The default screen-size of FreeMind(R) is suited for small displays, but not scalable to larger ones. Flexibility in display parameters is lacking. Nevertheless, displays that fit on small screens, and wrap and fit to down-sized browser windows on larger screens ought to be status quo. Unfortunately, FreeMind won't down-size, either.
Fly-overs on the grayed-out icons on the opening screen reveal no alternative text displays, at least not in Firefox on Windows. They give no clue as to what the graphic representations across the topbar or down the sidebar might mean. Maybe flyovers are not Firefox compatible; maybe the software itself isn't broadly internet compliant.
Once you click on the dog-eared, page-like icon, to open a new file; all of the icons in the topbar and sidebar light up! How dumb must you be not to recognize a shadow of an icon near the left of the topbar in order not to get started right away? Figure out which, and click...
Then, when the file on display automatically presents an element with a Japanese label ("新規マインドマップ"), perhaps simply because I've downloaded the software from a location in Japan, what do I do?
I'm going to go find out if language preferences are available to over-ride the ... (sorry, I shouldn't use such a strong collocation online for...) default settings. In fact, the menus are in Japanese, as well! Pretty hopeless, after midnight, I find neither flyover labels in the sidebar, nor language preferences in drop-down menus from the top bar, nor in the icon-ized cross-bar below that. That doesn't mean that they're not there; it means that I should give up and go to bed.
[337 words]
Well, I gave it another try on a different computer (Mac). The program defaulted to English, and I quickly found the language settings, which I left set to automatic.
ReplyDeleteThen I went back to the Windows machine, uninstalled FreeMind, and got a fresh download. The program defaulted again to Japanese, but this time I found where the settings ought to be. However the global environment settings still weren't enabled in the right-most drop-down menu.
It seem now that the only way to change the language in which FreeMind displays menus and roll-overs when loaded in a Windows XP environment is to change the system-level language preference setting. I hope that changing that setting in my user area doesn't override other users' language preferences in their user areas!
Since corrections of comments already posted are impossible (:-(), withuout trashing them entirely, I'd like to do one here.
ReplyDelete¶3 of my previous comment should start with, "It seems...."