This evening I’m working on or from a mind map on a lake in North Carolina.  I work from Lake Wylie in my own wifi cove with a covered fishing dock. A high top bar serves dual purposes for serving drinks and serving as my desk.  I recently installed a pull down projector screen on the dock, and have moved my portable projector outside tonight to work from a mind map that I created with MindManager a few days ago.

The unique setting tonight with a thousand frogs chiming in their opinions about topic changes juxtaposed with the setting where the map was created made me pause.  I created the mindmap last week in the Nevada desert in Laughlin.  I worked with my friend Joe Klein on a brainstorm evolved into a business plan upgrade.  We worked from his home in Laughlin where I used the projector to display the map from his dining room table onto the vertical blinds that cover the sliding glass doors to his patio and hot tub.

The mindmap in the picture is of course the default map with MindManager 8, the map I’m working on in reality is top secret! 

Going from the desert to a lake in North Carolina is definitely two examples of the extreme.  In the past I’ve worked on planes, in conference rooms, at a soccer field and a McDonalds. Brainstorming, a function that is one of MindManager’s strengths, is definitely the type of activity that can work well when you place the participants outside the box. Its not required, but can produce some interesting results.  So where is it that you mindmap?  Do you use that location exclusively?  Do you mix it up and if so do you mix it up on purpose or just by chance?

I ask the question mostly because I’m curious and partly because I’m curious if the location drives better results or hinders results (like when the sun glares down on a screen outside, or when the mosquitoes get to thick on your projector screen or when the sun melts the silicon in your laptop back into sand particles in the desert). 

A couple years ago I was introduced to a very interesting mind mapping program called Topicscape.    The program is rather unique in that it provides a three dimensional landscape view of a mind map of information.  That was version 1 and I worked with the software up through about version 1.5x beta if memory serves.

Now Topicscape Pro Beta 2.0 is on line.  The new version has a number of new features driven by user feedback that include but are not limited to:

• An improved tag cloud
• Capability to customize the Home view position to your own taste
• Another zoom option

From a strictly mind mapping perspective one of the things that is very cool about Topicscape is that it allows you to refocus your perspective on the entire landscape by changing any given topic into the ‘central’ topic of focus.

Navigating the map itself has the look and feel of flying through a video game interface similar to something like Entropia or SecondLife (without all the crazy looking avatars).

The program also runs on a database essentially, which gives it more horsepower and potential than most mind mapping programs that are more common in this software category.  In many ways despite the look and feel this is a seriously powerful mind mapping tool for people with seriously complex sets of information or knowledge to classify, map and categorize.

If you are looking for a unique mind mapping experience, or if you are finding that more conventional mindmapping programs are not enabling you to see the real level of complexity of the information you are working with in a single glance, or restrict you too much in viewing things from a single perspective, I highly recommend you try Topicscape.  There is both a Pro and Basic version as well as an education version.  You can typically try the program with a free 30 day trial as well.

Video Reviews of the Older version of Topicscape

Sometime back I was first introduced to Mindjet connect under MindManager version 7.  Under that account I received a trial account to connect.  At the time, I did not use the account.  It was in the early days and none of my partners were using connect and so there was no one for me to connect with.

Its the peril of cloud computing and social networks.  Sometimes they need to develop a critical mass before they become useful.  Facebook would be a pretty worthless tool if you were the only one there, same goes for Twitter!

This evening, I received an email from Mindjet indicating that my account was going to expire.  I’ll admit that I had forgotten about the account, even though I upgraded to version 8 last fall.

When I logged in, I noticed that my Connect account was still registered with my Version 7 license.  (Actually, it was a trial version of 7 from a long time ago.)

I couldn’t identify anyway to upgrade my Connect account information so that I could replace my license number with my current license number.  But a little digging pointed me in the direction of this message.

About the Mindjet Connect trial account

Mindjet offers a free 30-day trial of Mindjet Connect service. During the 30-day trial, you will be able to invite up to 5 users to your account. We recommend you read the Mindjet Connect Data Sheet here:
http://www.mindjet.com/pdf/us/mjc_datasheet_en.pdf
Please click this link to view tutorials on using Mindjet Connect:
http://www.mindjet.com/resources/tutorials/mindjetconnect/default.aspx

Promotional offer:

