The face of Mind Mapping with NovaMind has just changed dramatically once again. Now you get to choose from a wide range of connection styles which allow you vast amounts of creative freedom with the way your Mind Maps are drawn.

To give you an idea of the flexibility of the new Mind Map drawing, here is an example of what you can create:

NovaMind Mind Map Connection Lines

There have been user interface changes to allow you access to the new features, so we have put together a video showing you the how to use the new functions in both the Windows and Mac versions of NovaMind:
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Quite often I am asked about the very basics of how to make Mind Maps, so I have written an article and posted it for everyone to see:

How to Create Mind Maps

I hope you find this useful in increasing your Mind Mapping skills.

If you like it, please give it the “Thumbs up”, and if you want to be notified of my new hubs, you can subscribe to the RSS feed. If you are on hubpages, you are also welcome to join my “Fan club”.

This is just the first of many hubs I plan to post.

All the best

Gideon

This weekend we deployed a new update which contains a number of new features and bugfixes.

New features:

- Upload documents and attach to topics. Limited to 100MB/user (available for premium users only)

- Insert Video to topic

- Insert Audio to topic

   - The map canvas is automatically resized to contain all available topics

   - Translation to Chinese, Italian, Russian

Bugfixes:

- Fixed  FitMap functionality

- Improved performance of drawing curves.

    - Remember me at login didn't allow to logout

    - Many other small improvements and bugfixes

With this release we hope to satisfy the requests of teachers and trainers who wanted to have the possibility to combine Sound and Video into their MindMaps, in this way learning materials can be presented in a more vivid and attractive manner.

Video on topic:

 Uploading documents was also requested by a high number of users. Now you can upload documents, organize into directories and attach them to topics.

Multiple documents attached to one topic:

Topic features are extended with Multimedia and Attachments:

Enjoy,

The Mindomo Team.

We’ve so far only talked about the new Offline feature with Google Gears that we launched with the latest release. And while most of the energy went into that, we also added some other new features and enhancements. Here’s a short list:

Passwords for public maps You can now set passwords for public maps for secure linking and embedding and to hide them from the public maps list Blog embedding for everybody Now you don’t need to be Premium user anymore to embed maps into websites or blogs Embed API A new embed API allows you to seamlessly integrate our map editor in virtually any other web application Improved performance Vastly reduced the number of requests when loading a map by combining icons and other tuning measures Reseller Scheme If you’re interested in reselling MindMeister to other users just sign up for an account here and get 20% on every license sold! Other enhancements Easy enable notifications when first sharing a map - tag auto completion - reworked publish dialog with easy copy buttons - view invoices and export as PDF - and many more…

Right now we’re working on a few fixes to some editing problems that some people have been having, as well as on a number of new features. They are things that have been requested frequently and that we think we need to complete our mind mapping offering, such as attachments and images, connections between nodes, possibly some project management things (e.g. task info) as well as Geistesblitz enhancements.

Season’s Greetings to all MindMeisters around the world and thank you all for using our application, your generous praise, and constructive feedback over the last 10 months - it’s been a very interesting year for us and we’re all looking forward to a short break before kicking off the next year with a string of new features and ideas!

If you (like me) are late getting Christmas presents, and really have no better idea, you might want to sponsor a MindMeister Premium membership for somebody - we’ll even refund you 20% of the price on your credit card if you do this by 7th January 2008!

Well, that’s enough of the hard sell for this year, once again Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to everybody!

Not too long ago we launched the Geistesblitz Tools - widgets for Mac OS Dashboard and Windows Vista for quickly inserting ideas into a MindMeister mind map - and received lots of great feedback. However, we also received some not so good feedback from users of older Windows versions who found themselves not being able to use these gadgets…

So, we’ve taken that feedback very seriously and now are proud to give you not one, not two - but three new versions of Geistesblitz, for Yahoo! Widgets, iGoogle and the iPhone. We hope this will make everybody happy! (if you’ve never heard of the Geistesblitz tools before you can check them out here first)

