NovaMind: A Beautiful Program Marred by Bugginess

I recently had the opportunity to test NovaMind, a mind mapping program that has great potential but is unfortunately plagued by numerous issues. Despite its beauty and ease of use, I was disappointed by the frequent crashes, slowdowns, and lack of certain features.

When I first started testing NovaMind, I fell in love with its lovely outline view and auto-numbering feature for nodes. However, I was frustrated to discover that it didn't allow me to export the numbering. This was a major drawback, as I rely heavily on exporting my mind maps to use them in other applications.

Other features, such as keyboard commands for adding new child and sibling nodes, were also hit-or-miss. Sometimes they would work intermittently or stop working altogether. The toggles for expanding and collapsing the mind map also malfunctioned at times.

One of the most annoying issues I encountered was file size bloat. Even minor changes to a file could cause it to balloon from 100K to 600K in size. This made it difficult to work with large files, as NovaMind would often become unresponsive.

On the plus side, NovaMind does offer some useful features, such as the ability to export the outline to text or Word format. This is particularly useful when planning a larger project like a book. I also appreciated the option to switch between mind map and outline views, or view both simultaneously.

In addition, NovaMind allows you to select items in the outline view and copy them into an RTF document, which maintains the correct indent hierarchy but doesn't number the items. You can then import these documents into applications like Microsoft Excel for further analysis.

Overall, while NovaMind has many great features and is a beautiful program to use, its bugginess and lack of certain features make it difficult to recommend at this time. I hope that future updates will address these issues and allow users to fully appreciate the potential of this mind mapping tool.

Novamind insert word document