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This video will show some of the power of Topicscape in revealing information in 3D.
I'm going to show you how the contents of a collection of nested folders can be seen
clearly when you drag them in to make a Topicscape. Here is a collection of references that was
carefully built up, organized and is highly valued. It happens to be about technology,
but it could be on any subject you chose. And this is how you'd normally see it - in
a folder. The visibility is not great. Drill down, drill
down again..... Dragging that folder into Topicscape presents
a different view - one that makes a lot more visible at once, and allows instant zooming
in on an area. This is really easy.
I started with an almost empty Topicscape. I could also use the Import item in the File
menu, but in this case, drag and drop is quicker. The sole topic has the same name as the folder
I'm dragging in. Topicscape recognizes that and asks if I want to merge them, or treat
this as usual which would be to make the dragged-in folder into a separate topic. I choose to
merge them. Then I have the choice of moving all the files
and folders into this Topicscape's folder, copying them all there, or linking the items
in this Topicscape to the files in their present position. As a new user you may want to choose
"Link" until you're comfortable that Topicscape actually does handle your files well.
We wait a short time while Topicscape traverses the folders, finds out what's there, builds
the same structure in its database and records all the file information.
Soon we have a much more visual representation of what it has found, which is very different
from a collection of nested folders. Now that all the new topics are in place, I can press
the Home key and we shall see a fuller view. This function of the Home key is a useful
to remember. You will never get lost. Earlier I drilled down on a folder. Now I
can zoom in on that area to see its 3D equivalent. To do that, I hold Shift, and click on the
parent topic of the item drilled down to earlier. This gives a closer view of that area.
If I release the Shift key before I release the mouse key, we stay in that position. Then
on the topic I drilled down to before, when we were looking at the folder, I now select
the Current Topic icon, which is here, and the whole information landscape is reorganized
around this item. It becomes what we call the Current Topic.
We can go inside topics and see what we have there. The red flash icon takes us there.
In this case we have three Word documents and some HTML. Click on many kinds of documents
and you can see previews. And now I'm pressing the backspace key on
my keyboard to go back outside. Now you can start improving your information
by taking advantage of Topicscape's multi-parent links and loose associations to bring out
connections and ideas you hadn't spotted until you had an information landscape, but that's
for another video. (look out for "organizing the information landscape")
I should mention that you can switch the Halo menu off, and you'll probably want to do that
once you are used to the controls. There are check boxes in the Halo Help menu to let you
switch off the context Help like this, and the Halo menu itself like this. Then you'll
use the right-click context menu for most of the same controls.