What's new for you in Topicscape Pro 2.7?

Many users have written that they want to be able to arrange topics so that the cones or rectangles in the information landscape are sequenced according to their choice, rather than being in alphabetical order ... or date ... or any of the other sequences provided in past versions. Enough of excuses, we've made it happen at last. Please note that this is about changing sequence, not the relationships between topics.

And many users have said that they want a more fine-grained control over the detail shown: Whether children and grandchildren of a topic are shown or not. Topicscape has always supported three levels of detail, but the level selected applies to everything visible. Now you can control the level of detail shown, topic by topic.

This version also prepares some tables for future versions by adding slots for task and project management information into the database. After the conversion, your Topicscape files will still be compatible with versions 2.0 to 2.6.

Topic re-arrangement

What you can re-arrange

You can re-arrange topics when they are direct children of the Current Topic only. Any children and grand-children move with the selected topic.

What is the effect of the re-arrangement?

Once you have made the re-arrangement, the revised sequence will also be used when the topics appear as siblings, grandparents and so on.

You can still select one of the fixed-sequence views, like sort by name or date, and you can go back to your manual re-arrangement any time.

Re-arranging

To reposition a topic, click on the cone or rectangle and hold the mouse button down until its color changes. (Or right-click and select "Re-arrange sequence of this topic", or hover over the topic and press Alt+r.)

You won't be able to initiate re-arrangement if the Shift key is also held down, or if Caps Lock is on, because then you'll be using Quickzoom.

If, when you start this operation, the topics are arranged according to one of the fixed sequences (alphabetical, for example) Topicscape will warn that it's about to change to manual sequence. In that case, if you have previously made some manual sequence changes, the topics you see will jump to that arrangement, before you make the new change.

There are two ways to move the marked topic or: With the mouse wheel or the cursor movement keys.

Mouse wheel

Move the mouse wheel to move the selected topic group up and down its present rank. When it reaches the end of the rank, it moves to the next rank, and if the new position is off the screen, your viewpoint will be adjusted so that you can see the topic being moved.

Cursor keys

The up and down arrow cursor movement keys work in much the same way, moving the selected group up and down the ranks. The left and right arrows move it across the ranks.

Completing

To confirm that the topic is in the desired position, click on the topic or press Enter. The topic or topic group will then revert to its normal color.

The Esc (escape) key cancels a move in progress, and Ctrl+z will undo a completed move.

Defaults

If you have never made any manual topic re-arrangements in a Topicscape, the topics will be sorted by topic name. There are other sort sequences in the View menu, of course, and you may have chosen one of those.

Once you have made a manual re-arrangement, Topicscape shows topics in the order of your chosen sequence until you choose one of the preset sequences.

Adding topics

When a new topic is added to a Topicscape that has already had some manual re-arrangement, it will be placed as the last topic in its rank (that is, front right).

Hiding individual topic's children

Something else that users have often asked for is the ability to avoid showing children of certain topics in some cases.

This is similar to the functionality of the F10 key, but it applies to a specific topic displayed under a specific parent instead of a whole 'Scape.

There is a new item in the right-click topic menu "Hide children". This can be applied to children and grandchildren of the Current Topic, and to siblings of the Current Topic.

When a user hides children of a topic, an orange plus image like that on the right will be shown on that topic. When orange, it is an active button which, when clicked, will again show all the children that were hidden.

If F10 or F11 is in effect smaller topics will be hidden, so 'Hide children' will not be accessible for their parent topics.

Database change

A conversion is needed for each Topicscape, the first time you run it with version 2.7. This takes just a few seconds, and leaves a copy of the unconverted file in the Topicscape's folder.

What was new in Pro 2.6

There wasn't a What's New for 2.6, so for completeness here was the main change:

A most useful new option was introduced to the installer to add two buttons to your browser toolbar (Internet Explorer or Firefox). One of these buttons will send a shortcut to the page you're viewing to the Topicscape Box, the other will send an instruction to Topicscape Box to make an MHT (Internet Archive) file of the page you're viewing. You can later open the Topicscape Box and drag them to the appropriate Topicscape. The MHT file will include the panel that Topicscape adds (and browsers do not) to show the source of the page.

You will see a new panel during installation that allows you to choose whether to install these buttons, and for which browsers.

There were also some bug fixes in that release.