At last, our Student Edition is ready for release!

We’ve been working on this for over a year and it got pushed to the background with all the updates to 3D Topicscape Pro, and other developments that we’re not ready to uncover yet.

This is a fun Topicscape with brilliant, glowing colors, stars, galaxies and planets in the sky, but the underlying serious ability to make 3D concept and mind maps to support students in their homework, term papers and research on the web.  And did we mention it’s FREE?  This is a Beta version, but that’s not why it’s free.  It’s going to remain free when it comes out of Beta and goes live.

You don’t need a Beta User’s account, just read all about this new 3D mindmapper, download it here and off you go. 

Worried about the expiry at the end of this year?  Don’t — that’s just to encourage our users to move on to the next version, or to the live version when it’s available.   We don’t want you using an old version when there’s a new one available.  Oh, and it’s a little bit selfish: We’d rather not receive reports of known and fixed bugs from people using out-of-date versions.

We hope you like it, and we look forward to your comments, plaudits and brickbats.

Roy

Those of us who spend our lives thinking in 3D on computer screens - 3D mindmaps, here at Topicscape HQ - are always fascinated by the interaction with a 3D environment, displayed on a 2D computer screen.

Even more interesting than navigating in a 3D landscape is making a complex and detailed 3D object in the first place.            

At Brown University they’ve made significant progress.  There’s a piece at ZDNet about this - click here.  For the full paper at Brown’s, try this link.

Roy

After a long period in the wilderness, SiteAdvisor have put us back to green status.     We had some links to sites that were green on SiteAdvisor when we made them and they turned red.  Without any warning, SiteAdvisor made our site red as a result, despite showing 28 green downloads from our site and no problems from our software (all zero on the nuisance-meter).

Topicscape.com went red on 3rd August,  we removed those links on 3rd August and made strenuous efforts to get SiteAdvisor to acknowledge that.  SiteAdvisor got round to correcting its results today, 18th September.

 Roy

I found the Mindmapping 2.0 blog a few days ago, and liked the initiative.  Jonathan Sapir was asking for guest bloggers to comment and fill out the discussion that he has already provided a useful framework for, so I stepped up to the plate.

My first post is there now - it’s about trends from web-based to desktop mindmapping software.

I hope to be contributing more thoughts in the coming days.

Roy