Hi, again it as been quite a while since we have been in touch through the newsletter, and as usual there is a lot of news to catch up on.
There have been a number of enhancements to NovaMind, so rather than listing them individually, I will give you a link to a blog post where there is a video, pictures and explanation of the new features.
As well as the enhancements I talk about in the video, we have also released a number of other updates to NovaMind, as well as the following articles and resources:
So as you can see, it's been a pretty busy time around here on the software development, public education, and web site.
We have built in to every page an easy way for you to bookmark the page using your favorite social bookmarking service. The five most commonly used services have specially designed icons links so that it reduces your typing when adding the bookmarks. These cover Stumble Upon, Delicious, Technorati, Digg, and Reddit. We also have a Share/Save menu which pops up with just about every other imaginable bookmarking service listed, including the ability to email a link to the page directly to someone else.
To make it easy for you to create links to pages on the web site (even if you don't know anything about HTML code) we have built a "link to this page" option in to the web site, and I have even made a video to show how to use it to create a link in a blog posting.
Hopefully this should help you when you are writing a blog post or web page and want to link to the NovaMind web site.
Rather than provide links to all the new articles, you can find them mostly under the Mind Mapping and Presentations menu items on the web site, and we have a new case studies section, as mentioned in our last newsletter. The articles cover a lot of information about Mind Mapping and how it is used in business, teaching, learning, presentations, personal effectiveness, etc.
Also my offer of fr ee publicity for your business through me doing a video, PDF or web page (whatever is appropriate) about your uses of Mind Mapping in your business organization or personal life, is still open. I'm surprised nobody has taken me up on that one. This is a great opportunity for you to get publicity at no cost.
We have enhanced the look and layout of the blog, and made it easier to find the RSS feed so you can stay up to date with the latest happenings.
In the last newsletter I mentioned that I had set up an account on Facebook and invited people to be my friend on Facebook. Well now I have almost 750 friends on Facebook. How cool is that? I am so thankful for the comments that people have made and feel humbled and honored at the same time.
And it struck me that the best way I can deliver even more value to you all is to fast track the development work, and the only way I can do that is to hire more people, so we are working on hiring more developers with the expertise required to move our development along more quickly in the directions we need to go. More on that later.
If you have friends who are screenwriters and are using Mac computers running Leopard, we'd really appreciate it if you could get them to try out the new version of the screenwriter and give us feedback. We rewrote it completely from the ground up, and are doing some final tweaks to it based on the feedback we are receiving.
Clinton has been the person doing all the work on that, and is looking forward to receiving your feedback so we can tweak it to become your screenwriting program of choice. Once those final tweaks are done over the next week or two, I'll be creating a video about how to use the screenwriting functionality.
We have a number of ongoing tasks like me creating new articles and videos, and Karen working on more sample Mind Maps for the gallery and more templates.
Another thing coming up in about 3 weeks' time is that Lam has been working on a new framework for import and export, which will make it much easier for us to support multiple other formats. The first two formats that will be supported for both import and export are Mind Manager and Microsoft Project. The framework is completely cross platform, so we will be able to roll out support for new file formats on both Windows and Mac at the same time once we have the framework fully set up in both systems.
In the last newsletter, I mentioned that we have some very exciting plans to take NovaMind where no other mind mapping product has gone before. Remember that? I also announced the mystery feature we have under development.
Well we got a long way down the track with developing it, but as we developed it, our idea of uses for the new technologies kept growing. It became clear that this was something that needed to be extended and rolled out on a bigger and wider ranging system than what we had been thinking. So we have the core functionality working fine, but now need to finish putting the rest of the architecture in place to work with it.
And that's just one piece of the puzzle. Before it's complete, it requires a complete rewrite of both NovaMind for Mac and Windows, as well as a whole lot of web programming - desktop bits, web bits, and dare I say it, maybe even mobile bits. I have developers all around me talking about rubies and clouds and rails iphones and all sorts of jargon like that ;-)
Now a lot of the web based technologies will be able to be deployed around the base of NovaMind 4, and there will be no additional costs for existing license holders to use the new technologies, and in fact we will be rolling a whole lot of web services out for the general public, but of course you will get more benefits from them if you actually own NovaMind.
So now that we have the picture of how it will all pan out much clearer, we see that in order to deliver the first stages in the next few months, we really need to get people with the right skills for specific tasks on board. We're looking for the right people to join the team, but so far we haven't managed to get the people in, so we're just going as quickly as we can with the staff that we have. If you have "techie" friends - especially ones who rave about how fantastic "ruby on rails" is, perhaps you could send them over to look at our jobs page.
This means that some of the things we had been planning for NovaMind 4 have been moved to NovaMind 5, and some things we were planning for NovaMind 5 have been moved to NovaMind 4 - in general, a shuffle of capabilities, as well as the addition of the whole web system.
Even when we have implemented those things, we are just at the start of where we want to to be in the long term. This really is an exciting time for NovaMind.
Well I can pretty much guarantee you'll love what we are building for you. It is so far ahead of where we are now, it's amazing. For me, this is all about achieving the vision of building the best mind mapping software available anywhere so that even more people can benefit from the improved productivity, better presentations, easier problem solving, enhanced creativity, better note taking and memorization, and more effectively run businesses and projects. I'm hoping that everything comes together quickly so that we can get more new staff on board quickly to implement the new features more quickly.
And I'll just mention that if you would like to become an affiliate partner, you can benefit financially from NovaMind sales too.
And we really do appreciate it when you tell your friends and colleagues about NovaMind, bookmark our site, or create links to our site.
Regards
Gideon King
NovaMind Software
Mind Mapping at its best
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