Paul Foreman and Adam Sicinski are two of the finest hand-drawn mind mappers active on the web recently.  Now they seem to be in competition to see who can produce the most maps and the best maps aimed at helping their readers achieve personal-development, self-improvement and study.

The Topicscape Mindmaps Directory is panting along behind, just to find out what comes next.  Today’s update has 4 new mind maps with a score of Sicinski 3, Foreman 1.  Since I started following these two, the overall score has totalled Sicinski 20, Foreman 37.  

But it’s not all about numbers, trust me!  The imagination, artistry, breadth of concept and the depth of their accompanying articles puts them both in the top class.  Here are two examples closer up than the Directory shows them, though to see them full size you’ll have to click through to the original sites.

Link: Paul Foreman’s De-Clutter

Link: Adam Sicinki’s Study Matrix 101

The newest entries in the Mindmaps Directories:

A useful new version of 3D Topicscape Pro, the information organizer and 3D mind mapper, is now available that implements four specific requests from our users.  As usual this update is free to all who have licenses or are still in their free trial period.

1. Topicscape is noted for the visibility it gives of tasks and information.  Now you can see even more at one time: Choose the number of columns for Current Topic’s children - previously four, now you can show five or six as well.  This stays at four columns until you change it in the Options panel (User Preferences).

2. Reduce distraction: Minimize the Topicscape window to an icon while you work on other tasks.  This is a customizable option that defaults to Not Hidden, so you need to take action to see it.

3. Get more of your information when importing from PersonalBrain: For PB4 users, we have enhanced PB import to Topicscape beyond the limits of the data exported by PersonalBrain itself.  Importing from the .pba file exported by PB is still an option.

4. Navigate large Topicscapes even more quickly: The programming for “Make Current” has been optimized to provide a faster re-calculation of the scene when the user selects a different topic to be the Current Topic.  This is particularly noticeable with large Topicscapes (several thousand topics).

You can read all the details at the What’s New page:

And you can download the new 3D Topicscape Pro installer from the usual place.

We hope you like the new version, 1.59.  Within the next month, we hope to release an exciting new Beta version those who have registered with our Beta program.

Roy

There are some more outstanding mind maps from Adam Sicinski on line now at the Mindmaps Directory. 

The new ones will be helpful to students encountering Shakespeare’s plays for the first time.  There are more than I’ve shown here.

And there’s a rather special bubble diagram by Michael Petiford about the development of art through print making.

Roy

We check TopicCrunch against all three major search engines daily.   On Saturday April 19^th 2008, TopicCrunch started recording no hits for any search on MSN.  This is because the SERPs (search engine result pages) had changed the part of their format that TopicCrunch uses to extract the results.

TopicCrunch has now been brought into line with the new format and an updated installer version is available at the usual place:

http://www.topicscape.com/TopicCrunch/download-topiccrunch.php

There is no need to uninstall TopicCrunch first, just install the new version on top of the old.

Regards

Roy

Adam Sicinski just pointed me towards his website studymatrixart.com, in case I felt they had a place in the Mindmaps Directory and I found a wealth of outstandingly-drawn mind maps there.  Well worth a visit and, for now, all on the Directory’s front page.

These maps have a focus on life skills: time management, study, improving memory, relationships, handling stress, weight loss and happiness.

Roy

The Mindmaps Directory has taken a leap in size.  Now it has 877 maps from all over the web.  Unlike other libraries that make exagerated claims but don’t let you browse to see how many there really are (only search for a term or see  ‘popular’ ones) you can explore our full directory - page by page. 

Hand-picked, classified by map type and tagged, these offer a growing and serious resource for students and businesses.  So you can search by word, click the tag cloud to see all on a given subject, or narrow what you see to just a particular type - concept maps, say, mindmaps, or tree diagrams.

Roy

AN EXTREMELY RARE BUT CRITICAL BUG AFFECTING 3D TOPICSCAPE PRO AND LITE HAS BEEN FIXED

New versions with fixes are now on line: 3D Topicscape Pro 1.57 and 3D Topicscape Lite 1.11

A user reported a problem resulting from an action that we had never anticipated: If you drag a partition (that is, a logical disk drive, not a folder) into 3D Topicscape Pro 1.56 or earlier, or Topicscape Lite 1.10 or earlier, the software gave an error report and lost files and folders.  In the nearly two years that users have been making 3D mind maps and organizing their information with Topicscape, we believe no one has tried this operation on a partition before, or even thought of it.  Fortunately, we were able to help the user to rescue all his files.

Do not try the action described with any versions of 3D Topicscape Pro before 1.57 or Lite before version 1.11 because you WILL loose files and folders.

Using the import functions to make a new Topicscape or a floating topic from a partition was already prevented by earlier versions of Topicscape Pro, but not Lite.

3D Topicscape Pro version 1.57 and Topicscape Lite version 1.11 now detect and prevent such a drag operation and give an explanatory message.

To import an entire partition into Topicscape, you could make a new folder in the root directory of the partition, and drag all the other folders into it.  Then drag that single folder to Topicscape.  Note that generally an entire partition would make a very large Topicscape, and if you chose the move or copy option, the contents of the whole partition would end up as a sub-sub-folder of your ‘My Topicscapes’ folder.

You may download the latest Topicscape installers here:
http://www.topicscape.com/download5.php

Roy

P.S.   A note to avoid uncertainty: This does not apply to the Student Edition, because that does not support dragging in folders.

The April (print) edition of PC World will have a review of 3D Topicscape Lite.  PC World’s site here:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,69200/description.html
already has 3D Topicscape Lite on it.

Argey

Dragging and dropping of files and favicons into Topicscape has been re-designed.  Difficulties with this action had been observed occasionally on a few computers and the computer code for this process has been re-written.

Some minor bug fixes have also been done.

The new version is here: http://www.topicscape.com/download5.php

Roy

Staying up to date:
You can sign up to learn about updates to our different products here: 
3D Topicscape Lite
3D Topicscape Pro
3D Topicscape SE

Email addresses given will be used for this purpose only.  We do not spam and we remove addresses for our list when requested.

Topicscape.com’s  amazing mindmaps directory has just grown. More than 700 mindmaps assiduously gathered from across the globe.

This is the only mind maps library that allows browsing, filtering by map type (we have spidergrams, bubble diagrams, concept maps, pure, pure mind maps and other types), and is fully tagged with a tag cloud filter and search by subject capability.  Each map is linked to its original source.

So useful for business mappers, students and creative types, looking for fresh ideas and a new approach.

To see the new maps, go to the end (page 48, with 15 maps per page) and work back to page 39 at least.

Roy