Then there is a whole boatload of features letting you can use your mind map in interesting ways. And you can even draw a link line between any two objects, including attached graphics, perhaps to show a connection of ideas that cuts across the hierarchy. An object can have any number of free-floating graphics and text boxes attached to it they need show no visible connection to the object, but when you move the object, they move with it. An object can display an "adornment" (a little icon that might signify the object’s type). An object or connected group of objects can be surrounded with an automatic shape, for emphasis and isolation. Lines (including connecting lines) can have different thicknesses and dot patterns. The text, and whatever it sits on or inside, can have color and a shadow, and can incorporate a picture, which you can import from just about anywhere (and NovaMind comes with a big collection of graphics). The text can sit on a line, which can be straight or wavy, or inside a rectangle or ellipse. When you do attend to this, though, you get lots of interesting ways to add interest, variation, and expressiveness to an object.
NovaMind provides automatic assistance with object placement and rearrangement, if you like, so you can brainstorm rapidly without attending to how things look.
#Novamind free windows code#
NovaMind’s interface makes heavy use of floating inspector windows for seeing and setting the characteristics of a selected object in much the same way as OmniGraffle – which is no coincidence, as NovaMind uses the same inspector window code as OmniGraffle (the wonderful Omni Frameworks).Įvery object, consisting effectively of some text (which, according to the "laws" of mind-mapping, should be kept short), is created as either the child or the sibling of some other object – except, of course, for the original central object, which is always "just there" and can have only children. To some extent, the comparison is an apt one: with NovaMind, you are placing objects into the drawing which then stay connected to other objects no matter where you move them, just as in an OmniGraffle diagram.
#Novamind free windows software#
So perhaps mind maps are not, for personal use, my natural cup of tea (though, as I say, I’ve often covered blackboards with them while tying ideas together for my students) but in that case, the fact that I’m so struck by NovaMind – the fact, indeed, that NovaMind makes me reconsider my prejudices – testifies all the more strongly as to how stimulating this software is.ĭrawing On Both Sides of the Brain - NovaMind, then, is a drawing program, specialized for mind maps in much the same way as OmniGraffle is specialized for diagrams. But despite my personal reservations over the mind map hype, I do also understand that some people simply swear by them for those to whose mental makeup a traditional outliner, with its rigid hierarchy and primarily verbal logic, feels cold and restrictive, a mind map’s warm visual and associative appeal can open those same mental doors of organization using, as it were, a different key. Now, as TidBITS readers already know, my tool of choice for arranging ideas is the outliner, with variations and a mind map seems to me, at first blush, merely a variation on an outliner – and a poor one at that, distracting the eye with colors and pictures and squiggles, and crowding the hierarchy into the clutter of a single canvas. As someone who has been viewing and drawing mind maps all his life (since they are, in essence, just the kind of thing any decent teacher is constantly developing on the blackboard while talking), I was surprised to discover that someone thinks he has invented them and has even made the term "mind map" a registered trademark, and has made selling them, as a technique for remembering, learning, planning, and presentation, the basis of a big business.
This is extraordinarily impressive software, proving once again that you don’t have to be a large company – in fact, it’s probably better not to be – in order to produce an application that’s original, interesting, useful, and attractive.Ī mind map is a drawing, connecting words and images that radiate ultimately from a single central idea. NovaMind, the flagship mind-mapping program of the Australia-based NovaMind Software Pty Ltd., has recently attained a new maturity with the release of its version 3. #1655: 33 years of TidBITS, Twitter train wreck, tvOS 16.4.1, Apple Card Savings, Steve Jobs ebook.#1656: Passcode thieves lock iCloud accounts, the apps Adam uses, iPhoto and Aperture library conversion in Ventura.#1657: A deep dive into the innovative Arc Web browser.
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