Slatebox — Visualize Everything

A new look, a better roadmap!

Slatebox is more beautiful than ever with a completely new logo and design. Enjoy!

We’ve also spent time deliberately casting a wider vision throughout the site by rebranding the core mind mapping app as SlateMind, and emphasizing Slatebox as a platform for ‘off-rail’, real-time applications instead of merely a single mind-mapping app. We are committed to mind-mapping as ever, and SlateMind will be the defacto standard app that ships with every Slatebox account, but as we reach out to developers, it’s increasingly important to convey Slatebox as a platform that provides a unique user experience for a multitude of applications far beyond the scope of just mind-mapping. Slatebox has always been designed as a platform, and the re-branding done today is in sync with the long-term vision.

We’ll have plenty more to come!

Resize many nodes at once

Now the multi-selecting includes proper re-sizing. (And there was much rejoicing.) Simply use the resize icon in the lower right of the box surrounding the selected nodes to resize all the nodes at once:

Multi-select nodes

Now you can select a group of nodes easily using the new multi-select link in the upper-left of the slate. Just click this link and select a group of nodes by dragging across the slate to include the nodes you’d like to include. You will be able to move and delete the selected nodes easily. Resizing is coming soon.

Once selected, the group will be contained by a background rectangle:

You can simply drag this rectangle around to move the group, or click DEL on your keyboard to be prompted to remove the entire group:

Please let us know at support AT slatebox.com if you have any questions. Thanks!

Keyboard Shortcuts

A handful of keyboard shortcuts have been added to make it easier to delete or add nodes to your slate. While hovering over a node, you can now:

• Use the RIGHT ARROW key to create a new, detached node
• Use the DOWN ARROW key to create a new, attached node
• Use the DELETE key to remove the node.

Also, there was a brief outage while the slate image export wasn’t working as expected — but that’s been fixed.

Have fun!

Slatebox: An Overview Video

I’ve gotten a number of requests to provide more help documentation, and thought I would embed a new video that gives a succinct overview of Slatebox and its capabilities.

Additionally, here are a couple links to other online help documentation.

• Building your first slate, a simple guide.
• Instructional Design Fusion: Slatebox Review & Overview

Resource Links Are Here!

More documentation to follow, but you can now embed URLs on your nodes to provide external links. Please email support AT slatebox.com if you have questions. Thanks!

Enhancements

Online Help Documentation

Here is a simple document to help explain how to build your first slate. Once you’ve understood the basics, it’s a snap.

Online guide to building your first slate

Thanks, Mr. Byrne

A nice man from Maine just posted some kind words about Slatebox. Dear sir, I thank you :)

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/01/slatebox-visualize-everything.html

We’re trying to keep up with all the interest; to all of you have asked to be part of the education pilot: Thank You! It’s coming soon. I’ve had requests from all over the world. It’s exciting to see.

As usual, please drop me a line at tim AT slatebox.com if you have any questions or need some help.

User Experience Enhancements

I’m happy to announce some great UI improvements at Slatebox:

1. A new help site has launched. Look for it in the top bar of your site after you log in. We’ll have a bunch of great training materials in the Knowledge Base shortly.
2. A lot of improvements have been made to the canvas:
   • Slimmed down the birdseye to give more room for slate-building
   • Now, nodes are automatically centered whenever they’re updated with text or images
   • Newly created nodes now automatically enter text-edit mode

I think these enhancements will make a lot of people happy!

Stay tuned for some simple video instructions that will show up in the help center.