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The Amazing World of Online Apps
- We Continue The 14th Anniversary
Sale 5 More Days!
- Mindware Applications Go Online: A
Look The Best By Bruce Ehrlich
- ++ July Plans: 15 Back-Issues Of The Mind Media Review That You Liked The Most Will Go Online
We are now
halfway through the year at Mind Media. The year started with
our launch of the Mindware Forum, which has now become one of
our most popular features, So in this issue, we spotlight the
20 stories that forum readers have chosen as their favorites.
May marked the 15th Anniversary of the first Mindware
Catalog. We
offered you a special sale on Mind Prober and
our Best-Seller
Software Bundle.
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As
many of you know, May marked the 14th Anniversary of the first
Mindware Catalog. In our last issue, we told the story of
Mind
Prober: the program that started the Mindware
Revolution.
We also offered both Mind Prober and our
Top Twenty Best-Sellers
from the Mindware Catalog with a
free Mind Prober at our lowest
prices of the year. Your
response was great but now we are at
the beginning of July
and many people have requested that extend
the special so
they can get a copy of Mind Prober and have
experience
what makes Mind
Prober such a winner.
So for the
NEXT FIVE DAYS ONLY , until the end of the Holiday
Weekend
on the Seventh of July, I'm again offering our
Anniversary
Prices. The Forth of July marks the our countries
historical revolution and if you take advantage of our
sale
right now, it may also mark a personal revolution in
your own
life as you have the Mindware expereince and
learn
to succeed in a down econonomy.
BE SURE TO GET
MIND PROBER 3 & CELEBRATE OUR 14TH ANNIVERSARY SALE
HOT LINKS: http://mindmedia.com/catalog/pub/bundles.html
http://mindmedia.com/probind.html
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MINDWARE APPLICATIONS GO ONLINE -- A LOOK AT THE FIVE
AMONG THE BEST
by Bruce Ehrlich
I ended the feature
sstory, Mind Prober: The Program That
Started the Mindware
Revolution in our las tinssue by discussing
the new online
applications that are supplementing and even
replacing the
ones we like to put on our hard disks. So in this
Mind
Media Review No. 46, I want to begin Part I of a two part
series looking what may be a phase in the future
development of
Mindware. In past issues, I've mentioned
some of these sites but
I wish to include them here again
as I want to give you a taste
of the best of what the web
has to offer in this exciting new
area. So to cross the
gap between yesterday and tomorrow, we
will begin by
revisiting a topic discussed a little over a year
ago in
Mind Media Review -- "Mindware" Online
Applications.
When I began the Mindware catalog in
1988, my intention was to
create a central community and
marketplace where the then infant
field of Mindware could
establish plant roots. At the time, most
software stores
or catalogs had no place for what I called
Mindware and
others psychology software or self-improvement
software.
It didn't even seem to belong in the Home and Gardens
section when that appeared. To this very day, there really
isn't
a special place for one of fastest growing and
potentialy most
important uses for computers as
information processors and
computers as communication
devices. That is why my company has
been around for 14
years -- I was a bit ahead of my time.
We didn't want
to develop new applications but instead to make
available
the work of the many innovative psychologists who
partnered with programmers to create the early software
programs. When I publish the Mindware Story - - a book
scheduled
for the Spring of 2003, some of bix shots and
screen shots from
those early programs will put a smile on
your face. It was like
those fellows who tried to make
flying machines twenty years
before the Wright Brothers
developed the airplane. They did some
good stuff but they
couln't quite lift you off the ground. Yet,
they were
early predicessors of what will eventually become
important tools for human development and some have
speculated
that they will become our companions in the
future evolution of
life and consciousness.
When I
put the Mindware Catalog online as part of the Mind Media
Life- Enhancement Network, there wasn't many others
around. But
with eight years, many of the same software
developers and
equipment manufacturers that I featured in
the Mindware
Catalog/Mindware Review are now online and
now have online
applications with features that they could
never have imagined
back in those days of internal
computer speakers and CGA
graphics.
Online
Applications and Web Based Services were a dream back
then. Each software had to have its own quirky operating
system
and drivers and wouldn't always run the way it
should because
each computer was configured so
differently. But with online
applications, your connection
to the Internet takes you to a
server that doesn't care
whether your running OS 10, Linux or
Windows XP. Indeed,
as the Internet has evolved, broad standards
are beginning
to make the dream we had back in those chaotic
days of
spending less time on rebooting and more time on
learning
or creating attainable.
So let's look at some of these
online applications, while
remembering that they are
simply the very early implimentations
of what the future
may hold.
1) THE ULTIMATE PERSONALITY TEST is a
perfect example of a
Mindware application that has made
the leap from CD-ROM to
online application. When Virtual
Knowledge, the company that
made the Ultimate Personality
Test into one of the best-selling
Mindware genre programs
became Smarter Kids, they sold the
rights for its use to
Emode -- a site which features a number of
sophisticated
mental and psychological tests in wide range of
areas.
So now instead of having to install the program from a
CD-ROM,
you can use it whenever you like on a per-use
basis on Emode.
http://www.qksrv.net/click-1099834-7201408
on Emode.com. To
experience the Deluxe Personality Test
firsthand, just tune your
browser to http://www.qksrv.net/image-1099834-7201408.
