NovaMind News

Another significant step towards the release of NovaMind 5 was achieved yesterday with the release of the first version of the technology preview for Mac. Here are some screen shots of some of the significant features:

We invented the concept of the Rainbow Coloring so that you could automatically have colorful Mind Maps. This is still a strong point to this day, with many people saying that they love not having to think about the colors, and yet automatically getting interesting, colorful Mind Maps. So we decided to improve on the concept in several important ways. Firstly, we added the ability to alter the brightness of the colors to give you finer control, and secondly, we added the ability to have alternating colors, so every second topic has its color taken from the opposite side of the colorwheel. This avoids a problem with the rainbow coloring where the adjacent topics are almost identical in color. This allows you to do things like this:

But this left an issue we were keen to address, and that is that some people only want some colors on their topics, so we invented another new way of coloring the subtopics automatically, and that is called Interpolated coloring. You have a color ring which you can drop colors on. You can have as many colors as you like, and it will interpolate between the colors like this:

But often you just want a set of specific colors, so we invented yet another coloring mechanism, which is called the Color Set. You can add as many colors as you like to the set, and NovaMind will cycle through the colors and apply them to the children. For instance, if you wanted alternating colors to make it easy to follow the subtopics, you could have just two colors in your colorset. Here’s an example with 3 colors:

Together, these options give you massive amounts of control over the automatic coloring, but there was one more limitation, and that is that in earlier versions of NovaMind, you could only set the coloring on the Mind Map title, so we changed that so you can now you can have automatic children coloring set on any topic.

So let’s talk a bit about topics.

We have introduced a number of new topic shapes as you can see here:

The last four topics are of particular interest, seeing as they are what we call Custom Topic Shapes. When you select that option, you can select each of the for quadrants individually and set it to be angled left or right, chamfered, square, or rounded. This gives you a massive amount of flexibility to make your Mind Maps say what you want them to say.

We are also showing some new topic coloring options, like this gradient fill:

And if you want something that gives you even more control and flexibility, you can create a detailed gradient like the one shown here.

I guess that is a bit of an extreme example, but it gives you and idea of the power of the fill options.

We also have the layout options like what we have in the Windows Technology Preview – this image shows you what they look like in the Mac version.

So that’s just a few of the things that are new in the NovaMind 5 Technology Preview for Mac. This release marks a very significant step in the development process. The progress has been really good over the last few weeks, and we are expecting to make good progress from here on in as we attend to bugs and implementing the rest of the functionality to get it ready for release.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Announcements, NovaMind for MacOS X. 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.