	Geistesblitz Yahoo! Widget Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) is the most common widget engine out there and works on all recent Windows versions, as well as Mac OS. So we thought it only fair to support this as well! System Requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista or Mac OS X Download Now!
	Geistesblitz iGoogle Gadget For those of you who already live and breathe through the web browser, the Geistesblitz gadget for iGoogle is the weapon of choice - one click to add the gadget to your iGoogle page and fire off ideas to MindMeister straight from your web portal! Browser Requirements: MSIE 6+, Firefox, Safari, Opera Install Now!
	Geistesblitz iPhone Gadget With 4 million phones sold within half a year, developing for the iPhone recently became more than a fashion statement. While you’ll have to wait a little longer for the full iPhone interface, here’s a cheeky gadget for your iPhone browser as a little taster! System Requirements: Apple iPhone or iPod Touch Install Now!

Most people accept, I believe, that we are on the verge of recession.  Maybe already in the downturn in parts of the western hemisphere.  So what’s that got to do with mind mapping?  Survival!  I’ve just put up a few thoughts on how you can use mind mapping skills to better your chances if downsizing looms:  Visual mapping and recession-proofing your job 

 Tip of the hat to Chuck Frey for suggesting this topic to me.

Vic Gee
http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software

Stephen Feber, a long time NovaMind customer tells about how he used the planning and organizational capabilities of NovaMind to obtain &pound22m (US$43.5m) project funding for an urban regeneration project.

In the process, he beat 312 other competitors for the funding, making him one of the top 1% of all bidders on the proposal.

Stephen shares his secrets of success in detail in an interview with Gideon King, founder of NovaMind.

Read the full PDF report at:

http://www.novamind.com/Business/case_studies/stephen_feber.php

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of NovaMind Connect - the new social Mind Map sharing web site from NovaMind.

This video gives you an overview of some of the capabilities of NovaMind Connect:

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NovaMind Connect is an easy way for you to share NovaMind Mind Maps with other people. You can upload your Mind Maps to NovaMind Connect and view them online, navigating right down through all the branches of the Maps. You also have full text search capabilities for every branch of every Mind Map that has been uploaded to NovaMind Connect.

NovaMind Connect allows people to comment on your documents, Mind Maps and even on individual branches, and the comments are maintained in threads according to where they were made. This allows you to have conversations with others about the Mind Maps, and everyone can benefit from the additional insights they gain from the conversations and collaborations. You can even be notified by email when someone posts a comment on one of your Mind Maps, so you can come back and continue the discussion.

You can rate the documents to build up a list of both your favorites and everyone’s top rated mind maps.

You can tag the documents with relevant words and build up a communal tag cloud linking to the most popular topics and allowing you to view all the related Mind Maps in just a single click.

You can download the documents as NovaMind files, or individual Mind Maps as either PDF documents or JPG images.

You can build up a group of friends within NovaMind connect, receive messages when they have posted Mind Maps, and send them messages.
You can set up your profile to tell people about yourself, and look not only at other peoples’ profiles, but also at what Mind Maps they have posted, and all the comments they have made.

You can be kept up to date on new Mind Map additions by using the RSS feed which contains links to all the documents as they are added.

You can send links to specific branches and Mind Maps to your friends and associates, and use your favorite bookmarking tool to bookmark them for future reference.

As you can see, NovaMind Connect is a great way for you to connect with other NovaMind users, and the rest of the world, and share the benefits of Mind Mapping with everyone.

Come and try it out at http://www.novamind.com/connect

NovaMind are pleased to introduce a new export to Microsoft Word DOCX format. The video below gives you the details.

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This is a very full featured and powerful export feature of NovaMind. Of course you’ve always been able to select the Mind Map title and copy and paste the text into Word, but you didn’t get it the Word outline format and you didn’t get all the images or hyperlinks.

With the new export feature, all that has changed.

When you export a Mind Map to Word, the Mind Map title becomes the title of the document, and each branch is mapped to a Word heading according to its level. This allows you to generate tables of contents and work in outline mode if you want to.

