Workaround for FreeMind OutOfMemory Exception (Mac OS X)

I’ve been having trouble running FreeMind on Mac OS X. I have the FreeMind icon in the dock. When I click on it to launch FreeMind, it hangs for a while, with the CPU pegged.

After some time I get a “Cannot launch Java application” dialog box with the text “Uncaught exception in main method: java.lang.OutOfMemory: Java heap space”.

I found a workaround on Julianus’ Blog. (Thank you!) This is a little ugly, but it works. I can use FreeMind.

Step 1
Run the Terminal program.

Step 2
Create a soft link from the FreeMind JAR file to some convenient location in your user account. Type the following all on one line, then hit “return” — or use copy and paste.

$ ln -s /Applications/FreeMind.app/Contents/Resources/Java/lib/freemind.jar freemind.jar

This will create a soft link (called an “alias” in OS X parlance) in your home directory. You can click on this to “open” the JAR file, causing FreeMind to run normally.

Step 3
(This step is optional.) Drag the icon to the file portion of your dock. This will allow you to run FreeMind with a single click.

This is more a hack than anything, but it gets the job done.