All customers who purchase a new license, or upgrade to MindManager Pro 8 between November 11th and December 31st, will receive a complimentary 6 month subscription to Mindjet Connect service. Your MindManager 8 license key is also the activation key for your free 6-month Mindjet Connect subscription account. The following steps must be followed to activate your free Mindjet Connect account.
1. Install MindManager 8 for Windows
2. On the MindManager 8 toolbar, click on the Connect tab.
3. Click “Create Account”
4. Click the link “Extended Mindjet Connect Promotion”
5. Enter in your MindManager 8 license key to validate your account
(to locate your license key, click on the Tools tab and select “About MindManager”)
For more information on this promotion, please click here: http://www.mindjet.com/promotions/mindmanager/mm8upgrade.aspx

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Please note:
The license key used to activate the Connect account can only be used once. The first person to successfully register the account using the MindManager 8 license key becomes the account owner. The account owner is responsible for adding/removing users, and sets each users access level.  

Apparently, I could sign up for a complimentary 6 month subscription to Mindjet Connect based on my version 8 account.  But I suspect that I have to actually let my account from version 7 expire as there is no way to update the account information.

So I’m going to give that a try and finally make the Connect plunge and see how this tool can be used with MindManager.

By the way, it costs about $10 a month normally for a Mindjet Connect account, or $120 per year.

For a couple years now, I have been looking forward to the day when I could power MindManager with my voice.  I could think it, speak it, and it would be mapped!

A couple years back, I picked up on Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, then upgraded to version 10.  Neither version plays nice with MindManager 5, 6, 7, or 8!

Fortunately, a great little company has come up with a cheap solution to bridge that gap and the software is called VoxEnable.

Now, I sat down a week ago and created a series of videos showing how VoxEnable made it possible to use Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 with MindManager 8.  It worked beautifully.

Unfortunately, I had my video/audio recording settings cross wired, and the audio of my voice didn’t make it into the video.  Today, I finally got around to making those videos.  They are a little low tech as I created them on the airplane coming out here.   

That itself was a fun little experiment.  I wanted to see how the airplane sound quality might impact Dragon Naturally Speaking.  (End result, no impact at all, it worked great).

The first video is above, and I will have some more videos to follow this as I get a chance to publish them this week, so don’t forget to subscribe to our site if you haven’t already!

Great News!  Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 and MindManager 8 might soon work well together.

I have reviewed in the past the limitations of using Dragon Naturally Speaking with MindManager.  It works, a bit but it doesn’t work nearly as well as either program work alone.  Recognizing this problem a solution has been developed in the form of software that is supposed to bridge the gap and make it possible to run MindManager 8 using Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.

The company, Citnexus, that has created this solution, calls the software VoxEnable.

I’ve just heard about this and written to the company to get more information.  In reviewing the shopping cart, it is less than clear how this software sells or ads on to existing configurations.

I for example own both Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 and MindManger 8.

VoxEnable seems to come bundled with upgrades for both Dragon and MindManager and it comes stand alone.

I could be wrong (as I’ll admit I’m confused by the pricing and product descriptions) but I think if you already have both Dragon and MindManager that the software only costs £29.95.

In the meantime, you can play with Dragon and MindManager 8 together without VoxEnable, but you will not get anything productive done.  Without a boost, the two just are not good enough alone.  I’m hoping that VoxEnable puts them both over the top, but I’ll let you know. . . . 

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I’m still working through my first impressions of the new MindManager 8.  In general, it is a little more than an evolutionary move forward for Mindjet. The player makes it possible for a person creating a mindmap to publish the mindmap in an interactive fashion on the internet or in a pdf file.

You can see an excellent demonstration of this by Andrew Wilcox of Cabre.

One thing that strikes me as a simple player upgrade that would be beneficial, enabling users to view the player in full screen mode.  Ergo, push a button, and view the player temporarily outside of the web page it is located on, like you can with a YouTube video player (and many other video services).  Obviously Adobe supports this functionality, and I’m going to dig into the possibility of creating this option manually in the code.

I’m also curious to test the system to see how it might work with my Western Digital external hard drive.  I’ve recently been working to push all of my data and maps to a central storage system, that I can access via the web.  I’m curious how those relative and permanent hyperlinks in a player map might work hosted essentially on one of these drives.

The IQ Visual Mapping Conference is coming up this October 3rd in Morristown New Jersey. 

The conference will be hosted and led by Brian S. Friedlander, Ph.D. and his professional team of preeminent visual mappers who include: Adam Clayman, Stephanie Diamond, Chuck Frey, Arjen Ter Hoeve, Kyle McFarlin, and Wallace Tait. His assembled team comes from such areas as banking, psychology, manufacturing, business management, marketing and college teaching.
The conference will be held on the campus of the College of St. Elizabeth which is centrally located in Morristown, New Jersey, in close proximity to Newark Liberty International Airport and to Manhattan via New Jersey Transit.

