We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of a beta version of NovaMind 5.4 for Mac, which includes the much anticipated Presenter functions in the Platinum edition.

Presenter features at a glance

• Smooth animations to expand and collapse topics and pan to show the required topics, so that your audience understands the context.
• Start with a good impression: NovaMind can show a subtly animated slide before you start your presentation, which can include a title, subtitle, scrolling words and phrases of your choosing, the time, and you can even even hook into Twitter and feed live related tweets.
• Easy slide creation: just select the topics you want to use to define your slide, and make sure any subtopics you want hidden are collapsed, and a single click creates your slide. You can also set the amount you want to zoom in when the slide is presented.
• Slides automatically update as you edit your Mind Map, so you don’t need to manually manage them.
• Preview your slides outside the presenter. To assist with preparing your presentation, you can preview your slides outside the presenter, showing the topics that were used to define the slide.
• Easy slide management: drag and drop reordering and copying of slides make it easy to manage your presentation. It’s just a single click to exclude or include slides from your presentation.
• Highlight topics during your presentation: if you need to draw attention to a particular topic, or several topics during your presentation, you can just double click on topics to highlight them.
• Zoom, pan, expand and collapse during your presentation: even though the slides you define will normally be what you want to show, occasionally, you may need to show or hide topics or zoom for best effect. These options are all available within the presenter.
• Draw on the screen: you can use the mouse to draw colored lines on the screen to further illustrate your presentation. You can manually delete individual lines or all the lines, and NovaMind will automatically clear them when you go on to the next slide, or select a different topic in the walkthrough mode.
• Edit during your presentation: you can switch to edit mode while still in the presenter, and edit your Mind Maps, including editing your slides, and then switch back to either the slide presenter or walkthrough.
• Jump to a particular point in the presentation: you can show a slide selector to choose the slide you want to jump to in the presentation.
• Hide the presentation: if you need your audience to focus on you or something else, you can with a single keystroke cover the presentation with either a white or black screen.
• Present either in Full Screen or Window: You can present using full screen mode where you just need one thing on the screen at a time, but for webinars and video creation etc, you are likely to find the capability to present within your current window useful.
• Access hyperlinks and attached files while still in the Presenter: they will open in their native applications, and when you are finished, you can return to NovaMind and continue your presentation from where you left off.
• Ad-hoc presentations: you can use the Walkthrough mode to present your Mind Map without having to define any slides. There are options that take you right from automatic expansion and collapsing of topics, back to manual selection, and presenting just the expanded topics etc.
• Thorough control over the presentation and walkthrough using the Apple remote, including presentation navigation, walkthrough predefined topic selection and ad-hoc selection, zooming in and out, slide selection, and presentation mode selection.

Full documentation for the Presenter is included below – please scroll down…

System Requirements

You must be running MacOS X 10.6.4 or later. We recommend MacOS X 10.7 or later for the best results.

The presenter is only available in the Platinum edition of NovaMind, and you must have a Platinum license key (i.e. *not* an Apple App Store copy) to participate in the beta testing.

How do I get it?

You can download it from here: http://downloads.novamind.com/novamind5/mac/NovaMind540b6.dmg

Beta FAQ

Q: I’m scared of beta releases – will I get automatically notified when this is released?
A: Yes, it will be released through the normal update channels. You will not be bothered with notifications about updated beta releases.

Q: Why are you doing this beta thing instead of just releasing the software already?
A: This is a major update to the software, and affects a lot of the internals of the application in addition to just adding the new features. While we have done our best to test these new features internally, the nature of the changes mean that we need to make sure it runs properly on all hardware variations, and that we haven’t missed any significant bugs before doing a full release. This way, people can decide whether they are interested in working with the beta, or just want to wait for the final release.

Q: When will v5.4.0 final release be ready?
A: When it’s ready We can not predict how long the beta program will take, but we are keen to get it completed ASAP so we can move on to the next set of enhancements. The is still quite a bit of tidy up work to be done to complete this ready for release, so there will likely be a few beta updates along the way

Q: Will I automatically be notified of updated beta releases?

A: Yes, once you have a beta release installed, NovaMind will automatically notify you of updated beta releases, and when the final release is available. Please keep up to date with the beta releases so that any feedback you give is relevant, and not relating to things that have already been dealt with.

Q: I purchased NovaMind through the Mac App Store – can I be part of the beta program?
A: When you purchase through the Mac App Store, you do not receive a license key, so if you download NovaMind, it will run in 30 day trial mode, and then as a viewer only.

