to import references from a BibTeX file generated with Mendeley, so I am missing one of the most useful features.
I started using SciPlore on my new job assignment, and found it perfectly suited for managing literature and project drafting – especially the pdf bookmark import. So, hopefully, with switching to Freeplane many bugs (export problems, wired path names, …) will be fixed and due to Freeplane’s very nice development concepts, less bugs should occur in the future and new features will be implemented faster. What does this mean for you as a user? Well, Freeplane is much faster and less buggy. We also got many emails from our users who prefer Freeplane over FreeMind and we are sure that this is a huge improvement for all SciPlore MindMapping users. Under his lead Freeplane became a really, really nice mind mapping software over the last years. Freeplane was founded by Dimitry Polivaev, one of the core developers of FreeMind. Therefore we decided to switch to Freeplane as code base in near future (around July 2011).
Since a long time, the FreeMind team is releasing new versions very slowly, not to say the development of FreeMind almost pauses. However, time is changing and FreeMind unfortunately is not. It was a straight forward decision: for many years, FreeMind was bascially the standard choice if you wanted a free open source mind mapping software and it was written in Java, our preferred programing language. That means we used FreeMind`s source code, modified it slightly, and added some new features.
When we started the development of SciPlore MindMapping about a year ago we decided to use FreeMind as code base.