Google announced that they will stop providing the Realtime API capabilities for Google Drive files to third party applications (such as MindMup). This means that starting from December 2018, MindMup users will have to choose between keeping their maps on Google Drive and collaborative editing. To allow for a smooth migration, MindMup from today supports saving and editing plain Google Drive files, in addition to collaborative maps.
- Starting from 17 July 2018, newly created maps are collaborative as before, and you can open and edit old maps as well as the new format plain file maps. The owners of collaborative maps will see a message encouraging conversion.
- Starting from September 2018, newly created maps will no longer support collaboration on MindMup, but you will be able to edit old collaborative maps.
- Starting from November 2018, existing collaborative maps will become read-only, and you will have to convert them into plain files for editing.
Key changes for users
The new way of storing maps just uses Google Drive as a file system, meaning that multiple concurrent updates are not guaranteed to work correctly. For that reason, auto-saving on every change is no longer possible, and users will have to explicitly send the content to Drive by clicking on the Save button in the top-right corner, or using File > Save from the main application menu.
MindMup will warn you about any potentially unsaved changes, and keep a list of recent changes in your local browser profile, so they can be restored in case of network problems or if you accidentally close the browser window. MindMup also will try to detect remote changes and warn you about them proactively. Please note that, due to the limitations imposed by Google Drive, we cannot protect against simultaneous saving of the same file by different users, so this is not a full replacement for collaborative editing. For users that need safe collaborative work, it’s best to use the MindMup Cloud collaboration platform instead of Google Drive.