NovaMind

Some time ago I wrote about NovaMind and that I did not like the program. I got lots of complaints by people that do like this program.

As a result of this I decided to give NovaMind a second try. After all - NovaMind only have one product and it better work, right? I have been using NovaMind for about three weeks now.

Starting to learn

Compared to all the other mind managers I have tried NovaMind takes some time to learn. The ribbon menus really are troublesome to learn. Even if images says a thousand words I do not believe this is true for menu items.

I started up by reading all available tutorials and documentation to get a hold of what features I should now and how to use them.

Step by step I found out how to use NovaMind and I also learned what I did wrong in the first place.

Is it as bad as I first said?

My short answer is no. Even though I do miss lots of creative/useful features NovaMind is not a bad product. And compared to the cost of US$99 I now find NovaMind very interesting. You can read more about what I miss and what I like below.

Memory consumption

NovaMind loves your memory. My Vista computer with only a half a gigabyte of memory peaks out when I installed the 5 free available graphics add-ons. For my everyday work I find 200MB of memory usage to be very high. With this memory consumption it uses more memory than Outlook and Opera together. (And these programs love memory.)

Cool features

There are some cool features that I do like very much with NovaMind. They are;

• RapidFire. When RapidFire is enabled you can write subtopics without the need for an extra enter when you have created a topic.
• Rainbow colors. All topics below the root gets their own color based on the placement. Why this? The brain works better with different colors and images.

Features I miss

First of all - I love to use the keyboard. NovaMind is not designed for ease of use with the keyboard.

• General zooming and panning. Try to zoom in and out without using the mouse.
• Focus on a topic. Compare to MindManager F3 function which collapses all other branches and let you focus on the one you are working on.
• Try to get to recent files without using the mouse. You can't open the menu at all using your keyboard.
• The new Windows key to the right of the keyboard shows you the same menu as you get when you right-click on a topic. You can move but you can't choose anything without left-clicking with your mouse.

Conclusion

 I was wrong. Nova-Mind is not as bad as I first thought after all. When I learned to use it. Nova-Mind just announced version 4 of their editor. With this new version they will change both pricing and the feature list. You can read more here. Recently they have also released some new releases of version 3.