Q: Will this replace my copy of NovaMind that I already have installed?
A: Yes, if you purchased directly from us (as opposed to from the Mac App Store), and drag it to your applications folder. If you do not want to replace your current copy of NovaMind, you can put it in a different folder. If you purchased from the Mac App Store, the application name is different in your Applications folder, so installing this beta would not replace it.

Q: If I replace my copy of NovaMind, but then find an issue that means that I need to go back to the released version, how do I do that?
A: You would just download the latest release from the NovaMind web site (just click on the big Download button) and replace the beta with the one you download.

Q: Can I run both the older released version of NovaMind and the beta version at the same time?
A: No. You can have them both installed at the same time, but if you want to switch between one and the other, please quit one before starting the other. If you don’t do this, NovaMind could get confused about autosave and which documents are open.

Q: What do I do if I find a problem in the beta?
A: Use the normal options – either using the Send Feedback, Report a Defect menu items, or the crash reporter. Please ensure that your email address is correct in the error reporter so we can contact you if we need further information. Please make sure you are up to date with the latest beta – we fix lots of issues between beta releases.

Q: I’m waiting for feature “X” to be implemented, when will it be available?
A: We do not comment about unreleased features and when they may be available. We are working very hard to improve NovaMind as quickly as possible, and the latest enhancements are a huge step towards our upcoming enhancements that we are working on. They give us a much better framework to work on both now and in the future.

Q: What if I have other questions about the beta?
A: Please send your queries to support@novamind.com

We hope you enjoy the updates we have included in this release of NovaMind.

NovaMind 5 for Mac Presenter Documentation

The NovaMind Presenter is a very powerful presentation system built right in to NovaMind, allowing you to predefine how you would like your Mind Map to look using "slides", and present the slides either as a full screen presentation, or in the current window. It also allows you to do a walkthrough presentation without having to define any slides, which allows you to present the entire Mind Map in order in a standardized way. There is also a built in capability to edit your Mind Map during the presentation without having to drop out of the presenter mode.

Creating Slides:

To create slides, select the topics you want to define your slide, and then either use the menu item Presenter / Create slide from selection, or if you are showing the presentation slides panel, you can click the + button at the bottom left of the window. You can show the slides panel by dragging its divider from the left of the window, or by using the Slides icon in the toolbar, or by using the option in the View menu.

It is important to understand what will be included in the slide: the selected topics will always be shown during the presentation. Also any visible subtopics will be shown.

If you add new subtopics to your topics on which your presentation slide was based, they will also automatically be included in the slide when it is presented.

The presentation slide also remembers all of the collapsed topics on the Mind Map, and ensure that those topics are collapsed when you run the presentation. Therefore, if you want to progressively reveal information in your presentation, you would create a slide with the subtopics collapsed, and another with them expanded.

If you delete topics that you have used to define your presentation slides, they will be removed from the slide definition automatically, and if you delete all the topics that were used to define the slide, the slide itself will automatically disappear.

When you are editing your Mind Map, any affected slides will update themselves to show a preview of the slide. These updates happen in the background and should not slow down your editing, but if you find the updates distracting, you can hide the slides panel, and the slides will not be updated again until you show the panel.

Your slides can be defined based on topics in multiple Mind Maps, and the presenter will switch Mind Maps as required during the presentation.

These mechanisms give you a lot of flexibility to create slides, and continue editing your Mind Map.

Editing Slides

As described above, the slides automatically take into account the addition and removal of topics, but you can also use the slide inspector to change how the slides are presented:

The first option is to hide the slide. If you choose this option, you will see that a diagonal line will be drawn through the slide preview, and when you go to give the presentation, that slide will not be included.

The other option is how much to zoom in when showing the slide: close up will fill the entire screen with the topics included in the slide. Normal will leave a reasonable amount of space around the slide so you can see the context. Far leaves a lot of room around the topics so you can see the bigger picture.

Each of these zoom modes has its limits of zooming in or out (except that close up will zoom in as far as necessary to fill the screen), to ensure that the presentation is legible and looks good.

When you add a new slide, it is automatically selected so that the inspector is inspecting that slide, but you can select the slide you want to work with in the slides panel, or even select multiple slides at once and change their settings.

Reordering, Copying, and Deleting Slides

You can reorder slides by dragging them to their new location in the presentation. You can select multiple slides at once using Shift+Click or Command+Click as appropriate.