All of the text is added to the document using the Word default fonts unless you have explicitly set a font or color in NovaMind. If you have only set the style of some of the text, the rest of the text will take the Word default formatting for the attributes of the text you haven’t changed, and for the rest of the text. This means that the Word templates and styles are easily applied and update the text in the same way as if you had made those changes in the text within Word.

The text comes across using the standard Word formatting except where we explicitly set it to something else.

And if we apply a specific style to the document in Word, then it applies that style to the text of the document.

You can also work with the NovaMind themes without affecting this - only the text styles that you have changed to be something different than the theme settings will have those specific settings applied in the Word document. This allows you to use the full power of the Word themes for your Word document.

Also, the hyperlinks on your NovaMind document are translated into the MS Word equivalent - either hyperlinks or bookmarks and links if the link is to another branch.

The images are exported, including any reflections you have put on the images. This also includes attached graphics and adornments.

Also the branch notes are exported, including any embedded graphics.

All of these features are designed to give you the absolute best experience when you export your NovaMind document to MS Word.

Time flies - so much that we missed the 1 year anniversary of MindMeister just a few days ago on February 7! Yes, it was just one year ago that MindMeister went into private beta to about 200 users, which very quickly became 2,000 through many many invitations. Admittedly, we really only went “live” on May 1st, so we have an excuse for another anniversary celebration in a few months time!

Since the private beta lots of features have been added, and also the interface has undergone a few revisions - albeit minor ones (it just looked good right away ;-)). Since the start of development, however, the design of the user interface has changed quite a bit - and luckily so, as you can see from the image above, showing the evolution of the map view in the early stages of implementation…

It’s been a good week - great weather, more user registrations than ever before, and finally the news that MindMeister has won the Innovation Award 2008 of the german SMB Initiative in the category “Web 2.0″!

MindMeister was selected from over 1600 submitted tools and sites and they said we should be duly proud (well, we are!). The prize is awarded to software tools especially suited for use in small and medium businesses.

So my colleague Till just came back from CeBIT in Hannover where the prize was awarded and the glass trophy fits snugly beside last year’s design award. Your first award is always special of course, but when they give you a second one you know it wasn’t just a fluke! We’ll take this as an incentive to keep working hard on our online mind mapping tool and improve it for all our users in releases to come.

See some pictures of the award ceremony or read the official press release (german only, I’m sorry guys…).

The God of Awards has been good to us these last few weeks - just before the Easter break we were informed that MindMeister has been shortlisted for the Red Herring 100 Europe 2008 - an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA region each year. Thanks very much guys!

Apparently we’re one of 200 finalists for that award, and the 100 lucky winners will be announced at the Red Herring Europe 2008 event scheduled for April 14-16 on the beautiful Mediterranean island of Malta.

Red Herring say their editorial staff “rigorously evaluated several hundred private companies through a careful analysis of financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development”. In any case, we’re in pretty good company, as past winners include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube (and before winning they must have been finalists too, right?).

Keen readers can check out the official press release (this time in English - yay!).

No, it’s not me that’s moving.  Nor this blog. 

I just heard from that exciting producer and publisher of hand-drawn mindmaps, Paul Foreman, that his site has moved to http://www.mindmapinspiration.co.uk 

Although his site is not mentioned in mind-mapping.org because that focuses on articles and mind mapping software, it has a well-deserved place on my list of canonical mind map sites, mindmapsearch.org, which now points to the new location.

Vic
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software

Up to now, I would have said that uses of mind maps could fit under four main categories: Learning and teaching; creative idea generation and brainstorming; planning and managing tasks or projects; and organising  information.  Always in these, we would expect the items under a branch to be logically related to concepts or topics higher in the hierarchy.

But now, I’ve seen signs in two places of another direction.  Not an attempt to replace the others, but something refreshingly new in mind maps (to me anyway): Free association.

Mikky J has a poem and mind map combined called “Frozen” where he free associates his way down each branch.  Mikky asks people not to copy it, so please follow the link above to see it.

