We are pleased to announce that although the original offer on the Your Study Coach program has finished, we are now able to offer a replacement offer, with the same benefits for purchasers of NovaMind Pro or Platinum mind mapping software.

This new offer is available when you purchase NovaMind Pro or Platinum, and gives you free access to the Your Study Coach training, which normally sells for US$375.

This offer will be available until 12:00 noon AEST on Saturday 21st August 2010.

To get the free course:

1. Add the Your Study Coach course to your cart at the NovaMind online store,
2. Add your copies of NovaMind Pro or Platinum to your cart,
3. Proceed through checkout as normal.

You will receive login information for the course by email within a couple of days or so.

This excellent video-based training system has been on sale on the NovaMind web site for the last 18 months for US$375, but I have been busy negotiating with the guy in charge of marketing at YourStudyCoach.com on your behalf…I have negotiated to buy you a place in the training when you buy NovaMind, so you get the entire training course at no additional cost to you.

This video course will teach you how to learn, and also very importantly, how to unlearn. The course teaches you:

• How to correctly memorize information
• How to read at greater speeds while still maintaining comprehension
• How to switch on the thinking part of your brain
• How to overcome any learning challenge

The course is designed to be applicable for students, parents, teachers, home school teaching, or anyone who wants to make the best and most efficient use of your brain. There is a video about the curriculum at the NovaMind Online Store.

A lot of the Learning to Learn and Learning to Unlearn tools have been used by individuals and featured in numerous schools, colleges and companies all over the world, for example: BBC, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Apple computer and Oprah.

So What’s The Catch?

OK, time for me to confess. Yes, there is a catch. You have to do some work to get the course. When you purchase your copy of NovaMind at the NovaMind Online Store, you have to click a button to add the Your Study Coach course to your shopping cart. That’s it!

What if I already have a NovaMind license key?

I’m glad you asked. Consider this: if you purchase a NovaMind 5 Express license key, it will cost you US$49, and you get a course valued at US$375. Heck, even if you bought a Platinum license key at US$249, you would still be ahead of the game! And if you have no need for it yourself, it would make a great present for a family member, friend, colleague, or your favorite charity.

OK, so how do I get it?

Just go to the NovaMind Online Store, and make your purchase of NovaMind, and remember to click the button to add the course to your cart. When you check out, I’ll buy you your place in the course, and you will receive your login information direct from the folks at YourStudyCoach.com.

How long is this available for?

On the web site, you will see that it is available today, but I have now negotiated for it to be available until midday, Saturday the 14th of August AEST.

Here is the transcript:

Let’s talk about link lines. Link lines are used to link topics and other items like floating topics and shapes together, in order to show secondary relationships between the items.

With Mind Maps, you always have the basic hierarchical structure which supports radiant thinking, but often it is also valuable to be able to show those secondary relationships, for ideas that cross-link to other ideas.

The link lines in NovaMind are more powerful and flexible than those found in any other program, yet they are also very easy to use.

First, let’s create a simple link from one topic to another. Just click on the Link Line option in the Insert tab, now click on the start topic, then the end topic. Congratulations, you have just inserted your first link line. This is a fully automatic shaped link line.

But let’s say we wanted a completely straight line instead of a curve. You can see that the curve has control points to maintain the curve. An automatic curve will always have at least one control point, and may have more.

To make it a straight line, we delete the control points by selecting each one and pressing the delete key. Surprisingly, most Mind Mapping applications either don’t allow you to use straight lines or make it very difficult to achieve.

Sometimes you know the path you would like your link line to take. So let’s look at another way to create them.

Select Insert, Link Line again, and click on the topic where you want to start your link line. Click on each of the points you would like it to go through.    When you click on another topic, shape, or callout, it will know that you have reached your destination and complete the curve.

But sometimes, you just want to draw the curve where you want it to go. You can do this too. Again, start to insert the link line, and this time, just click and drag to draw the line where you want it. Don’t worry if it looks jagged. NovaMind will smooth it out.

You can also start by clicking where you want the points, and finish by dragging to the destination, or even just drag part of the line and go back to clicking points.

If you’re part way through creating a link line, and decide not to, you can press the Esc key to cancel the operation.

If you want to alter the curve, you can just drag the control points to where you want them, or select and delete them if you don’t want them.

You can add a control point simply by clicking on the line while it’s selected. To make it even easier than that, you can even click to add and drag to move the control point in a single operation, so you just click and drag to reshape the line. The line will be smoothed to curve through the control point.

You will notice that when you select a control point, it has two handles associated with it, one at each end of a bar. When the shape of the curve at that point is automatically smoothed, the handles will be filled with white. If you really want to make fine changes to the shape of your line, you can grab these handles and shape the line as you like. The handles will be filled with black when you have shaped it manually.

If you want to reset it to be automatically smoothed, just right-click the point and select the Smooth option. If you want to convert the line to be automatic, choose the Automatic link line option.

To format the line, you can use the context menu to access the formatting dialog box, or you can use the Outline settings on the Format tab.

In the format tab you get a live preview of your changes as you mouse over them, so you can make your link line look exactly the way you want it.

There’s a gallery of line terminators that you can choose from, if you want to use one of the standard line terminator options.

But if you want to set the size of your terminators or choose different terminators, you will need to head over to the advanced setting panel.

There are 30 different line terminators that you can choose from, to denote the meaning of the link line, and you can scale the terminators to visually highlight the differences. You can also switch the terminators from one end to the other, if you need to.

By default, the line uses automatic coloring, so if your background is dark, the link line will automatically be colored white.

So now you know all about link lines and how to format them in the shape and style you want.

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

NovaMind will be releasing an update of the Windows version of their Mind Mapping software next week, including two new languages: German and Spanish, bringing the total number of languages to 4: English, German, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese.

NovaMind for Windows in English, Simplified Chinese, German, and Spanish

Of course you can create your Mind Maps in any language, but it’s also nice to have the user interface in your native language…

NovaMind provides a very powerful synchronization service for your To Do lists and Events. This allows you to use the alarms, meeting invites, synchronization, to do lists and other features available in iCal, synchronizing directly from within NovaMind, using either automatic or manual synchronization of task information. The synchronization can be set up to be either one way, so that NovaMind tasks are pushed to iCal, or to be bi-directional, so that your iCal tasks are also synchronized back to NovaMind. Some iCal synchronization features are available in the Pro edition, and some only in the Platinum edition.

