It’s been a few months since WikIT published an extensive series of information maps prepared by medical practitioners and students studying medicine.
Recently, some excellent charts started appearing in WikIT’s uploaded files. Then a small entry was added to Medical profession’s use of mind mapping. I had to do a little detective work to get in touch with the uploader, and check that he held the copyright, but once he assured me he did, I was able to add this excellent and detailed new resource as a separate article Medical mind map sources – Zoom out – Pharmacotherapy. These go well beyond mind maps, into the field of information landscapes.
They are the work of Maha Atef, a Clinical Pharmacist and a Healthcare Quality Specialist based in Cairo, Egypt, who has his own site devoted to the topic.
Imagine holding a virtual highlighter in your hand as you read web pages, documents, or PDF files. You highlight sections of text you want to save or indicate images to preserve, and with a familiar keystroke, send them to Topicgrazer.
It works with web sites, text, Word documents, PDF files, spreadsheets and more – anything, in fact, that can be saved to the clipboard. Each snippet is headed with its source if it came from a web site or Word, for example.
By the time you have finished, all the portions you select are extracted and gathered in one document that you can open with Wordpad, MS Word or OpenOffice Writer.
To fly: Use keyboard cursor arrow keys (then add Shift, Alt or Ctrl).
Press the Home key to return to the starting position.
Slow zoom with + and - on the number pad.
Dramatic Quickzoom: Hold Shift, then click on topic cones.
Hover over topics to see …
details in the Details Panel,
an enter button, and
sometimes an “open link” button.
Click a topic cone to reorganize the landscape around it.
Don’t forget you need an up-to-date driver for your 3D graphics hardware for WebView to work (just like Topicscape). Here’s reference for Troubleshooting.
Yes, it’s left its Beta status and gone gold: You can now download 3D Topicscape Pro 2.5.
Differences;
What’s new;
Pro licenses
‘Help’ migrates to wiki;
User-made video.
The differences from 2.15 are very significant. Most noticeable is that it allows an almost instant switch between 3D and 2D views.
But also, it has options for flying like Google Earth (in 3D) or Cooliris (in 2D – see above), improved navigation and user controls, much greater visibility of files and file previews from the 3D and 2D views, enhanced MindManager import, and the capability of moving the main “My Topicscapes” folder around without re-installing and manually copying files. It has now been tested for Windows 7 compatibility.
The illustrated “What’s New” page has details of a couple of additional capabilities that weren’t mentioned in the Beta What’s new.
If you have a Topicscape Pro 2.0 license, you will be able to run vsn. 2.5 straight away – it’s a free upgrade. A reminder: Topicscape Pro 1.0 users can upgrade for a modest $29.99 charge by clicking the Buy Now button. If you accidentally load a Pro 1 license into Pro 2, Topicscape will fail to load some components and won’t run. In that case, you’ll have to uninstall Topicscape Pro 2 and install it again.
With the release of 2.5, we have decided to mostly externalize the Help system. Topicscape Pro itself now contains a 20-page Help of essential information, but the main help is half-way through being transferred to the Topicscape Wiki – a few more days and we hope to have that done. It has a fully hyperlinked Contents page. This means we can update the help without having to release a new installer. If you still want the Help on your PC for offline reference, you can download the PDF.
One of our users, David Esko, made a great vid: http://is.gd/5phL4 Take a look!
This one really appeals to my association of knowledge and information with landscape (which is where Topicscape came from). For pointing it out, I have to thank Jeremy Wagstaff, who reviewed Topicscape a year ago in the Wall Street Journal.
