NovaMind 5 for Mac – Important information for users of earlier versions of NovaMind.

NovaMind 5 is a completely new application, taking everything we have learned from creating Mind Mapping software over the last 10 years and putting it into the new program. Therefore if you used to use NovaMind 4, you will need to know a few important things about upgrading to NovaMind 5, in particular about importing NovaMind 4 files, operating system compatibility, and the current feature set of NovaMind 5 and update plans. Users of NovaMind 4 should note that NovaMind 4 is known to not work properly on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Further details are below:

Downloading

Use the button above to download NovaMind 5. You can run both NovaMind 4 and NovaMind 5 on the same computer if you need to – they don’t interfere with each other.

License Keys

All license keys sold since May 2009 are already NovaMind 5 license keys, so it is possible that you already have a license key for NovaMind 5. If you are not sure, you can try entering it in NovaMind 5, and it will tell you whether it is valid for NovaMind 5.

If your license key is for NovaMind 4 or earlier, you can upgrade through the NovaMind online store: https://www.novamind.com/store/. Please see the Upgrades section. You will need your old license key in order to upgrade.

Your license key was sent to you when you purchased NovaMind, but if you have lost your license key, you can visit the Lost license key page at http://www.novamind.com/support/lost-license-key and our sales staff will look it up for you. As there are likely to be a lot of people in the queue, please check your email records first to see if you can find it yourself, and if you do need to contact us, please be patient as we process all the requests.

Please watch the tutorial videos

NovaMind 5 is a new program. It works differently than NovaMind 4, so to get the most out of it, you should watch the tutorial videos. Even if you only watch one, please make sure you watch the introductory video at http://www.novamind.com/tutorials/novamind5/mac/. It will only take you 5 minutes to watch, and will ensure that you know all the basics of using NovaMind 5. This tutorial is everything you need to get started.

NovaMind 4 File Import

NovaMind 5 is a complete redesign of the entire application from the ground up, based on the feedback of our customers and the Mind Mapping needs of current and future Mind Mappers. It was impossible to keep the old internal representation of topics, layout, and settings, and at the same time allow for the new themes, automatic coloring, advanced layout, flexibility and extensibility of NovaMind 5.

It is therefore not possible to accurately transfer all aspects of NovaMind 4 Mind Maps to the NovaMind 5 file format. What we are able to do with the import is to import all the basic information, as well as all the formatting information we can transfer to the new file format. This includes attributes such as topic shapes, line colors, fill colors, boundary colors, the map background, and rainbow coloring, where there are matching attributes in the new file format, and we are able to determine the intent. It should be noted that all of these features override the defaults in NovaMind 5. This means that from a visual standpoint, the imported Mind Maps will look as close as we can reasonably get to the same as they were in NovaMind 4, taking into account the completely different design of the application, but also has the limitation that the imported maps behave significantly differently than ones created in NovaMind 5, especially with regards to coloring, the effect of themes and color sets, and automatic topic shapes defined by themes.

If you are just importing a Mind Map from NovaMind 4 and not doing a lot with it, these limitations probably won’t bother you too much, but if you are doing a significant amount of editing, you will find that you are having to set colors and shapes etc manually whereas this would be automatic in a document created in NovaMind 5.

In order to help you out with this, we have added two special features. One is on the context menu for selected topics, and is a Reset Formatting option. This will remove all the custom settings for shape, line, fill color, children coloring, effects, and connection lines, and let them to revert to the default as defined by your theme. It affects all selected topics.

The other option is on the theme selector panel, and allows you to reset the current Mind Map to the theme. It is very similar to the effect you would get if you selected all the topics and reset the formatting, but it also resets the Mind Map background to the default values as well.

Using these two options, you can return your Mind Map to using the theme, color set, and automatic formatting that you would expect when creating a new NovaMind 5 file, either for the whole Mind Map, or just some of the topics.

Other attributes like the exact positioning of topics and positioning of attached graphics and attached text are not able to be imported, because the new layout system uses completely different reference points for the relative locations of items, and also ensures that topics don’t overlap, so you will need to manually move these items to where you want them.

Missing Features?

There are a few things that were in NovaMind 4 which have not been implemented in NovaMind 5. Most of these features will be added as free updates to NovaMind 5. The Presenter, the FlexiTopics (FlexiBranches), and NovaMind Connect are still under development. We plan to deliver these features as free 5.x updates to NovaMind 5 customers. While we do not have an ETA for any of these features but of these features, our top priority item is the Presenter.

The Screenwriter and Suggesterator are planned to be made available as plugins for NovaMind 5 for Mac. We do not have an ETA at this stage. More information will be made available in due course.

Other Upcoming Features

We plan to implement a Theme editor for NovaMind Pro and Platinum, so that you can create your own themes. We do not have an ETA for this at this stage.

What is the minimum OS X system version required?

The initial releases of NovaMind 5 run on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). The use of Lion is highly recommended, Snow Leopard is fine, but Leopard (10.5) is not recommended. NovaMind 5 does not run on 10.4 or earlier versions of MacOS X.

Before the release of NovaMind 5.1, we will stop active development for 10.5 versions of NovaMind 5. This is because already more than 96% of our customers are using Snow Leopard or Lion, and also supporting Leopard means that we can not concurrently use some of the advanced features of Snow Leopard or Lion. The reason we are offering a 10.5 compatible version at all is because we told our customers in 2009 that we would, and we are honoring that promise, but we can not let that stand in the way of continued progress and giving the vast majority of our customers the benefits of the latest advancements.

We have already added some features specific to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), and in several areas of the application, there are significant advantages to using Lion. This focus on Lion support will continue to increase over time, but we will continue to support Snow Leopard for the time being. Please see the blog post about Lion support for specifics on what is already included in NovaMind 5.

A Special Note about NovaMind 4 and Mac OS X Lion

While NovaMind 5 has been tested and runs fine on Lion, and has even got a number of features developed specially to take advantage of Lion, NovaMind 4, on the other hand, does not work on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. NovaMind 4 was developed in 2006/2007 for Leopard and tweaked in 2009 to run on Snow Leopard, but will not run on Lion. It would be a major operation to try to bring it to Lion, so we do not plan to update NovaMind 4 for Lion, and are instead concentrating our efforts on NovaMind 5.

All license keys sold since May 2009 are already NovaMind 5 license keys, so if you purchased since then, your license key will work for NovaMind 5, and you can just download it using the download button at the top of this page.

If you purchased before that, then you will need to purchase an upgrade to use NovaMind 5.