To turn on synchronization with iCal, use the File / Sync With iCal… menu option. You will see a number of options as defined below:

In NovaMind Pro, you will see the following options:

NovaMind 5 Pro iCal Synchronization Options

And in NovaMind Platinum, you will see the following  options:

NovaMind 5 Platinum iCal Synchronization Options

Although there is only one checkbox difference, there is a big difference in the functionality between NovaMind Pro and Platinum.

Here is an explanation of the options:

• Synchronize topics with task information with iCal events (Platinum edition only): When this option is checked, whenever a synchronization is performed, NovaMind will synchronize any tasks you have where they have a start and end date defined in your Mind Map, with iCal Events. iCal Events are the items you see on the main calendar in iCal. If your start and end dates have the time set as 12:00 AM, this is taken to mean that the hours and minutes are not relevant, and the Events created in iCal are therefore marked as All Day events.
• Synchronize topics with checkboxes with iCal To Do items (Pro and Platinum edition): When checked, whenever synchronization is performed, NovaMind will add any topics with checkboxes to iCal as To Do items. The amount of information that is transferred is dependent on whether you are using a NovaMind Pro or Platinum license.
• Add new Event and To Do items to: Choose the calendar that you want to have NovaMind add the events to. It is often a good idea to create a calendar for your project, in order to keep your tasks manageable. If you come into the setup sheet and then decide to add a new calendar for your tasks, close the setup sheet without synchronizing, and then open it up again once you have added the new calendar, and you will be able to select it. As soon as you synchronize your Mind Map, the tasks will be placed on the calendar you had selected at the time, so if you change to a different calendar later, that will only affect new tasks.

  If you completely delete a calendar that NovaMind was trying to synchronize with, NovaMind will inform you next time you try to synchronize, and you will have to come back to the setup panel and choose a different calendar to synchronize with. If this happens, NovaMind will re-sync all the tasks with the new calendar, but if you just change calendars part way through, only the new tasks will be synced with the new calendar, unless you manually remove the old ones from the old calendar.

• Auto-synchronize before save: If you turn this option on, every time you save your file, it will update iCal with any changes you have made in NovaMind. If you don’t have this option turned on, you will have to come back to the setup sheet and use the Sync Now button to update iCal.
• Accept changes made in iCal: If you have this option turned on, then any changes you make to data in iCal will be transferred back into NovaMind. Note that if you add additional information that does not relate to data stored in NovaMind (e.g. alarms), then that will remain stored solely in iCal. Only the data relevant to NovaMind will be transferred back in. If you have this option turned off, then the synchronization is purely one way – from NovaMind to iCal, and any changes you make in NovaMind will always overwrite your iCal information – but with all synchronization, it will only affect data that relates to NovaMind data.

  This option allows for updates to data that is made live while both iCal and NovaMind are running. Normal synchronization takes care of cases where the iCal data was changed while NovaMind was not running, or the particular map was not open, but they still honor your setting, and will only copy in data from iCal if you have this option turned on.

  Note that if you change the title of the To Do item or Event, then the synchronization only transfers back the plain text, so if your topic had other formatting on it, it will be lost, and the formatting will revert back to the formatting defined in the theme you are using. For this reason, we recommend that if you are going to change the name of a task, you change the topic title on the Mind Map and let it synchronize that way rather than the other way around, if you have set custom text attributes.

  The same applies for the topic notes, which are also synchronized with iCal.

• Warn before accepting changes: If you have this option turned on, you will be asked to confirm before any changes made in iCal are accepted into NovaMind.
  

  Synchronization from iCal to NovaMind

  This applies to both the live updates from iCal, and synchronization where the items in iCal may have changed while NovaMind didn’t have that document open, and the synchronization would lead to data being updated from iCal to NovaMind.

General Synchronization mechanism

When you synchronize between NovaMind and iCal, if you have altered a topic in a way that means that it should have an iCal task associated with it (adding a checkbox, or setting a start and end date), then the To Do or Event is automatically created.

If you do something that means that the Event or To Do would no longer be required, for instance removing the checkbox, or unsetting a start or end date, then the iCal Event or To Do is removed automatically – even if you have entered other information such as attendees and alarms on the Event or To Do. Also, obviously, if you delete a topic, its corresponding iCal item will be removed when you next synchronize.

If you cut and paste a topic, or graft it from one place to another, so long as you cut and paste without saving in between, your linkage to your iCal event will be preserved.

If you copy a topic, then the original will maintain its iCal event, and the new topic will get its own one next time you synchronize.

If you add additional information to items in iCal, we do not override that in our synchronization. This can be useful where you want the base tasks in NovaMind, and want to add things such as alarms in iCal. The only time that information would be deleted would be if the iCal item was being deleted as per the rules above.

NovaMind does its best to be self-repairing. If you delete the selected calendar, NovaMind will prompt you to choose a new one, and will re-sync your tasks with the new calendar:

Choosing A New Calendar

If you delete a task or event from iCal while NovaMind is not running, NovaMind will recreate the To Do or Event when it next synchronizes. If you try to access an iCal item from the inspectors and they are not available, NovaMind automatically resets the linkage so that next time you synchronize, it will create a new item in the calendar.

To Do Synchronization

When you synchronize To Do items, if you have a Pro edition license key for NovaMind, then a To Do will be created for any topic with a checkbox, and just the checked state will be synchronized, along with the topic title and notes. If you have a Platinum license key, the priority will also be transferred, and if you have an end date defined for the task, that will be transferred as the due date for the To Do.

When you have a To Do synchronized with a topic in NovaMind, the “View in iCal” button will be enabled on the inspector, but only if that is the only topic you have selected:

Checkbox Inspector With "View in iCal" Enabled

Note that in the To Do items on iCal, the checkboxes are simple checked or unchecked checkboxes, so we only transfer that information – if your checkbox is in an indeterminate state, it will be transferred to iCal as unchecked. This isn’t too much of a problem, but seeing as the data on the iCal calendar is not as rich as the data in NovaMind, we are forced to adapt the data coming in from iCal. This has the side effect that if a task is in the indeterminate state in NovaMind, and you export it, and then change one of the other fields that synchronizes with NovaMind (e.g. the priority, if you are running NovaMind Platinum), and then sync that change back to NovaMind, it will uncheck your checkbox in NovaMind even though you didn’t directly change that field in iCal. This is likely a very rare occurrence, but you have now been warned! And there isn’t anything we can do to work around this.