If you hold down the Option key while dragging the slides, they will be copied instead of moved.

Slides are automatically deleted when the topics on which they are based are deleted, but you can also delete them either by selecting them in the slide inspector and pressing Delete, or the "-" button at the bottom of the slides panel.

Previewing Slides

To preview how a slide will look, double-click on it in the slides panel. This will show the slide in the Mind Map panel without you needing to go into the presenter. When you do this, it will also briefly highlight the topics that were used when defining the slide, so you can understand what is included. The slide will be shown the same way as it would be during a presentation, with the exception that during the preview of Close Up slides, it will only zoom in to a maximum of 500%.

Configuring the Presentation

There is an inspector panel for setting up your presentation the way you want it:

The first option defines whether there is an introductory slide at the start of the presentation. Normally you would probably want this so your audience has an introduction to the topic of the presentation, and so they have something interesting and useful to look at while waiting for the presentation to start. The options in the box below the checkbox relate to the introductory slide.

Title: this is used as the title on the presentation slide. If you do not type a title in, the title of the first Mind Map in the document will be used.

Subtitle: this is shown below the title, in slightly smaller lettering.

Scrolling Text: this is text that will scroll slowly across the introductory slide from time to time. You can enter multiple lines of text, and NovaMind will choose them in random order, and scroll them across at random locations (while avoiding other things on the slide).

Display time: if checked, a floating clock will be displayed using the system defined short date format.

Twitter search: if you define something in this field, and you are connected to the Internet, NovaMind will find tweets based on the search term, and show them on the introductory slide. This can be fun if you are at a conference and have a hashtag that people can tweet using – it can show tweets that the audience tweet.

Help spread the word: when checked, there will be a small note on both the introductory slide and at the end of the presentation that it was created using NovaMind – we appreciate you telling people about NovaMind!

Presenting Full Screen or in the Window

When you are running your presentation, you can either use the default full screen mode, or start the presentation while holding down the option key to present within your current window.

If presenting using full screen, NovaMind will take over the screen, hiding everything else away. In MacOS X 10.7 or later, it will use the standard full presentation options to create a temporary Space for your presentation. If running on 10.6, it will take over the full screen, removing the window title etc.

The windowed presentation option can be useful when you are giving a webinar, and need to have other things visible on your screen, and just want to share that window, or if you are working between multiple documents or multiple applications and want to switch between them, or if you are recording a video of your presentation for later use or posting to YouTube etc.

There are options in the menu for setting the size of the window for the windowed presentation mode. This is particularly useful if you are recording a video of the presentation and want it to be a particular size for broadcast or sharing on the Internet. If you choose the option to present at your current window size, NovaMind will not resize your window, but if you choose any of the other options, your content will be resized to the chosen size. Please note that it is the content that is set to that size, and not the window – any window adornments like the title bar are on top of this size (this is so you can crop to the exact video size and get only the content without the window adornments in your final video.

When running the presenter, it will stop your screensaver from activating and your computer from going to sleep, since these are things you would not want to happen in the middle of a presentation. Also in Slide Presenter and Walkthrough modes, the mouse cursor is hidden after a couple of seconds of inactivity – just move it to make it reappear.

Switching Presentation Modes

When you are running the presenter, you can use the popup menu from at the bottom left of the screen to switch from one presentation mode to another without exiting the presenter. If you are using an Apple remote, you can press and hold the Menu button to switch to the next presentation mode in turn: Slides => Walkthrough =>Edit => Slides etc (of course if you haven’t defined any slides you won’t be able to switch to slides mode).

Presenting Slides

When using the presenter to present slides you have defined, the following options are available to you:

Exiting the presenter: Using the keyboard, press Escape, Q, or Command+. (command period). Using the mouse, you can select the option to exit the presentation from the presentation mode popup (from the button at the bottom left of the screen). Using the menus, you can exit the presentation from the Presentation menu. Also, when you get to the end of the presentation, clicking on the slide or pressing any key (except for the ones to take you back to the presentation or select slides) will exit the presentation.

Getting help: Press the ? or / key to show help. Press any key to close the help screen.

Next slide: Using the keyboard, you can press the Spacebar, the Right Arrow, Return, N, Enter, or Page Down to go to the next slide. Using the mouse, you can click on the slide, or the right arrow button on the controls. Using the Apple remote, you can click the Play/Pause button, or the forward button. There is also a menu option, so you can assign a keyboard shortcut to that if you like.