And Paul Foreman, who has appeared in the mind-mapping.org blog before, has a “flip it” mind map where, to fight off negative thinking, he suggests we reverse words, and look for free associations that reverse the starting point to become a positive thought.

My favourite branch is the one for “bored”.  Paul allows copying if there’s a link back as well, so you can take a look by clicking on the thumbnail here or the link above:

Always good to see creative new ways of using mind maps.

Vic

(With apologies to the person whose famous epitaph I paraphrased in the title.)

I decided I’d add some of my knowledge of mind
mapping to Google’s Knol, their competitor to
Wikipedia.  That’s just a snippet over on the right.

I’ve tried to keep this a neutral definition, and I’d
welcome comments.

Vic Gee

Oh yeah, and I’m working on one about concept maps,
but it still needs some examples.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Merlin 2.5. Merlin is a fully featured Project Management application for Mac OS X that integrates with NovaMind Mind Mapping application.

There are over 100 new features in Merlin 2.5, with one of the most requested features being the network-based collaborative project management features with complete access controls.

It also has dynamic planning where activities that have not started can float to the current date, which is very useful for agile project management.

There are too many other new features to mention here, but this once again highlights Merlin’s total dominance of the Mac project management arena.

Version 2.5 is a free update for existing Merlin 2 customers, and you can just download the new version from within your existing copy using the check for update feature, or you can visit our downloads page to download it.

All copies of Merlin sold through the NovaMind online store are compatible with Merlin 2.5.

You can find out more about Merlin at:

http://www.novamind.com/Merlin

and purchase it through the NovaMind online store. Note: there are Merlin + NovaMind bundles available which give you a discount when you purchase the bundle of both programs together. The discount is not available when you purchase the programs separately.

We now have a new book available covering the wide range of uses of Mind Mapping in business environments. The book is called “Business Guide to Mind Mapping“.

The book gives examples of using Mind Mapping as a business planning tool, a sales tool, for project management, staff management, and for personal and professional development, as well as many other uses.

There are example Mind Maps throughout the book to get you up and running quickly, so you can get the best leverage out of using Mind Mapping in your work.

Full information is available at:

http://www.novamind.com/Books/Business

and you can purchase the eBook from the NovaMind online store.

Hi, in this video you’ll learn how to upload a Mind Map to NovaMind Connect from within NovaMind.

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Seeing as the process is almost identical for Windows and Mac, they are both included in one video, and you will see both user interfaces.

To start the upload, on Windows, you can use the option under the NovaMind Button, then choose to Publish on NovaMind Connect.

On Mac, you can either use the option in the File menu called Share on NovaMind Connect, or click the icon on the Toolbar. If you don’t see the icon in the toolbar, you can control-click the toolbar and add the NovaMind Connect icon.

Next you will see the login panel. On Windows you get the option to have your username and password stored encrypted on your system for next time so you don’t have to enter them every time to log in.

On the Mac, it is very similar, only you get the option to store your username and password in the system keychain.

If you store your credentials in the keychain, next time you upload, you will get a different panel to initiate the upload, where unless you wanted to change your login details, you would just press Return to start uploading.

NovaMind will then contact NovaMind Connect to get upload details, so you will briefly see a progress panel while it collects that information.

If you have already uploaded that document to NovaMind connect, you will see a panel showing you the existing document details.

Now if you are updating an existing document that you have already uploaded, just click the Replace Selected Document option. This will preserve any comments on the existing document, maps and branches, and update everything to match the new version of the document. Note that if you delete a branch that had comments on NovaMind Connect, those comments will be removed when the branches are removed on NovaMind Connect.

You should be aware that if you are editing a Mind Map, and cut and paste branches from one place to another on the Mind Map, they will be considered to be new branches as far as NovaMind Connect is concerned, and the comments that were on the original branch will be deleted. If, however, you graft the branch from one place to another, it is considered the same branch, and therefore all comments are still attached.

Now you will be able to enter the title of the document, the description and tags. If you are replacing an existing document, the information will be pre-filled with what is currently on NovaMind Connect, and you can edit it if you desire.