Event Synchronization

Events will only be added to iCal when both the start and end date are defined, and the start date is not after the end date. The start and end dates, topic title and notes are synchronized with iCal.

If you don’t set the time to anything other than 12:00 AM, then all day events are automatically added to iCal.

When you synchronize your events with iCal, the view in iCal button will be enabled, but only if you just have a single topic selected. When you click it, you will be taken directly to that calendar event in iCal:

Task Inspector with "View in iCal" Enabled

Toolbar Item

There is a toolbar item available, but it’s not on the default toolbar, so if you want to show it, you will need to use the Customize Toolbar option and drag it on.

iCal Sync Toolbar Item

In yet another significant update to the capabilities of NovaMind 5 for Mac preview release, NovaMind has enhanced the capabilities of the task reporting by adding a very powerful printing option, and exports to RTF and MS Word.

You can print your tasks directly from within the NovaMind program. When you choose to print, you will see options as follows:

NovaMind 5 Task Report Printing Options

The header and footer options are almost exactly the same as the main Mind Map printing options, so we won’t go into them in detail here. Notice one item in particular though, and that is the “Print Filter Criteria” option. If you turn this option on, the report will include the exact criteria that were used to generate the report, for example:

Task Report Filter Criteria

The information included in the reports is filtered according to your filtering criteria, and sorted according to any sorting you may have set up using the column headers.

The report only includes the columns you have chosen to include in your view, and the ordering and width is dependent on what you have set up on the task reports panel. Basically, we take the things you are looking at on the screen and reproduce that as best we can in the report. If you see columns with data that is wrapped onto two lines, and you want to prevent that, you would just cancel out of the printing, and widen the column and try again. Seeing as the task column is almost always going to be wider than any other columns, it is set to take up any available space once the other columns have taken up their space.

Task Report Exports

You can export your task data to several formats by using the popup menu in the bottom left of the task reports window:

Task Report Export Formats

CSV Export:

You can export the data from your report to CSV (comma separated values). Only the data that is shown in the results table will be exported, and only the columns that you have showing at the time. The export will also honor your sort order.

CSV files can be read by many programs, including in particular spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel.

Note that the specification for CSV files is very loose, and it doesn’t even have a standardized way of representing dates, so we just export the data as it appears on your screen. Most programs that import CSV files have options for interpreting things like percentages and dates, if they need to turn them into their raw data types to work with them.

RTF and Word Export

The RTF and Word export give you a table with the information, showing the columns you have selected, and with the data sorted according to your selected sort column (if you have sorted it). It also includes all the filtering criteria, just like what you get when you print it out.

NovaMind 5 has sophisticated outline numbering capabilities, unmatched in any other Mind Mapping product, which allow you to number topics in a variety of different ways.

To access the outline numbering settings, use the Children Outline Numbering inspector in the Data inspector group.

If you are using NovaMind Express, the outline numbering inspector will look like this:

Outline Numbering in NovaMind 5 Express

And if you are using NovaMind Pro or Platinum, the inspector will look like this:

Outline Numbering in NovaMind 5 Pro and Platinum

The difference is because there are more advanced outline numbering options available in the Pro and Platinum editions, which allow you different formatting options for the numbering, like using letters and Roman numerals, different separators between the numbers at different levels, and prefixes and suffixes, which can be set individually at each level.

Outline numbering is applicable for the children of the selected topic or topics, and setting the outline numbering on a parent topic can affect the sub-topics to multiple levels, and can be overridden at any level below, to give unparalleled power and flexibility in the outline numbering system.

There are two parts to the outline numbering settings – the first is where you want the outline numbering shown, and the second is the formatting of the outline numbers that are shown.

Basic Settings

• Default: this uses the default outline numbering, which may be on or off at any particular level, based on the theme, and your settings on parent topics. In most situations, the only time you would change the setting away from being the default would be if you want to explicitly turn on or off the children numbering.
• All Sub-Topics: this turns on numbering for all levels below the selected topic. Please be aware that this option can result in very long and unwieldy outline numbers like 1.5.12.6.8.23 if you have a deep hierarchy and don’t use the Restart Numbering option at all.
• Numbering Off: this will force there to be no outline numbering on the children of the topic. This option is particularly useful if you have a deep hierarchy of outline numbers and for a specific topic, you don’t want the children to have outline numbers, but for most of the topics you do want them.
• X Levels: this turns numbering on for the specified number of levels from the selected topic. Note that the hierarchy is extended by this setting, so if you want the numbering to restart instead, you would have to also turn on the Restart Numbering option.

Let’s first take a simple example of where you want to set the outline numbering to go down to two levels from the Mind Map title. You would select the title, and select for numbering to go down to two levels.

Simple Outline Numbering to 2 Levels

Now if you decided that you wanted to have these outline numbers on all but the subtopics of topic 2, then you could leave the first setting as is, select topic 2 and turn numbering off for that topic like this:

Excluding a Topic from Numbering

By contrast, if you wanted to have outline numbers on the first level only, except that on subtopic 2, you wanted an additional level, you would select the Mind Map title and set the outline numbering to  1 level, and then select subtopic 2 and set the outline numbering to 1 level:

Selectively Extending the Numbering Depth

Restart Numbering

Normally the outline numbering builds up at each level – 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 etc., but sometimes you want to just start the children numbering for a particular topic back to just a single number, and that’s where the Restart Numbering option comes in.

In our example, let’s set the outline numbering to all levels from the title. Then on topic 2, we’ll turn on the Restart Numbering option like this:

Restarting Outline Numbering

Custom Formatting

The table at the bottom is for adding custom formatting to as many levels as you need. The first row sets the formatting for the first level, and the second row for the second level of subtopics etc.

So for instance if we wanted to change the formatting to be lower case letters for the first level and Roman numerals for the second level, we would add two rows on the same topic where we set the outline numbering (in our example, the Mind Map title).

To add a row, click the “+” button at the top right of the table, and the second column is where you set the numbering format. To delete rows from the formatting table, select the row and press the Delete key.

Custom Outline Number Formatting

Advanced Formatting Example

The formatting options for the advanced outline numbering are more powerful than those of any other Mind Mapping software, and give you massive flexibility.

