We are very happy to announce the immediate availability of NovaMind 5.7. If you have NovaMind installed already, it should come through on the automatic update system, or you can download from the NovaMind web site.

About FlexiTopics

The NovaMind FlexiTopics allow you unparalleled flexibility in shaping your topics, while ensuring that the topics don’t overlap each other. FlexiTopics can be used alongside any other topic type to create great organic looking Mind Maps. Let’s look at some of the powerful features of the FlexiTopics:

Automatically flexible

When you select topics and convert them to be FlexiTopics, NovaMind automatically curves them nicely, so that even without editing the curves at all, you have a great looking effect.

In the Mind Map below, we took a document that had all standard topics and simply selected them and changed them to FlexiTopics. Here is the result:

Remember, we did absolutely no editing of the topic shapes to get them looking like this – just changed them to FlexiTopics.

As flexible as you like.

The NovaMind flexible topics allow you to curve the topics as much as you want.

When you add a FlexiTopic or change a different topic type into a FlexiTopic, it adds some automatic control points which you see when you select the topic like this:

You can either click and drag those control points, or click on the line and drag to add as many control points as you like, like this:

Notice how the layout system automatically ensures the other topics are positioned as closely as possible to the topic, so there is no wasted space (unless you have moved topics to where you want them).

For advanced users, you can even select a control point and edit its formatting handles to further adjust the shape of the curve like this:

You can right-click a control point to show the context menu. If you have fine-tuned the shape, you will have the option to smooth the point. You will also have the option to return the topic to be the automatic shape.

Automatic length adjustment.

No matter what shape your FlexiTopic is, as you type, it will adjust the length to accommodate your text, while preserving the overall shape, up to a point where the topic would be too long, where it will start wrapping the text. Even in rather extreme cases like the one below, you can see that the shape is preserved without you having to manually adjust it all the time:

We started on the left with a very short, curved topic, and just typed text. NovaMind expands the topic sensibly, and moves other topics out of the way as necessary while you type.

Multi-line text wrapping.

While we would not recommend having a lot of text on topics, if you do have text on the topic that would be longer than the length of your FlexiTopic, NovaMind will automatically wrap the text to fit the space available on the topic.

Also, if you manually insert line or paragraph breaks in the text (Shift+Enter / Control+Enter), then NovaMind will curve the text to the shape of the topic.

Checkboxes, Task information, and Adornments along the curve.

As you can see from the image below, you can add checkboxes (NovaMind Pro and Platinum), task priority and percent complete, and other task information (NovaMind Platinum), and adornment images.

These images are all positioned and angled along the curve as part of the topic.

Formatting options, and International language support

As you can see from this image, there are lots of formatting options available. At the top, you can see a topic with right aligned text, then a topic with a shadow, one with a dashed line and multiple fonts on the topic. NovaMind also fully supports international languages including right-to-left languages on the FlexiTopics.

To our Mac users: This is not yet available on the Mac and we don’t have an ETA for this on the Mac yet but we will implement this on the Mac as well. Our Mac team has been very busy rewriting most of our data layer to crush some of the instability issues that have been affecting some users on the Mac.

Summary

As you can see, NovaMind has again raised the bar in Mind Mapping, with most of the features of FlexiTopics not being available in any other Mind Mapping product. We hope you enjoy using the FlexiTopics, and we look forward to receiving your feedback.

Note that there are lots of other things in this release like a format painter, color set and font set editing, new themes, favorite and default themes, and the full theme editor…