Macworld gave a great review of NovaMind (particularly the UI) last week.
The part that I found particularly interesting was this....
"Tools for customizing your mind map are abundant and deep, yet they don’t overwhelm. The many palettes can be docked to the working window or dragged out to float independently. Individual palettes can be collapsed to just a title bar, or removed all together. Click a small button to see a palette’s advanced options and it flips over in a cool Quartz animation. The net result is an interface that is remarkably clean and easy to use despite the large feature set."
We had a continuous problem at NovaMind - how do you add more features without increasing product complexity. I don't think this is specific to NovaMind, in fact it's a common software engineering problem.
The big surprise is that (according to the article) we actually achieved what we set out to achieve. Excuse my skepticism, but it's very rare in software engineering that you get to do this. Usually you come out with something that's either almost there, or not even close but a way awesome bi-product.
Anyway, we did this with NovaMind by:
- Group like controls into separate groups in a separate space (a palette)
- Group those groups by changing the background color of the palette
- Only show palettes that are relevant to the selected item on screen
- Allow the user to customise it...
- User can collapse palettes to hide stuff they don't use
- User can reorder the palettes into the order they like
- User can have the palettes 'docked' in their document window or floating like an inspector
- Making the interface reveal advanced or low used features show up only when you need them. (We did this by 'flipping' the palette to show advanced features).
The resulting interface was this...
BIIIIG thanks to Keith Lang for his help (or rather complete and total input) in creating the quartz composition for the flip.