For ordinary formatting, you would not use a prefix or suffix, but would just be changing the number format and possibly separator, depending on your needs, but let’s do some “Extreme Number Formatting“!

Let’s say we wanted to have the outline numbers formatted so they said something like

“Section 2, part 3 (iv) e.6?

(where 2, 3, iv, e, and 6 are the numbers at different levels). You would do this by setting the numbering up as follows:

Advanced Outline Number Formatting

Let’s just break this down. Each format has four components:

1. Prefix: This text comes before your outline number at that level. Note that there is no space between the prefix and the number, so you will need to add a space after it. In our case, we did want a space, so we added the word “Section ” (with a space after it) for the first row.
2. Number Format: This gives you options for the type of number – numbers, upper or lower case letters or Roman numerals.
3. Suffix: what you want to come after the number – again, if you want spaces before or after the suffix, you will need to type them.
4. Separator: this is the punctuation you want between this number and the next level down, and it is only shown if there is a next level below that topic.

Just a couple of notes about the formatting above: on the second and third level, we didn’t want to have a separator, so we chose the (no separator) option from the menu. On the third level, we wanted to have a space between the previous numbering and our open parenthesis, so we typed ” (“. The fourth level required a space before the letter, so we just typed a space in the prefix, and the last formatting level is just standard formatting with no prefix or suffix.

There are many new features in the task reporting features of NovaMind 5, such as live update of data, exporting to CSV files, live inline editing of task information, and sorting of results. This is available in the Platinum edition of NovaMind 5.

You can access the task reports using the Task Reports button on the Task Settings inspector, or from the Window menu item.

The Task Reporting Panel

All the items on the report panel are updated live, so you can leave the panel showing while you edit your Mind Map, and the filtering, sorting, and data values will be updated live.

Here is an explanation of the filtering options:

• Complete: When checked, the report will be filtered based on the option beside it. Filtering by complete=Yes will show you any tasks which are at 100% complete. Filtering by complete=No will show you any tasks that have a percentage complete for the task (0% or more), but are less than 100% done.
• Overdue: When filtering by Overdue=Yes, you will see all the topics where there is an end date defined for the task, and the end date is after the date and time right now, and either there is no task % complete information for the topic, or the % complete is less than 100%.

  When filtering by Overdue=No, you will see all the topics where there is an end date defined for the tast, and the end date is less than or equal to the current date and time, and either there is no task % complete information for the topic, or the % complete is less than 100%.

• In Progress: When filtering by In Progress=Yes, you will see all the tasks that have a percentage complete of 0% or more, but less than 100%. Note the 0% – a task is not said to be in progress when you have no percentage complete, but where the percentage complete is set to zero, it is thought to be in progress because you have registered that you have started the task even though nothing concrete has been accomplished yet.

  When filtering by In Progress=No, you will see all the tasks that have no percentage complete, or the percentage complete is 100%. As per the above explanation, tasks with 0% complete will not be shown when filtering to show tasks that are not in progress.

• Min Priority: When filtering by minimum priority, all tasks with a priority greater than or equal to the specified priority will be shown in the report.
• Max Priority: When filtering by maximum priority, all tasks with a priority less than or equal to the specified priority will be shown in the report.
• Due to start in: When filtering by the tasks due to start in a certain number of days, only the tasks that are due to start after the date and time right now, and the specified number of days away will be shown in the report.
• Selected Resources: You can either choose to show the tasks no matter who is assigned to them, or you can select as many resources as you want to filter the results. When filtering by selected resources, only the tasks which have been assigned to the selected resources will be included in the report.

You can filter on as many of the different attributes as you like, all at the same time. Your filter settings are remembered in your preferences for all the left side filters, so you don’t need to set them all up again next time you start NovaMind, or work on a different Mind map.

Sorting results:

You can sort the results by clicking on any of the headers of the table to sort on that field. Note that we have implemented a special three state sorting where clicking on the table title will switch between sorting ascending on that column, sorting descending on that column, or not sorting at all. When you don’t sort at all, the results will be in the natural order of the Mind Map – i.e. the order that they would be numbered if they had outline numbers showing.

Results Sorted by Priority

Just a special note about the duration sorting: the sorting on the duration column works based on the actual length of time, so if you have a duration of 8 days and another duration of 1 week, the duration of 1 week would come before 8 days when sorting in ascending order.

Working with columns:

You can show and hide columns from your report by right clicking on the table to see the context menu like this:

Showing and Hiding Columns

Select one of the menu items to hide the column if it was showing, or to show it if it was hidden.

You can reorder the columns just by dragging them into the order you want them in.

You can resize the columns as desired. Note that the only column that will wrap its contents is the Topic / Task column.

Editing data:

With the exception of the actual name of the task, all the other columns are editable.

This means that you have full editing of the task information for all the displayed information.

For some data, like the priority and percentage complete, editing is in place:

Inline Editing of Task Data

For the more complex data, we need special popup editors to edit the information:

Popup Editors for editing Task Data

Editing Start Date in the Reports Panel

The same editing and value rules apply here as apply if you are editing the values in the inspector.

Note that if you have filtered your results and your edited data means that your topic no longer complies with the filter conditions, the edit will be applied, and the topic will disappear from the results. For example, if you were filtering on tasks that were complete, and you changed the percentage complete to be 95%, then it would no longer be displayed in your report.

Exporting your data:

You can export the data from your report to CSV (comma separated values). Only the data that is shown in the results table will be exported, and only the columns that you have showing at the time. The export will also honor your sort order.

CSV files can be read by many programs, including in particular spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel.

Note that the specification for CSV files is very loose, and it doesn’t even have a standardized way of representing dates, so we just export the data as it appears on your screen. Most programs that import CSV files have options for interpreting things like percentages and dates, if they need to turn them into their raw data types to work with them.

NovaMind 5 for Mac introduces many enhancements in handling of resources, including two way integration with Address Book.

Resources refer to people, equipment, facilities, or anything you may use for tasks, but in most cases, they refer to people. Resources are available in the Platinum edition of NovaMind.

To use resources on your Mind Map, you must create a pool of resources which you can assign to topics.

