Thursday, February 08, 2007

Associating FreeMind mind map files with FreeMind in KDE

FreeMind is a fantastic cross-platform mind map application. If you haven't used it, I highly recommend it as it is a revolutionary way of taking notes, organizing thoughts, and planning.

On Windows, the FreeMind installer offers to associate its .mm files with the application in Windows Explorer. On KDE however, you have to do this yourself. I happened to put the missing pieces together on how to do this when looking over Beagle index logs that revealed the FreeMind MIME type to me. The steps are:

  1. Run kcontrol (KDE Control Center).
  2. Under KDE Components, choose File Associations.
  3. Click Add. Change the group to text, and enter x-troff-mm for the type name.
  4. Under Filename Patterns, enter *.mm. Fill in the description as FreeMind Mind Map.
  5. Under Application Preference Order, click Add, and browse to the FreeMind application (on mine, it installed under Office; you can probably just enter /usr/bin/freemind).
  6. Click Apply and you're all done.
If you want to associate the FreeMind icon while you are here, you'll have to download it from the source tree. In the 0.8.0 source zip file, it's at freemind/images/FreeMindWindowIcon.png. I copied this to /usr/share/icons and then made the association in kcontrol.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Visual Studio Extensions for WF conflict with Office Live Meeting 2005

Not sure if this is related to me trying to develop on Vista, but when I run the installer for Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation (EN), it tries to repair or reinstall Office Live Meeting 2005 and never actually installs the WF extensions. I had to let it remove Live Meeting (repair didn't work) before it would actually install the extensions.