The title should be a brief one so that people can see at a glance what the Mind Map is about.

The description should be a complete description of what the Mind Map document is all about. Bear in mind that people will be searching for Mind Maps on NovaMind Connect, so make sure to use the types of words they are likely to be searching on in your description.

Then the tags. A tag is a keyword or term assigned to your document, used to help describe the document so that it can be found again easily.

Please use only one or two words for each tag, and use singular terms.

Assign tags to your document by listing them with commas between them.

You should use tags that are the same as the ones already in use on the NovaMind Connect tag cloud if they suit your document. The more people use the same set of terms, the easier it is to find the important tags for the types of document on NovaMind connect. This helps with finding things. In many cases you’ll have some tags in common with others on the site, and some that are unique to this document.

Now you are ready to press the upload button. You should be aware that there is a timeout between the time when you initiate the upload and when you click this upload button - you have 15 minutes. If you wait longer than 15 minutes, the upload will fail and you would have to try again. This is a necessary security measure in the underlying technologies we are using for NovaMind Connect.

So click the upload button, and you will get a progress bar again while the file is uploaded and then NovaMind tells NovaMind Connect that the upload was successful.

At the end of the process, you will get a URL to view the document on NovaMind Connect

Now if you immediately click to go to NovaMind Connect, it is likely that the document may still be being procesed, but NovaMind Connect will show you the document as the different parts are processed, and you should get the first of the Mind Maps in the document visible pretty much straight away. NovaMind Connect will continue to check the progress of the processing, and will automatically add Mind Maps as they become available. When the processing is complete, you will automatically be switched over to the completed document view.

The processing should only take a few seconds for a small Mind Map, and probably all but the biggest Mind Map documents will be processed in well under a minute, but if you want to go elsewhere in the web site, you can do so, and your document will continue to be processed in the background, and when it is ready, it will automatically appear on the recently added Mind Maps on the home page of NovaMind Connect, as well as in your profile. You will also receive an email from the system when the document has been processed. The email will also include a link to the document on NovaMind Connect, so you can click that link to go directly to the document if you like.

The technology that drives NovaMind Connect is very complex and includes 11 different systems spread out over 4 different physical locations with all the vagaries of networking between the systems, so it is possible that there may occasionally be communication errors between the different parts, but it is designed to both try to recover from any issues, and to inform us that there are issues so we can deal with them. So if your document doesn’t appear immediately, please be patient and the issue should be resolved shortly. If it still hasn’t appeared after 24 hours though, please do contact us so we can chase up on where the issue occurred and get it live for you.

All of this makes it sound more complex than it is to use the system, but the reality is that once you have stored your password, all you need to do is click a couple of buttons, and enter the title, description and tags and that’s about all there is to it.

I hope you enjoy using NovaMind Connect and find it a useful resource.

On Mind-mapping.org this week there are four new entries in the master list - three graphical and one a related development platform.

bCisive

bCisive is software for business decision making and diagramming.  It supports building and communicating business cases as well as documenting the reasoning behind decisions.

GenIE & SMILE

GeNIe is a user-friendly development environment for graphical decision-theoretic models. It is the Windows user interface to SMILE, which is a portable library of C++ classes implementing the models.

Outliner 2.0

Outliner is an outliner for mobile phones and PDAs.  It lets you create your outlines with desktop software and import them.

Vic

http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software

Due to a rather large server update we’ll be having a scheduled downtime on MindMeister from Friday, April 11, 7pm GMT for about two hours. Please try and export any maps you might need during this time in advance and try and enjoy a mind mapping free Friday afternoon / night ;-). Thanks for your understanding!

We appreciate the new release has been a long time in the making - but it’s here now! Last week we’ve deployed a new version of our mind mapping tool, which we’ve boastingly dubbed MindMeister 2.0.

Our users often tell us that they like MindMeister because of its intuitive interface and overall simplicity. That’s why we try to add only the most necessary features in new releases - and still, this time it turned out to be quite a long list

Oh, and don’t fret if you can’t find your pet feature below, in spite of all the talk about simplicity some more updates are coming soon!

