@lizamyers, the noted Vermont artist, tweeted that she was “Listening to Andean music and talking with my students about the Machu Picchu trip next summer!” and it brought something to mind that I hadn’t thought of for many years.
In the late 60s, around the time of the first Moon landing, I was working in Switzerland. When I first arrived, I stayed for a couple of months in a large apartment block in Nyon, near the shores of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva to most English speakers).
My neighbour, Louis, was a real character. He kept reptiles in his apartment: Poisonous and constrictor snakes, a small crocodile in a tank, a large iguana. The iguana escaped once, and for days was sunning itself on the exterior ledges of the building up on the 10th floor.
But that’s not what this story is about. It’s Louis brother who is the protagonist. He was an anthropologist who studied South American culture, but I had the story from Louis.
He was working high in the Andes, in a camp with a couple of people native to the area. After a few days, they beat him up and ran away in the night taking everything of value.
This was long before mobile phones and GPS, and he was soon wandering lost, without water and, after several days, in a desperate condition. Severely dehydrated, he survived only because he was lucky enough to be found by some Amerindians who took him back to their village and nursed him back to health.
He stayed with them for a while, and found himself enchanted by their music. He was a very competent clarinet player–according to Louis, at professional standard–and learned some of the instruments and pieces while in the village.
Eventually he recovered, left the village and went back to the city where he started to research the music. But he found that it was fading fast and in danger of dying completely. He decided to do something about it, and started a campaign with the government to save the music and eventually got support. If you’ve come across these strolling groups or heard recordings of Peruvian and Bolivian music, and who hasn’t, you’ll know that this was successful.
Now, you’ll hear it all over the world. You can see (and hear) Bolivian musicians in the Paris Metro, in the London Underground and even in China.
He formed a group and toured, eventually making a handsome living off it. Louis told me he once hired a truck, filled it with sacks of flour and drove it up to the village where they had nursed him back to life.
That’s the story as I had it. Maybe the music wasn’t dying out. Maybe it was, and Louis brother wasn’t its saviour, but I have a 10″ vinyl record of Los Jairas from the 60s and on its cover there’s a group of ponchoed musicians standing round a Caucasian clarinetist who Louis identified as his brother. And the name matches.
3D-Scape is pleased to announce the availability of a Beta version of Topicscape Pro that adds a 2D option to Topicscape for occasions when smaller, simpler bodies of information are to be organized.
Unique? Well Topicscape was already that, but now it’s even further ahead of the pack of software that organizes information visually.
Just about all of the functions of Topicscape in 3D are accessible in the new 2D view – with the exception of the broad view of the landscape, and the “sense of place” that tells you where you are instantly. On a small or simple Topicscape, we know it’s not always necessary to have that broad view.
Version 2.5 of Topicscape Pro lets you flip between 2D and 3D as you wish, see contents of topics pop up in the Map or ‘Scape views, and see previews there as well.
2D Map option. Flying is like Cooliris®
2D maps are customizable, and individual modified appearances can be tied to a particular Topicscape.
In 2D select one of your own images for the background.
Flip backwards and forwards from 2D to 3D as you wish with Ctrl+w.
Optional new Google® Earth-style controls to fly and zoom in 3D.
See contents of topics anywhere; from contents list, open occurrences;
See previews of occurrences wherever an occurrence item can be seen (where Windows makes one available to Topicscape).
Topic name plates can have black lettering on a white background or the reverse.
If you have no login information, please give us some information about your PC via the application for Beta User form (to help us support you better), and if your computer looks as if it will run Topicscape we will issue you a login account.
License
The Beta version will work without a license, whether you have previously installed Topicscape or not, until December 15th. We plan to release the live 3D Topicscape Pro 2.5 or a new Beta before that date.
Beta 2.5 will co-exist with any live version of Topicscape you have on your computer. It does not change the format of your Topicscape data from version 2.15 and you can run any live version of Topicscape you may have installed on your PC at any time.
For purchasers of Topicscape Pro 2, version 2.5 will be a free upgrade when released to live. Purchasers of Topicscape Pro 1 will need to purchase an upgrade license to take advantage of the new capabilities of v.2.5.
We’re keen to hear what you think, whether you find any problems, and what suggestions you have. You can contact us at beta [at] topicscape [dot] com for help and direct feedback, or use Topicscape’s Google Group.
We hope you enjoy the new version.
Roy
Admin stuff
Purchaser or past Beta User with no login details? Please enter your email address on the Forgot password page here: http://www.topicscape.com/beta/forgetPwd.php
Please use the email address from which you previously applied to be a Beta user (or if you bought Topicscape, the email used for that).
Checking for new Beta installers:
When you first run Topicscape, if you accept its suggestion that it check for new versions one run in each 24 hours, you will be able to keep up with all fixes in this beta version.
Mind mapping and concept mapping have been attracting increasing attention over the past year, but there’s a problem for mappers who are approaching it for the first time.
These thinking and organizing aids have many variants, and some advocates believe theirs is the only ‘acceptable’ one.Maybe they think they’ll have fewer people buying their books or software and attending their courses if they don’t claim that theirs as the only right way.
Now hold tight, I’m going to explain the many reasons that these mind mapping advocates individually have often got to be wrong.The first and most obvious is that they claim different, sometimes contradictory, things. They can’t all be right!
Some say that hand drawn, paper mind maps are the only way, others that you have to use software.Some say ‘one word per node’, others that nodes should contain complete thoughts.Some like to propose clip art and images all over the map, others like simplicity.Some insist on a diagram where everything radiates out from the center, others like any node to be connectable to any other, maybe with descriptions of the relationship.