You can create resources in a number of different ways:

1. Click on the “+” button at the bottom of the inspector. A new empty row will be created, and you can edit the name and initials for the resource, or
2. Click on the address book button at the bottom of the inspector. A people picker will show, populated with all the people and groups you have in your address book, like this (only less blurry ):
   

   The People Picker

   You can use the search at the top to filter the records you see, and select as many of the people or groups as you would like to add, and then use the “Add Selected Groups” or “Add Selected People” to add the people you want. If you select multiple groups and some people are in more than one group, they will still only be added to your resources once, or

3. You can also drag resources directly from the Address Book application on to the resources inspector. In order to do this, you need to have the Address Book application running and visible and have NovaMind as the active application, and drag from the Address Book to the resources inspector without switching to the Address Book application (because the inspectors are set up to hide on application deactivation).
4. You can drag VCards in either from the file system or more commonly from mail messages. Note that there is no checking for uniqueness of VCard entries, or their linkage to any existing Address Book entries. Therefore, if you are likely to want to do a number of things with that resource, you would in most cases drag the VCard to Address Book, and then drag the person from the Address Book to NovaMind, to create a unique reference to the resource.

Once you have your resources there, if you have created them from Address Book addresses, you will see an address book icon beside them. If you click on the icon, the person’s record will be opened up in Address Book.

Resources, with Address Book icon

Note that when you add people from your address book, the initials are generated automatically, and there may be duplicates if you have forenames and surnames starting with the same letters. You can edit what is displayed in NovaMind without affecting your address book record, or breaking the link to the address book. Initials can be longer than two letters if you like, but the intention is that they are kept short.

You can sort your resources by name or initials, in ascending or descending order, by clicking on the table headers.

Resources are created on a document wide basis, so you can use them on multiple maps in the same document without having to create the resources again.

You can assign your resources in a number of different ways:

1. Select one or more topics, and use the check boxes to assign them to the selected topics, or
2. Select one or more resources in the inspector, and drag them to the topic you want to assign them to, or
3. Find the people (or groups) you want to assign in your Address Book application, and drag them on to the topic you want to assign them to. Note that if any of the people you drag on to the topic did not already exist in your resources, then they will both be added to your resources, and immediately assigned to the topic. If they already existed in your resources, they will just be assigned to the topic you dropped them on. If you have edited their name or initials in NovaMind, these settings will be preserved. This makes for a very powerful way to create resources and assign them directly from your address book.

When you have resources assigned to topics, you will see their initials displayed below the topic, along with any other task related information, prefixed by the letter R.

Task Resource Information on the Topics

If you do not have initials defined for a resource, the full resource name will be shown on the topic. We recommend using initials to reduce the space required.

When you mouse over the resources section of the information panel, you will see the full names of the resources as a tooltip like this:

Resources Tooltip

If you have multiple topics selected, and some of the resources are assigned to only some of the selected topics, then the checkbox will show in the indeterminate state:

Multiple Selection and Resources

In this case, Aileen and Galor are assigned to only one of the two selected topics. Checking or unchecking the boxes will affect all the selected topics.

Note that you are likely to often want to work with both task and resource settings at the same time, in which case, you would  select one of them and then Command+Click the other one in the inspector so you can see them both at once:

Selecting Multiple Inspector Panels

You can delete resources by selecting them in the resources inspector, and clicking the “-” button at the bottom of the inspector.

If you are removing resources which are assigned to any topics, you will be prompted for confirmation like this:

Deleting a Resource that is Assigned

So you can see exactly which topics that resource is assigned to. If you confirm deletion, they will be both unassigned and completely removed from your resource list.

Task information has just been added to the preview of NovaMind 5 for Mac. This article shows you what it does and teaches you how to use it.

You can put detailed information about tasks on the topics using the Task Settings of the Data inspector. This is available in the Platinum edition of NovaMind.

Task Information Inspector

The settings on the Task Settings panel affect what is shown on the Mind Map – for instance, the settings above would show like this:

Task Information Display

Priority:

• To set the priority, either adjust the slider, or enter the priority number in the text field, or in the text field you can use the up and down arrows. You can have priorities between 1 and 9.
• To make it easier to notice the differences, the different priorities are shown in different colors.
• To remove the priority indicator, move the slider all the way to the left, or enter 0 (or nothing) in the text field.

% Complete:

• The percentage complete is shown as a pie chart on the topic, with the green portion being the amount already complete, and the red portion being the amount still not complete. Percentage complete can be between 0 and 100.
• To set the percentage complete, you can either use the slider or enter a value in the text field. In the text field, you can also use the up and down arrow keys to increase or decrease the value.
• When you move your mouse over the pie chart on the Mind Map, you will see a tooltip showing you the exact percentage complete, so you can easily see the information even if you don’t have the topic selected.
• 

  Start Date Entry

• To remove the % complete indicator, either move the slider all the way to the left, or type in the number -1 in the text field, or enter a blank value in the text field (0% complete shows at an all red pie chart).

Duration:

• There are two parts to the duration: the amount and the unit. You can set the amount by either typing the amount or using the up or down arrows in the text field. Set the units using the popup button.
• At the right end of the row is a calculator. This is enabled if you have a start and end date defined, and when you click it, it will use the difference between the start and end date as the duration of the task. The duration may not be the difference between the start and end dates in all cases, for instance, where you have a task that has a start date and finish date a fortnight apart, but only 6 days of that time are actually spent on the work, you may want to record the work duration as 6 days instead of 14. When the duration is calculated, the system tries to work out the most appropriate units for the amount of time. If you want to use different units, you will have to change it manually.
• The duration is displayed as part of the information panel just below the left of the topic, after the letter D. If you are using a non-English language, and D does not mean “Duration” to you, you can see the full localized duration wording in the tooltip at that point.

Start and End date:

• The checkboxes beside the start and end date can be checked to indicate whether you want to record the start and/or end date for the topic. The start date is shown on your topic beside the letter S and the end beside the letter E.
• When you check the checkbox, today’s date will be entered into the field, with the time at 12:00 AM. The time 12:00am is used to denote there being no specific time associated with the setting, and the display on the topic will not include minutes or seconds. If you have any other time on the topic, then the time will be shown on the topic like this:

• 

  Date Selector Popup

• The order of the date components is automatically localized according to your system preferences. The date format to show the date on your topic is using the Short format as defined in your system preferences. If you mouse over a date displayed on a topic, you will see a tooltip with the full date in the Full date format style, like this:

• 

Multiple values:

It is very important when you are dealing with project data that you know about the applicability and accuracy of the information you are seeing on the user interface. If you have multiple topics selected, it is clearly impossible for us to show a slider or text field or date picker with two values at the same time, so we have always shown value for the last selected topic, but now we make it absolutely clear on the user interface that you have multiple values selected.

