Getting started with NovaMind 5

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A transcript of the video follows:

Hi, I’m Gideon King, founder of NovaMind, and in this video, I’d like to help you to get started using NovaMind 5 for Mac.

We make it really easy to get started, because when NovaMind starts up, your first Mind Map is already created and the title selected, so all you need to do is to start typing.

When you have put in your text, just press Return to finish editing.

To add a sub-topic, press Command+Return. To add a new topic as a sibling of the topic you have selected, press Return. So to add a whole lot of topics, you would type your text, press Return to finish editing, then press Return again to create the next topic, and so on. To add a sibling above the selected topic, press Shift+Return.

Another quick way to add topics is to use the drag topic from the toolbar. Drag it close to the Mind Map, and you will see where it will connect. Drop it there to create the new topic. If you drop the topic on the canvas away from the Mind Map, you will see that there is no connection and it will be created as a floating topic.

When you add anything to a Mind Map, the colors, fonts, and styling of the object are defined by the theme you are using at the time. If you want to change the overall look of the Mind Map, you can select a different theme. If you have changed any formatting to be different to what is used in the theme, then your custom formatting will be honored when you change themes. Wherever you see an option to reset the formatting to the default, it will remove the custom setting you have applied and revert to whatever the theme defines for the selected item.

You can change the overall coloring of the Mind Map by selecting a different color set. Any colors that are set using the themed colors will be changed to their equivalent in the new color set, ensuring that the colors still go well together and have the same relative intensity.

You can alter the layout of the Mind Map by selecting a topic that you want to lay out the children of, and choosing a layout option. Quite often you will want to use the radial layout for the first level topics and linear layout for the subtopics, which is the way it is set up in most themes, but it’s up to you – the layout settings can be changed individually on any topic.

You can set the angle that the subtopics are laid out at using the angle control. If you click on one of the quadrants, it will rotate the axes to be either vertical or horizontal in that direction, but if you want it to be laid out at another angle, just drag it to be the angle you want. To help you to get different angles lined up, if you hold the shift key while using the angle control, it will alter the angle to 15 degree increments.

In most cases, the automatic layout of the topics should be everything you require, but occasionally you may want to move a topic to a specific location. To do this, just mouse over the topic and you will see both the graft and move controls. To move the topic to another place, drag it using the move icon with the four arrows on it. To put it back into its automatically laid out position, use the Reset Location option. If you want to move all the subtopics of a topic back to their default locations, use the Arrange Sub-topics option.

You can use the Automatic Coloring to make your subtopics look good. Just select the option you want, and any subtopics that don’t have their coloring manually set will use the automatically calculated color. This allows you to make interesting looking, colorful Mind Maps with a minimum of effort.

If you want to alter the look of topics, you have lots of options available for fill, lines, effects, and topic shapes. When setting the colors, we recommend you stick with the themed colors where possible so you can change to a different color set, and it will still look good. To select themed colors, click on the lower right corner of the colorwell, or use the themed colors from the color panel. If you are using a themed color, the triangle at the lower right corner of the colorwell will be black. If you are using some other color, the triangle will be red.

To make the topics look more interesting, you can either drag on images directly from the finder, or a web browser, or iPhoto, or you can use the built in media library.

We do provide a a huge number of images for you to use from within the NovaMind media library, and we will be adding to the number of libraries available for download over time, but to get started, you should download the Initial Library. This contains over 3,000 images and is therefore quite a large file, and will probably take a few minutes to download, but once you have started the download, you can carry on your Mind Mapping, while it completes the download and installs itself in the background.

You will see that there are three categories of images: the Image library, Adornments and Textures. The adornments are special images that will automatically go on the left end of the topic, and are used as a visual indicator of a particular meaning. You can have as many adornments on a topic as you like – just drag them on, and you can drag them to reorder them. To remove an adornment, just drag it off the topic.

The Images can be dragged on to the topics, and you can have up to four images on each topic. Just drag an image on and drop it in the quadrant you want it. Note that there is an additional option at the top left to add the image as a shape, which is attached to the topic, but not actually part of the topic. You can also select the centre of the topic to add the image as a texture image which is tiled over the background of the topic.

The Textures are images that are designed to tile well. You can drag them onto topics as with any other image, or you can drag them onto the canvas or onto a boundary to instantly add them as textures there. If you want to add any other image as a texture on a boundary or the Mind Map canvas, hold the shift key while dropping it. In many cases, you will want to decrease the opacity of the image to give a nicer, mort subtle effect.

As you build your Mind Map, you are bound to need to graft topics from one place on the Mind Map to another. To do this, drag the topic by its graft handle. If you have multiple topics selected, they will all be grafted in the graft operation. The indicator will show you where the topics will be attached when you drop them, so you can easily see what the effect will be. If you want to create a copy of the topics, you can hold the Option key down while you drag the topics. You also have cut, copy, and paste available if you prefer that method of working with your topics.

When you create topics on a radial topic (such as the Mind Map title) the first five topics will be placed on the right side. The 6th topic you create on a radial topic will be placed on the left side. After the first topic has been placed on the left side and you hit Return on any topic to create a sibling, the new topic will be added on the same side as the topic you had selected at the time. If you want to create a topic on a specific side you can either select a topic that is already on that side and hit Return, or create a topic and then graft the topic to the correct side.

You can always use the graft feature to place a topic on the other side or change the order of the topics, even if you have fewer than 6 topics.

The Mind Map title and any floating topics use a radial layout by default but you can also set the layout mode to Radial on any topic or callout. The first time you switch to Radial the topics are automatically balanced but when you switch between Linear and Radial afterwards we will remember on which sides topics were previously.

Moving a topic will not automatically cause a topic to switch sides because moving only changes the visual position of a topic but will not change the structure of a mind map or change the growth direction of its sub-topics. To change the structure of the Mind Map so that a topic is on the other side of the radial layout, you need to use the graft option. This gives you a lot of flexibility in the way the subtopics are laid out in relation to their parents.

You can resize your topics by dragging the resize handles. Once you have resized a topic, you will see lock icons that indicate that you have locked their size and are not using the automatic sizing for the topic any more. If you want to revert to automatic sizing, click the lock icon.

Often you will need to add more information than you would have just with the keywords on the topics, and this is done using the topic notes. You enter the notes by selecting a single topic on the Map and displaying the notes panel.

With this basic information, you have everything you need to create your Mind Maps, but of course there are a lot of powerful features and options that we have not touched on in this overview. For in depth information on these topics, we will be continuing to create detailed tutorial videos about each aspect of the program, and there is a wealth of information in the NovaMind help documentation.