It’s not hard to see that the range of uses and needs, the different audience sizes and expectations, and the wide selection of tools you can use to make mind or concept maps, leads us to the second reason: One approach cannot possibly fit all cases.
Uses of mind maps stretch from learning and inquiry by school kids, through project planning and control or organizing information in business, to a framework for thinking, innovation and creativity. Maps and the process of making them can be inspirational, but they can also be used when what you most need is reflective and careful analysis. Groups can work together to build a concept map with rigorous thinking to capture corporate knowledge, or they can brainstorm together to throw fresh ideas at a mind map when rigorous thinking will kill the flow, and so must be pushed to the end of the session. The same type of map is rarely (never?) going to be suitable for both.
The ‘audience’ for any one map may range from just the person making it, through a small collaborative team using it for a discussion and future action, to a large group viewing a business presentation.
The circumstances in which the map is made may vary from scratches on a handy piece of paper in an out-of-office discussion, through simple, web-based applications like bubbl.us or more complex ones like MindMeister, iPhone apps like iBlueSky to rich desktop applications like MindManager or even 3D mind mapping applications like Topicscape.
Earlier I said that individually the gurus are often wrong — collectively, though, they have rich ideas, deep experience and are right:Depending on your circumstances, you can cherry pick to find one whose dogma is right for you and for the task in hand.
Don’t let anyone tell you what type of map to choose, pick the one that’s suitable for your audience, your tools, your purpose, oh – and the type you like most.
Suggestions about how you might make your choice can be found at WikIT the Mind Mapping Wiki: Choosing a map type
One final point, have you noticed how many blog posts you can find that claim to introduce you to mind maps but do not show you a single map or any other visual form of presentation?It might make you think that these bloggers don’t really believe in what they write about.
This is Roy Grubb, InformationTamer and editor of WikIT.
You can follow me on Twitter @roygrubb for more on mind mapping.
Today, we had an inquiry from a freelance writer about what Topicscape could do for him and what uses we had seen it put to.
When he wrote back, he described the reply as ‘kickass’, so I didn’t feel I could let it go to waste. After all, he’s a writer and I’m not, so who am I to judge? This is what I told him:
If you are gathering information for a writing asignment, particularly if it is a complex topic with many ramifications, you will have a need to research the subject, scope out how far the article will explore the terrain, and collect information to support your writing.
Topicscape lets you do these tasks simultaneously, and in a way that doing one supports the others.
As you research and collect reference material, you lay it out in Topicscape’s 3D landscape that reflects how you feel the topics are related. You place the web pages, text files, images or just simple notes under Topicscape’s control at the same time. Topicscapes can be very large – thousands of topics and tens of thousands of file attachments is common for serious users.
Yet the 3D landscape keeps complex collections of information under control and quickly accessible. You can fly and zoom around the landscape, focus the scene on a different area, search by words, or navigate through the hierarchy of topics on those occasions when the right word or phrase just doesn’t come to mind.
A significant and unique property of Topicscape’s visual presentation of the information is that you start to recognize where you are. Finding reference material can often feel like looking for something in your home or neighborhood–using your sense of place–and this saves time.
If you are undertaking fiction assignments, Topicscape probably has less relevance – I would recommend Liquid Story Binder in that case. Mind you, writers who develop complex worlds and characters that span many books (Tolkein, Pratchet, or the scriptwriters for Star Wars, say) might have found Topicscape’s information organizing capabilities very useful.
We had a plea from Enrique in SpainMexico! (oops … thanks for the correction Enrique) to support his searches for words that included accents and diacritics such as à and ñ . Topicscape has been able to display these OK from the beginning, but searching for something like señor only worked when the word or phrase was in quotes – and that was slower and less flexible than the regular Topicscape search.
Now, searching with a wide variety of commonly-used Western European characters is fully supported in 3D Topicscape Pro 1.63. It can handle searches for words including all the following Latin alphabet characters with diacritics and ligatures:
The search will ignore case, so a search for señor will match a topic called SEÑOR MARQUES.
Easier license installation
When you buy 3D Topicscape, we send you a license file by email. In the past this file had to be renamed and placed in the correct location manually. Now we have added an item to the Help menu to do it for you. Just drag the license file attachment from the email to the Desktop on your computer, select the “Install license . . .” item from the Help menu and the license will be loaded to the right place. You might well ask “How can I do that if Topicscape has expired and I can’t start it to get to the Help Menu?” Well, there’s a new item on the main programs menu: Start > All programs > License Installer. That will do the same thing.
Import from Wkimindmap fixed
Have you tried Wikimindmap? If not, give it a go, it’s great fun. It will take a Wikipedia article and turn it into an on-line mindmap that you can browse through. And it can export the results to a FreeMind mindmap.
We recently found that an unusual structure in the FreeMind files it generates gave incorrect results when imported to Topicscape. The files do not include some data (a node attribute) that Topicscape expected to be there. This has been worked around now.
Bug fix
We also found that Topic group coloring* was broken. If you selected the option to color topics to show how they are grouped, next time you opened Topicscape, the setting had changed to ‘Each topic to have its own color’.
* Topic group coloring is set as follows: Tools > Options > Skin > Flag and color usage > Free choice of topic colors > Set topic colors according to topic groups
This is a collection of 3D Topicscape hints, Windows and software fixes, and information about where Topicscape Personal Edition and other editions are heading.