This is done by putting a special prompt at the top of the inspector, and a colored background behind the specific items where there are multiple values, like this:

Task Inspector with Multiple Selection

So at the top, you see the key to tell you that that shape means that there are multiple values in the selected topics. Both the selected topics have the same priority and start date, but different % complete, duration, and end dates.

The controls are still active for the items where there are multiple selections, and when you change a value for one of the settings, it will set that value for all the selected topics.

Notice also that there is a dependency for editing the end date on there being an end date specified for both the selected topics, so for the dates, if you have a date specified for all the topics, but they are different dates, then you would see the checkbox checked, and the date would be editable.

The latest release of the preview of NovaMind 5 has just had

Checkboxes are used to denote tasks where you just need a quick view of whether something is not done, partially done, or completed. Checkboxes are available in the Pro and Platinum editions of NovaMind.

Checkboxes can be added to your topics using the checkboxes pane of the Data inspector.

The Checkbox Inspector in NovaMind 5

Automatic checkboxes are automatic in two respects: they have their checked state automatically calculated based on the checked state of all of their children checkboxes, and when you manually change the checked state of an automatic checkbox, it will change the state of its automatic checkbox children topics.

Automatic checkboxes are square, so you can easily recognize them on your Mind Map.

When using automatic checkboxes a parent topic and all its children topics all have automatic checkboxes, altering the checked state of the parent will set the value of all the children to the same value as the parent, no matter what state they had before. Altering the state of the children will have the following effects:

All children unchecked: parent will be unchecked

All children checked: parent will be checked

Any other combination: parent will be in the indeterminate state

Manual checkboxes are round, and as their name suggests, they are completely independent and can be checked or unchecked at will, without affecting anything else.

When using a combination of automatic and manual checkboxes, the checked state of the manual checkboxes will still affect the state of any automatic parent checkboxes, but are themselves not affected by parent checked states, and will not affect the state of any children checkboxes.

This also has the side effect that if you have an automatic parent with at least some manual children, it can restrict the states you can get the automatic parent into. For instance, if you have an automatic parent with one automatic child and one manual unchecked child, and you click on the parent, it will check or uncheck its automatic child, but will not affect the manual checkbox, and therefore when it works out its own value, it will cycle between unchecked and indeterminate. Also, if all the children are manual, you can never directly change the state of an automatic parent – the state would always be calculated from its children.

Recommended usage: in almost all cases, the automatic checkboxes will do what you want, so unless you have a specific need for the manual ones, stick to the automatic ones.

To check or uncheck the checkboxes, or set them to be indeterminate, you can either use the radio buttons in the inspector, or just click on the checkbox in the topic itself. If you have multiple topics selected and they have different checked states, the inspector will have none of the radio buttons selected, but you can still select a value to change all the selected topics to that state.

NovaMind will shortly be introducing Link Lines to NovaMind 5…but they will be about a million times better (at a rough estimate) than NovaMind 4, or any other Mind Mapping application for that matter.

Link lines are lines that denote secondary relationships between topics. Of course, you have the hierarchical format that really defines what Mind Maps are, but often you need to show secondary relationships in some way.

In NovaMind 5, you will be able to easily create straight line links between one topic and another (or floating topics, or attached shapes, or callouts), but also you will be able to create arbitrary curves.

Here is an example of the straight lines, in this case between some floating topics:

There are two ways of creating curves. You can click on the start topic (or shape or floating topic or callout), and then click at each place you want the curve to go through, finally clicking on the topic you want to finish on, and the curve will be created.

The other way of creating a curved link line is to drag a curve from the start to finish like this:

First, you drag the curve, which looks like this:

And as soon as you have finished, the program automatically smooths it like this:

But you are not limited to just creating a curve. You have full editing capabilities. When you select the curve, you will see editing points like this:

You can drag the points around to alter the shape of the curve, or remove points, or add points as required. For those who really like to fine tune the curve, you can even access Bezier path editing points, giving the ultimate control. The path automatically resizes itself when either end is moved.

You also have control over the drawing aspects of the link line: it supports automatic coloring, theme colors, 25 different dash patterns, and 30 different types of line terminators, which can be attached to the start and end of the line.

All in all, a very flexible and powerful system. This will be available in the Windows version of NovaMind 5 within the next couple of weeks, and will be added to the Mac version a little later on.

NovaMind 5 sees the introduction of a completely new media library with new, higher resolution images. An update to the Windows version of NovaMind 5 has been released, which allows you to add background textures to the mind map canvas as well as to topics and boundaries.

Along with the updated software NovaMind released a significant update to the media library, which adds over 70 new images.

Just changing the background texture image for a mind map can change the whole look of the mind map.

One of the key things about NovaMind is the automatic coloring of the text – as you can see, the text is automatically changed to be white on a dark background and black on a light background. This feature is unique to NovaMind, and makes it easier to create great looking Mind Maps.

Here are some examples (click to expand):

Note that you can get even more interesting effects by adjusting the translucency of the texture and having different canvas fill colors showing through.

We recently introduced advanced outline numbering features to the Pro and Platinum editions of NovaMind 5 for Windows (and also coming to the preview of NovaMind for Mac next week, but this tutorial is about the Windows version).

To access the new features, click on the down arrow on the bottom half of the Numbering button on the Format tab, and select Advanced Settings…

You will see a dialog that looks like this:

Numbering Basics

Before we go on to the advanced numbering, let’s just cover the standard numbering first. Outline numbering always sets the outline numbering for its sub-topics – not itself, and this concept applies to the formatting as well as the settings for the number of levels. So here are the specific settings:

As with all “Default” settings, this will use whatever the setting is in the theme.

There are two situations where you would want to use the Numbering Off setting, and those are: if the theme sets numbering on but you don’t want numbering, or if a parent topic sets numbering on for your sub-topics, but you don’t want your sub-topics to have outline numbering.

The Numbering Depth is the number of levels of sub-topics which will be numbered by this setting.

