NovaMind 5 for Mac is built from the ground up for Mac. You won’t find any reworked Windows user interfaces here. The inspiration for the user interface in NovaMind 5 is taken from some of the best Mac applications out there, the Apple user interface guidelines, and some of Apple’s own applications. In this way, the user interface is logical, easy to learn and use, and very similar to other applications you probably use on a day to day basis.

Familiar Toolbars and Inspectors

The toolbars and inspectors are modelled after other popular Mac applications, so you’ll feel at home straight away. You can show and hide individual inspectors, connect inspectors together or split them apart, and show multiple panels in a single inspector when you need to.

Customizable Window Layout

Position your sidebar to the left or right of the window; position your notes in the sidebar or below the Mind Map. This flexibility allows you to work the way that suits you best. You can collapse the panels you are not using at the time, giving you an uncluttered workspace to get your tasks done, and later restore them to their previous positions.

Hotkeys

The hotkeys for adding the different types of topics are all grouped together to be easy to access without having to hunt all over the keyboard. Hotkeys make it easy to switch between editing the text on the topic and editing the topic notes, expanding the notes panel if required, so that you can create the content of your entire Mind Map without leaving the keyboard.

All the major functions of NovaMind are represented in the menu system, and are assigned hotkeys that are consistent with other mainstream applications, and the fact that they are in the menu system also means that you can use the system preferences to change the hotkeys if you want to.

Printing

NovaMind makes full use of the MacOS X printing capabilities, and gives you a single panel which is able to set up printing of the Mind Map or the outline, with a complete live-updated paginated preview image showing you the contents of all the pages as they will be printed in a single view. NovaMind even tells you the minimum size that the text will be when your Mind Map is scaled to the selected size, so you can make informed decisions about how many pages you want it printed on.

You can print the document without the background color and textures, and NovaMind will automatically update any automatic colored text to ensure legibility. Also you can print the Mind Map without the text on the topics, for use as handouts for note taking, and for memorization of information.

You can define the headers and footers for left, center and right to be either used on a per-page basis or for the whole document. You can insert replaceable tokens for things such as file names, page numbers, dates etc. The header and footer can also each contain an image. You can save and load print settings so as to reuse those print settings on different documents.

Media Library

The Media library is designed based on the Apple media browsers, but extending those concepts to include better filtering, recording of recently used and favorite images, and access to iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom libraries directly from within NovaMind. It also has the capability for you to add your own folders of images, and do searches on Flickr and drag the images directly into your documents.

Imports & Exports

NovaMind works with a wide range of cross platform and Mac only applications, including importing from iMindMap, XMind, FreeMind, MindNode, SimpleMind, OmniOutliner, OPML and text files.

Integration with Other Applications

Sync with iCal

NovaMind allows you to synchronize your checkboxes with to-do items in iCal, and your task information with iCal events.

The syncing can be one way or two way depending on your needs, and you can choose which calendar a task should go on. You can then use iCal calendar sharing, alarms and the other features of iCal to further manage your tasks.

Address Book Integration

You can open up an address book browser directly within NovaMind and drag and drop addresses or groups to use as resources on your Mind Maps in NovaMind 5 Platinum, or open the address book and drag individual addresses or groups on to NovaMind to add resources.

Web Browser Integration

You can drag and drop URLs directly from your web browser to create hyperlinks, or use bookmarked links directly from the NovaMind media browser.

Mail Integration

As well as being able to create hyperlinks to files and URLs, you can drag messages from Mail to NovaMind to create hyperlinks directly to those mail messages.

Automatic Application Detection for Attachments

The new Attachment feature allows you to attach any file to become part of your NovaMind document. When opening attachments, NovaMind uses the Mac OS X services to determine the preferred application for opening your attachments, and makes that directly available as a hyperlink on the attachment text, but it also works out what other applications can open that type of file, allowing you easy access to open the files in whichever application you want to use at the time.

Help at your fingertips

NovaMind 5 comes with built in help, as well as tool tips on just about all the items in the inspectors and toolbars, so that you have the information at your fingertips, and there is easy access to comprehensive online video tutorials.

Full Outlining Support

NovaMind 5 includes full outline editing support including grouping, ungrouping, moving left, moving right, indenting, outdenting, and moving up and down, all with full keyboard editing support. The keyboard shortcuts are borrowed from other leading outlining programs so there is no learning curve for people familiar with using outliners.

The text in the outline view uses the same fonts as are used on the topics, so you can see the meanings conveyed through the fonts, bold, underline, strikethrough, and italic settings. These attributes are preserved when editing in the outline view.

You can alter the size the outline view text is drawn in the preferences so that it is readable. The text automatically wraps to multiple lines where necessary and resizes the outline view rows as required to accommodate the text.

You can show or hide outline view columns showing topic types and notes indicators, and reorder your columns to suit your needs.

Redesigned Tab Bar

The new tab bar for multiple Mind Maps allows you to add a new Mind Map by simply double-clicking in an empty space on the toolbar, and if you have so many Mind Maps in your document that they will not all fit on the tab bar, it automatically adds arrows to go to other Mind Maps, and an overflow menu which also shows which Mind Maps are currently visible, so that you can always access any Mind Map no matter how many you have in the document.

More Information

For further information about NovaMind 5, please see the overview of NovaMind 5 and the NovaMind 5 features page.