Task information on ideasAs a first step to lightweight project management in MindMeister you can now add task information - priority, completion, due date and owner - to ideas. More to come! Attachments on ideasYou can now upload file attachments to ideas and preview images through inline thumbnails. This feature is for Premium users only, but everybody can try it out for 30 days. WunderLink and WunderNoteTry out these new functions to magically add links and notes to your ideas, using the wonders of the web. WunderLink gets its link from a little Yahoo! search performed in the background, while WunderNote uses a FreeBase database lookup. Automatic text wrapsIdea captions will now automatically wrap at a certain length to avoid overlong nodes (you can keep the old behaviour by adding manual line breaks with Shift-RETURN) More Geistesblitz featuresIn our constant quest to improve the Geistesblitz tools we have now added email support and a Geistesblitz Activity for Internet Explorer 8. With email support, you can send single Geistesblitzes or while mind maps just through an email. Subsharing for mapsNew option to allow collaborators to invite others when sharing a map - this will also work for already shared maps Print and export enhancementsNew option to center map on printout, PDF export of mind map now includes notes Formatting and navigationApply text styles selectively to child ideas, nicer formatting of first level branches, ability to expand and collapse levels Notes and linksAdvanced and larger note editor with more formatting options, new links widget in sidebar, “Show popular links” for idea OpenID and Paypal supportSupport for signup and login through OpenIDs and Paypal support when upgrading to commercial licenses. Other enhancementsNicer invitation and sharing emails, new user options, improved support for Safari and Opera, performance improvements through better script and image loading.

In the big-screen world of computers there is a seemingly endless supply of developers keen to give us mind mapping software.  Are we going to see a repeat on the iPhone and iPod Touch?

A few days ago there was MindMaker (US$5) - the first contender.  It has some way to go, but does show promise and they have a roadmap.  Its most obvious limitation is that it does not provide a landscape view when the device (mine’s an iPod Touch) is rotated. 

Now there’s iBlueSky (US$8) - to my eye a more stylish entrant, and one that already offers portrait mode. 

Not quite mind mapping software, but capable of making hand-drawn maps is Zeptopad (US$10).  They even choose a hand made mind map as their screenshot illustration (but I don’t think it would come very high in the hand made mind maps survey that the Mindmaps Directory people have going on):

And there I was thinking I’d have a quiet week…. 

Regards
Vic Gee
http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software

NovaMind has just released a video detailing the value of Mind Mapping where the financial benefits of Mind Mapping are quantified, as well as going in to detail about some of the many other benefits that you can get out of Mind Mapping. This information has also been written up in a PDF report on the value of Mind Mapping in case you need to justify the expenditure of buying NovaMind to your boss.

Here is the video:

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I have a free license for Buzan’s iMindmap to give away for the best answer to a competition.  This is it:

Many, many people have never heard of mind mapping.  Others have heard of it but have no idea what it is or how it might help them.

Write a comment to this post (and/or send a mind map!) suggesting how to achieve exponential growth in the numbers of people doing mind mapping.  This needs an idea that will motivate committed visual information mappers and at the same time can leverage the whole mind mapping community to get the word out, explain, demonstrate, tell stories, show all different styles of maps, all uses. 

I shall judge the winning suggestion (my decision will be final!) and pass (only) the winner’s name and email address to Buzan Online so that they can deliver the license.  Judgement will be based on originality, practicality and opportunities to obtain best leverage of existing mappers’ contacts.  If you decide to send a mind map to illustrate your ideas or thinking, please send a png or jpg image to vic [at] mind-mapping [dot] org.  I will arrange for it to be embedded in comments (max width 590 pixels).

This competition will run from 4th October to 3rd November inclusive.

Regards
Vic Gee
http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software

PS  You probably know that some people know about mind mapping or other visual information mapping techniques and do not like them, and will not use them because they have their own thinking style.  They find that visual representation gets in the way and they don’t need introducing to it.  I’m sure we all respect that and got over it long ago. 

These are not the people this competition aims to find ways to reach out to.   VG