Previous slide: Using the keyboard, press the Left Arrow, P, or Page Up. Using the mouse, you can click on the left button on the controls. Using the Apple remote, you can use the rewind button. There is also a menu option, so you can assign a keyboard shortcut to that if you like.

Show Slide Selector: Using the keyboard, press + or – or =, or type a number between 1 and 9 to open the slide selector with that slide selected. This slide number is based on the slides that are included in the presentation (i.e. excluding hidden slides). Using the mouse, you can click on the slide selector button. Using the Apple remote, press the Menu button. There is also a menu option for this, so you can assign your own hotkey if you like. When the slide selector is displayed, you can either double click on the slide you want, or use the arrow keys to highlight the one you want and press Return to present that slide. If you are using an Apple remote, you can use the +, -, forward and reverse buttons to select the slide you want, and then the play/pause button to use that slide. To exit the slide selector without selecting a new slide, just click on the slide selector button, or type + or – or =, or on the Apple remote, press the Menu button again.

Draw lines on the presentation: you can click and drag to draw lines on the slide while you are presenting it. This can be useful for highlighting areas of interest, or things you are talking about at the time. The first line you draw is red, and then different colors are used for the other lines you draw, so that you can refer to the lines by color if you like. Lines are removed when you switch to another slide – they are just for temporary highlighting.

Delete lines that you have drawn on the presentation slide: if you press Delete or Backspace, it will remove the line you have just drawn. Press the C key to clear all the lines you have drawn on the slide without advancing to the next slide.

Highlight topics during the presentation: Double Click the topic you want to select – it will be highlighted with a red border. If you want to highlight other topics, hold down the Shift key while Double Clicking on them. You can also use the context menu by right clicking on a topic, and select whether to select that topic only, the topic and its descendants, or that topic and its siblings. To deselect the topics without going to the next slide, double-click on the background.

Cover the presentation with a blank screen: this can be useful if you want to pause a presentation or remove distraction while you talk about something else during your presentation. Press B to cover the screen with black, or W to cover the screen with white. Press any key or click to return to the presentation.

While it is recommended that you set up the slides according to your needs, and just run through the presentation, we do realize that there are situations where you may need to do specific things on an ad-hoc basis, so we have enabled the following options:

Scroll the canvas: although the scrollbars are hidden while presenting, if you have a trackpad, you can still scroll using a two finger swipe. You can also pan by pressing and holding the spacebar while clicking and dragging with the mouse.

Zoom the canvas: although the zoom control is hidden while presenting, you can still use pinch zooming if you are using a trackpad. You can also use the Apple remote and press and hold the + button to zoom in, or press and hold the – button to zoom out.

Collapse and expand subtopics: when you view a slide, the topics are expanded and collapsed as per the slide definition, but if you do need to expand and contract subtopics manually, the controls are still enabled.

Follow a hyperlink or open an attachment: The hyperlink and attachment controls are active, so you can click them. The required application will be opened to show the link or file. If you are using OSX 10.7 or later and running the presentation in full screen mode, it will switch you out of the Space that is used to do the presentation, but when you go back to NovaMind, it will be there as it was before.

Walkthrough

When doing a walkthrough of your Mind Map, the following are the options:

Show walkthrough options: click on the "gear" button at the bottom left of the presenter screen to see the options. These options are set as preferences, so will be used for all walkthrough presentations until you change them again. They are as follows:

Don’t Expand Subtopics / Expand One Topic Level / Expand Two Topic Levels: this controls how many levels of subtopics are expanded when you visit a topic. If you choose the Don’t Expand Subtopics option, the only topics shown will be those that are shown when you start the walkthrough, or any you manually expand. Using this option also disables the Auto-collapse option.

Visit All Topics: If this is turned on and you are navigating using the arrow buttons or the spacebar, each of the subtopics will be highlighted in turn before going on to the next topic. This can be useful if you treat your Mind Map like a list where you want to go through all the items and highlight and talk about each one in turn. If you have this option turned off, when you get to a topic which only has one level of subtopics, those subtopics will not be visited individually. If you think of it more as a topic with subtopics being reminders as to the meaning of the topic, then you might like to leave this option turned off.

Auto-collapse Topics: If this option is turned on, the topics that are not being presented at the time are collapsed. If this option is off, any topics that are expanded will not be collapsed again – this can be useful for progressive revelation of information.