The Restart Numbering option is useful if your parent topic sets your numbering format, but you want to restart the numbering at 1 for your immediate subtopics. For instance, if your number was 1.1 and your first subtopic was 1.1.1 but you just wanted it to be 1 (and it’s subtopics 1.1 etc), then you would use the Restart Numbering option.

If on a child topic you just increase the number of levels, then the sub-topics will continue the number of levels you have set. For example, if your parent’s parent topic set two levels of numbering, your number would be of the format 1.1. Now, if you set your number of levels to 2 as well, then it would extend the numbering for your subtopics down two more levels, so they would be of the format 1.1.1 and 1.1.1.1, but if you has siblings that didn’t have this setting, they wouldn’t have numbering on their descendant topics.

This gives you a massive amount of flexibility with the numbering, but we have taken it even further by allowing the ultimate flexibility in outline number format.

Advanced Outline Number Formatting

The bit we’re interested in is the child numbering format. When you click on the + button, it will add a row to the formatting for the children. You can add as many rows as you like to set the formatting of the children topics down as many levels as you like.

The formatting options for the advanced outline numbering are more powerful than those of any other Mind Mapping software, and give you massive flexibility.

For ordinary formatting, you would not use a prefix or suffix, but would just be changing the number format and possibly separator, depending on your needs, but let’s do some “Extreme Number Formatting“!

Let’s say we wanted to have the outline numbers formatted so they said something like

“Section 2, part 3 (iv) e.6″

(where 2, 3, iv, e, and 6 are the numbers at different levels). You would do this by setting the numbering up as follows:

Let’s just break this down. The top row is a preview of how the formatting will look when used. Below that are the actual formats. Each format has four components:

1. Prefix: This text comes before your outline number at that level. Note that there is no space between the prefix and the number, so you will need to add a space after it. In our case, we did want a space, so we added the word “Section ” (with a space after it) for the first row.
2. Number Format: This gives you options for the type of number – numbers, upper or lower case letters or Roman numerals.
3. Suffix: what you want to come after the number – again, if you want spaces before or after the suffix, you will need to type them.
4. Separator: this is the punctuation you want between this number and the next level down, and it is only shown if there is a next level below that topic.

Just a couple of notes about the formatting above: on the second and third level, we didn’t want to have a separator, so we chose the (no separator) option from the menu. On the third level, we wanted to have a space between the previous numbering and our open parenthesis, so we typed ” (“. The fourth level required a space before the letter, so we just typed a space in the prefix, and the last formatting level is just standard formatting with no prefix or suffix.

The formatting is updated live on your Mind Map, so you can see the changes immediately as you are editing. Have fun!

In the latest pre-release of NovaMind 5 for Mac, a new download management system was added, allowing the program to schedule multiple downloads to run concurrently, with error recovery in case of failed downloads.

NovaMind 5 Download Manager

The download system automatically notifies interested parties of the completion of the downloads, as well as managing the scheduling to avoid communication bottlenecks, and automatically disappears when all the downloads have completed.

This system is already being used by the Media Library Manager, and will help with the installation process of other components such as the Suggesterator and various other plugins when they become available.

Along with the release of the Media Browser, NovaMind also introduced a media library manager. The purpose of the media library manager is to allow the installation and maintenance of multiple media libraries within NovaMind. When you initially access the media browser, there are no media libraries installed, and the media browser appears like this:

Media Library before loading any library packages

Clicking on the Library Manager button allows you to see the available media libraries like this:

Initial display of Media Library Manager

In this screen shot, there is just one library installed, but in time, more libraries will be added. You can click on the Install button to download and install the new library, and the media browser will automatically be updated.

When updates to existing libraries are released, you will be automatically notified the next time you start NovaMind with a message like this:

Library Update Available

And you can update your installation direct from the media manager.

When new libraries become available, you will be notified about them automatically like this:

New Media Library Available

…and again, the new library can be installed using the Media Library Manager.

The media library manager makes it easy to see what you have installed, when new or updated libraries are available, and automates the whole process of installing the new media libraries.

In another significant update to the preview of NovaMind 5 for Mac, a new Media Browser system has just been added. The media browser has a multitude of features including:

• Easy access to images, adornments, and background textures.
• Ability to set up favorite images, adornments and background textures for quick access.
• Automatic creation and maintenance of a list of recently used images for quick access to those images again. If an image is used again, it is put back at the top of the list.
• Ability to view the images as a collection of images with tooltips telling you the categories and keywords used for each image.
• Ability to view the images in a combo view showing the image with its category and keyword information beside it.
• Automatic actions based on the type of image you are dropping on to the Mind Map, and where you are dropping it.
• Ability to drag and drop multiple adornments at once.
• Filter the image list by multiple categories.
• Instantly search for images by keyword prefix.
• Incremental loading and unloading of images for quick access and low memory requirements.
• Easy access to iPhoto libraries from within NovaMind.
• Access to Flickr® images and ability to set up Flickr searches.
• Ability to drag and drop extra folders into the library for easy access to images in other locations.
• Currently experimental access to Lightroom and Aperture image libraries.
• Currently experimental access to images acquired through Image Capture interfaces (e.g. from iPhones and cameras).
• Easy access to your browser’s bookmarks for Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb, and any other browsers supporting the XBEL standard.
• Ability to access any of the libraries directly by menu command.
• Toolbar access to the media library.
• Ability to move through All Images, Favorites, and Recently Used images using either a table view for visibility or popup button for space saving.
• Significantly higher resolution adornments shown at a bigger size than previous versions of NovaMind, giving a much better experience when zooming in or printing.

Please see below for an image gallery showing some of the new features.

Using with the image groups expanded

Using with the image groups as a popup menu

Showing images in combo view with categories and keywords

Background Textures

Setting up Flickr Searches

Filtering by Category

As part of the latest update for NovaMind 5 for Mac public preview, a set of new toolbar options have been added, like this:

The first item on the toolbar is a menu allowing you to add topics, callouts, floating topics, and shapes to the Mind Map. Here is more detail on the menu, and some of the other main items:

The second item on the toolbar is a topic you can drag on to place either as a floating topic, or attached anywhere on your Mind Map. Then there is access to the theme selector, color set selector and editor, and font set selector and editor. Then there are items for adding hyperlinks and attachments to your Mind Map (attachments are not available in the express version of NovaMind).