Assistive Technology

I do not personally know if I will be attending or not as I have a slightly competing conference on the other side of the country the weekend before.  However, I would like to meet the speakers, several of whom I’ve known through various mindmapping communities for sometime, but never had the pleasure of meeting in person.

But as these things go, you can’t always make every conference that comes along.  If you are going, or thinking about it, please drop me a comment or an email.  If I can attend (time permitting) I will and don’t want to miss out on something good. 

Gathering together a large number of visual mapping gurus together in one hall has to be a powerful thing, who know what they might conceive, figure out, map out, plan, create, build or fix as a collective, could be finding a solution to oil prices, world hunger, time travel, or maybe something simple like the cheapest and fastest route to and from the airport in Morristown or maybe something kind of odd like charting out the path to creating weight loss pills that work or a list of foods that will increase longevity.

Its hard to say what will be in the ethos, but with so many people that have the ability to think and build together in a visual mapping context, there can’t be too much of a limit on their result.

Today as I cranked up MindManager, I had a sudden angst of dread as I considered something that I needed to do with my MindManager mind maps.  I needed to find my mind maps on my computer, because MindManager doesn’t know how to do this simple function.  I hope Mindjet adds this functionality in MindManager Version 8.

When I use Windows media player from Microsoft or Picasa from Google, those programs are smart enough to go out and search my hard drive for all file types that can be used with them.  MindManager which is a software program that has a proprietary file type is not even smart enough to go find its own files that it creates.

That is a severe problem for users of the software that happened to store the files within sub folders other than the default file folder set up by MindManager, My Maps.  This means that you had to go find every folder that you stored a MindManager map within and link it manually into the program so they can then find your MindManager mindmaps and make them readily available for you within the MindManager program.

This is extremely tedious and time consuming and even worse if you happen to have a hard drive that’s a hundred or 200 or 500 GB in size and you’ve got multiple file folder structures.  I like to keep all of my files for a project together with in one folder instead of putting say the word documents for a project in one folder in the MindManager files for the same project in a different folder.  This makes it easy for me to find and organize files on my computer and it also makes it easy for me to share those files or folders with other users on ever need to either e-mail, file transfer, or upload them to a server somewhere.

But when I organize my files the way that I like to MindManager gets lost, and I tend to lose the maps I’ve created with MindManager.

My request for Mindjet working on version 8 of MindManager

So I have a simple request for the Mindjet team developing MindManager version 8.  Please build a simple little hard drive search engine that can search my computer and find all of my MindManager maps.  It should be too hard to utilize this type of search or index type of program.  They have been around for years and there’s lots of different companies and develop them for their own tools as well as generic tools. 

They are not as old as Roman Columns as technology goes but in the world of software they might as well be that old.  Even columns get an upgrade every now and then, ex. see fiberglass columns.

Last week I was in a hurry and made a rookie mistake.  I was working on a project and needed for some weird reason (using a software program that is not compatible with Firefox - . . . MindManager. .   aahemm. ..  ) to get a copy of all my Firefox bookmarks into some strange and weird program called Internet Explorer 7. 

I had not heard of this program which devotees sometimes call IE7, but I needed to find a way to import in a copy of my Firefox bookmarks, so that I could then use some special function in the desktop software program that I was working with on this special project.

The Problem – I lost my Firefox Bookmarks!

So after I imported bookmarks into this IE7 beast, I noticed about a day later, that I had lost about 80 percent of my bookmarks in Firefox.

Why 80 percent and not 100 percent?

I have no idea.  For some reason the bookmarks in about 100 folders that I had were deleted from Firefox.  They still exist in Internet Explorer which imported them but they were stripped out of Firefox.

So the quick lesson I learned from this, is actually one that I learned a long time ago with IE 6 (yeah I actually had used this beast before, but tried to block it from my memory).  You need to back up your Favorites and Bookmarks to separate special files and folders on a regular basis.  If you add lots of bookmarks often, then you may want to back up more often, if not, maybe quarterly is good enough.

How to back up Firefox Bookmarks

This is pretty easy.  Just go to the Bookmarks button on the Firefox menu, click on the Bookmarks manager.  This will open up a new window and you can now select the export option under the file menu of the Firefox bookmarks menu.  Make sure you send it to a safe place!