Exiting the presenter: Using the keyboard, press Escape, Q, or Command+. (command period). Using the mouse, you can select the option to exit the presentation from the presentation mode popup (from the button at the bottom left of the screen). Using the menus, you can exit the presentation from the Presentation menu.

Getting help: Press the ? or / key to show help. Press any key to close the help screen.

Next topic: This takes you to the next topic in logical order, visiting and highlighting the appropriate topics. If you have the Visit All Topics option turned on, this will mean that the leaf topics will be visited while keeping the parent topic in view. Using the keyboard, you can press the Spacebar, Return, N, Enter, or Page Down to go to the next topic in the walkthrough. Using the mouse, you can click on the right arrow button on the controls. Using the Apple remote, you can click the Play/Pause button. There is also a menu option, so you can assign a keyboard shortcut to that if you like. Note: you can not use the right arrow to go to the next topic in the walkthrough, since it uses the normal logic for selecting topics as if you were not in a Walkthrough.

Previous topic: Using the keyboard, press the P, or Page Up. Using the mouse, you can click on the left button on the controls. There is also a menu option, so you can assign a keyboard shortcut to that if you like. Note: you can not use the left arrow to go to the previous topic in the walkthrough, since it uses the normal logic for selecting topics as if you were not in a Walkthrough.

Navigate to a different topic: You can use the arrow keys to select other topics in the same way as you would if you were not in Walkthrough mode, but it will also automatically expand subtopics when you get to them, and collapse them when they are not in use, if you have the Auto-collapse option turned on. You can also Click on any topic to select it. If you are using the Apple remote, then the +, forward, -, and rewind buttons act as if they were the arrow keys. In Walkthrough mode, there can only be one topic selected at a time.

Next Mind Map: If there are multiple Mind Maps in the document, you can switch to the next one using the } or ] key. If using an Apple remote, you can press and hold the right arrow/fast forward button to switch to the next Mind Map.

Previous Mind Map: If there are multiple Mind Maps in the document, you can switch to the previous one using the { or [ key. If you are using an Apple remote, you can press and hold the rewind button to go back to the previous Mind Map.

Draw lines on the presentation: you can click and drag to draw lines on the screen. This can be useful for highlighting areas of interest, or things you are talking about at the time. The first line you draw is red, and then different colors are used for the other lines you draw, so that you can refer to the lines by color if you like. Lines are removed when you move to another topic in the walkthrough presentation by any of the methods outlined above – they are just for temporary highlighting.

Delete lines that you have drawn on the presentation slide: if you press Delete or Backspace, it will remove the line you have just drawn. Press the C key to clear all the lines you have drawn on the screen without selecting a different topic.

Cover the presentation with a blank screen: this can be useful if you want to pause a presentation or remove distraction while you talk about something else during your presentation. Press B to cover the screen with black, or W to cover the screen with white. Press any key or click to return to the presentation.

Scroll the canvas: Although the scrollbars are hidden while presenting, if you have a trackpad, you can still scroll using a two finger swipe. You can also pan by pressing and holding the spacebar while clicking and dragging with the mouse.

Zoom the canvas: There is a slider along with the presentation controls, allowing you to zoom in or out, and you can use pinch zooming if you are using a trackpad. If you are using an Apple remote, you can press and hold the + button to zoom in, or press and hold the – button to zoom out.

Collapse and expand subtopics: When you select different topics when you view a slide, the topics are expanded and collapsed as per the slide definition, but if you do need to expand and contract subtopics manually, the controls are still enabled. Note that if you have auto-collapse turned on, when you select a different topic, the expansion status of the topics will be set automatically again.

Follow a hyperlink or open an attachment: The hyperlink and attachment controls are active, so you can click them. The required application will be opened to show the link or file. If you are using OSX 10.7 or later and running the presentation in full screen mode, it will switch you out of the Space that is used to do the presentation, but when you go back to NovaMind, it will be there as it was before.

Edit Mode

You can switch into edit mode using the controls at the bottom left of the screen, or using the menu options. This allows you to edit the Mind Map, and slides without exiting the presentation mode. If you were presenting slides, NovaMind remembers where you were up to, and if you switch back to presenting the slides, it will see if that slide is still there, and not hidden, and if so, will put you back on that slide in the presentation.

You can exit the presenter using Escape or Command+. or the menu option. All other editing functions are as normal.