Also in the toolbar are options for displaying and hiding the notes, outline view, and inspectors.

NovaMind 5 for Mac is currently in preview release, and although it has most of the functionality of the final application, it has not yet been debugged or had any performance tuning done on it. The preview can be downloaded from the NovaMind web site.

Font sets make it easy to create Mind Maps that are consistent and use the same fonts for the same type of element throughout the Mind Map. As with color sets and themes, the settings are used as the default values, but can be overridden at any point on the Mind Map. Changing the font set updates the fonts on the entire Mind Map, wherever the existing topics are using standard fonts.

It is strongly recommended that you use fonts from the font set in your Mind Maps so that you can change to different font sets in a consistent manner should you wish to update the look of your Mind Map.

Note that the names of the fonts is for reference only, and different themes may use the fonts for different purposes, however, if you are creating a theme, it is strongly suggested that you stick with the named uses of the fonts, for the sake of consistency when applying different fonts.

Note also that the font information stored is purely the font face, and the theme defines the size and styling (bold, italic, underline etc.) that is used.

As with color sets, there is a collection of standard font sets, and (if you have NovaMind Pro or Platinum) you can create your own font sets and save them for later use. The default font set is drawn directly from the theme, and will therefore change when you change themes. The font set used in the theme should be chosen so that it goes well with the styling of the Mind Map that is applied along with the theme.

To work with font sets, choose the Format / Change Font Set… menu option, and you will see a list of fonts sets like this:

Note that the Express edition of NovaMind does not have the ability to use your own custom font sets, so the editing column will not be shown, and the button to add new custom font sets will not appear.

The first column shows an arrow indicator to show the selected font set. The second column shows a (-) button for items that you can hide and an (X) icon for items that you can delete. The standard built in font sets can only be hidden, but not deleted, whereas your custom font sets can be deleted but not just hidden. The default theme can not be removed at all, and can change when you select a new theme. The third column shows a pencil icon for font sets you can edit (your custom font sets). The fourth column shows the name of the font set.

To the right of the table is a preview of the selected font set, so you can see exactly what will happen to the fonts when you apply the font set.

If you have hidden some of the standard font sets, there will be a button to show them again.

To select a font set, you can use the keyboard: arrow keys to select the desired font set, and Return to apply it (or cancel to close the sheet without changing the font set), or you can use the mouse – just double-click on the one you want to use. When you apply a color set to the Mind Map, it is updated, and the font set information is written into the NovaMind file, so if you open the file on another computer which doesn’t have that font set, you will still be able to use it.

To add a new font set, click the (+) button at the bottom of the table. NOTE: when you click the button, it will use the selected font set as a starting point for your new one. This makes it easy to create variations of existing color sets that better suit your needs.

The dialog for editing an existing font set, or adding a new one is the same, and looks like this:

When you click the Set… button beside one of the fonts, it will associate the font panel with that particular topic, so that any changes you make to the selected font in the font panel will change the preview of the creatures.

A Note About Font Matching

If a file is created on one machine, and opened on another, or if fonts have been removed or disabled from your computer, you could run into situations where a font used in the file could not be found when you open the file. This is even more likely if you are opening a file on Mac that was created on Windows, or vice versa.

Unfortunately there is no mechanism to find a font that resembles a description of a font, or any other way of having a standardized fallback mechanism, so we have written our own.

If the font was set on a Mac, we attempt to find a matching font by using 7 different algorithms based on exact and likeness matching of font names, ensuring that if we do find a matching font, it’s the closest match possible on that system.

If there is still no match, then we start with one of the standard fonts, and apply all the characteristics that we were able to deduce from the original font information, and use the converted font.

If the original file was created on Windows, the font information will relate to Windows fonts. The Windows font information is not nearly as rich as Mac font information, so we go through a series of matching algorithms based on the information we do have available, and do our best to return the same font, if it is available on the Mac, or at least the closest match we can find.

Color sets make it easy to create Mind Maps that are consistent and look great. A color set is a collection of colors designed to go well together, and cover the different types of elements that you have in your Mind Maps.

Each theme has its own default color set, that is designed to look good with the layout of the theme, but if you want to select a different color set, it will change all the topics and other elements that are using the default colors to use the new colors from the color set you select.

It is strongly recommended that wherever possible, you stick with the standard colors from the color set, so that if you want to change the look of your entire Mind Map coloring, all you need to do is to select a different color set. When you use colors from the color set, it is stored as a reference to that position in the color set, so if you change to a different color set, the color used will be from the same location in the newly selected color set.

To work with the color sets, use the Format / Change Color Set… menu option. It will display a window looking like this:

Note that the Express edition of NovaMind does not have the ability to use your own custom color sets, so the editing column will not be shown, and the button to add new custom color sets will not appear.

The first column shows an arrow indicator to show the selected color set. The second column shows a (-) button for items that you can hide and an (X) icon for items that you can delete. The standard built in color sets can only be hidden, but not deleted, whereas your custom color sets can be deleted but not just hidden. The default theme can not be removed at all, and can change when you select a new theme. The third column shows a pencil icon for color sets you can edit (your custom color sets).

The other columns show the base colors and the name of the color set. The order of the color sets is the default one first, then the standard ones, then your custom color sets.

To the right of the table is a preview of the selected color set with all the variations of the colors that will be used when you apply the color set.

If you have hidden some of the standard color sets, there will be a button to show them again.

To select a color set, you can use the keyboard: arrow keys to select the desired color set, and Return to apply it (or cancel to close the sheet without changing the color set), or you can use the mouse – just double-click on the one you want to use. When you apply a color set to the Mind Map, it is updated, and the color set information is written into the file, so if you open the file on another computer which doesn’t have that color set, you will still be able to use it.

To add a new color set, click the (+) button at the bottom of the table. NOTE: when you click the button, it will use the selected color set as a starting point for your new one. This makes it easy to use the best points of a color set you like, and tweak it to suit your needs.

The dialog for editing an existing color set, or adding a new one is the same, and looks like this:

The instructions on the screen explain the normal uses of the different colors. Just a few tips: all the color wells are themed color wells, so if you want to use any colors in the currently selected color set, you can click in the lower right corner of the well and select a color or variation from the existing color set. Also, if you see some colors on existing color sets you want to use, you can use move the panel out of the way to see all the rest of the color sets, and select from the existing colors using the color picker from the color panel.