NovaMind News

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.

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Tags: link lines, Mind Mapping, novamind 5, relationships

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 10:07 am and is filed under Mind Mapping Articles, NovaMind for Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.