For
those of you who missed the last issue, here is how I
described the Deluxe Personality Test. at the end of the
the
Mind Prober Story:
Among the top selections
Virtual Knowledge Series there is the
DELUXE EDITION
PERSONALITY TEST
–http://mindmedia.com/customer3.html
which is based on Carl
Jung’s personality model. The
program’s test incorporates both
the Myers-Briggs® and
Keirseian models of personality theory
which many people
are familiar with from the books Please
Understand Me or
Type Talk by Otto Krieger & Janet M. Thuesen
first
published in 1992. Both used the original Jungian 16
personality types.
Those two books also fit into
Mindware history as Please
Understand Me by David Keirsey,
Marilyn Bates was a best selling
hit when it came out in
1978 later was published as DOS
software by Cambridge
Career Products and actually was one of
our top selling
programs for several years. David Keirsey has
published a
follow up and you can take the online version of the
Please Understand Me test if you sign up as a member of
the
“Advisor team. Com” web site. Typewatching was a
software
program we based on that version of Jung’s basic
type system and
you can find out more about where that
group is at
http://www.typetalk.com.
Both
use a deceptively simple personality system developed by
Dr. Carl Jung in the 1920’s. He had four “poles” which he
rated
people on: Introversion Vis.. Extroversion, Thinking
vis.
Feeling, Intuition vis. Sensation, and Judgment vis.
Perception.
Several of these categories are self-
explanatory. Introvert
like to keep to themselves and a
few others while extroverts are
the life of the party.
Thinking types make decisions based more
on the “head”
while feeling types are based more on the “heart.”
If this
has you confused, I suggest reading one of the books,
taking one of the seminars or even taking the online test
mentioned above.
We sell it in our SuperStar Suite
of Virutal Knowledge's Five
Time Best- Selling CD-ROMs but
you can now try it on the web!
2) http://www.goalpro.com/index.cfm?ID=50571
I've written a lot
in previous issues about GoalPro -
which I consider one of the
most helpful software programs
I've used to help me organize for
success. I'm featuring
it here again because you've got to look
around the site
to find that in addition to the software
version, there's
an online version of GoalPro you can purchase
as a
subscription which allows anyone including Mac and Linux
users to use this significant program. Here's what I wrote
in my
review:
The people who publish GoalPro 5.0
calls it "The most effective
success management
application available" and the funny thing is
-- they may
be right! GoalPro software in tandem with Microsoft
Outlook is the combo that I use. But you don't have to use
GoalPro on a PC. The people at GoalPro have kept up with
the
state-of-the-art and are offering GoalPro with most of
its
features intact as an online application. So Macintosh
and Linux
users as well as anyone who has access to the
web can begin
using GoalPro right now.
What does
the program do? Well it's hard to describe all of what
it
does briefly and so next month this publication will have a
feature length review of GoalPro. In short, it guides you
through the process of listing and clarifying your most
important life objectives. You list a set of concrete
goals to
reach each of these objectives and also create
short term tasks
for reaching the objectives and goals.
The program not only helps you create your "success
tree" of
objectives, goals and tasks, it sets up a regular
daily and
separate weekend routine where you visit these
lists and
determine how you are doing. This is called
Success Coach and
it's pretty darn useful. There's even a
past-due management
system where people who set too many
tasks or procrastinate can
evaluate and reschedule missed
deadlines. Download a free
thirty-day trial - -you might
want to keep using it -- I did.
3) Before Virtual
Knowledge published the DELUXE PERSONALITY
TEST, they had
assembled the one of the first top-rate
multimedia CD-ROM
production teams for the anticipated boom in
CD-ROMs that
never quite materialized. Their first product The
Ultimate
IQ Test surprised them by selling severl hundred-
thousand
copies at a time when most CD-ROMs were getting stuffed
in
ten packs and being sold for $3 each.
The ULTIMATE IQ
TEST http://mindmedia.com/customer3.html
must rank among the two or three top-selling Mindware on
the CD-
ROM media. It is part of our Virtual Knowlege Super
Star Suite
but you can also try it online at Emode by
going to
http://www.qksrv.net/click-1099834-7201401
4)
Those of you who remember the A.I. Program ELIZA, a program
that simulated a "Rogerian therapist" in the sense it
would
rephrase what you said and ask it as a question,
etc. Those who
first tried Eliza found that they prefered
Eliza to a flesh-and-
blood therapist. The main reason
whoever wasn't that Eliza was
any better (or worse). The
main explanation given for the
preference for the program
was that they felt better about
revealiing very personal
issues to a machine than a real human
being who would
judge them.
Of course Mind Media been featuring the
forth generation of
Eliza -- called PC Therapist IV for
five years now
http://mindmedia.com/review4.html#pcther.
PC Therapist IV
was developed by Joe Weintraub (no
relationship to Joeseph
Weisenbaum, who developed Eliza at
MIT. Joe Weintraub won the
coveted and valuable Turing
Test Award because his program
actually fooled people into
believing it was human (you can see
the award on our web
site.
A new project has taken Eliza several steps
furthur.
http://www.living-software.com/new/index2.htm
a team headed by
C.E.O Doron Zzur has been perfecting an
online therapist that,
like Eliza is not a human being and
you are not observed by real
flesh-and-blood people when
you take it -- As we noted a feature
also rated high by
program users. Perhaps this is where the
comparisons stop
because four decades have passed since Eliza
started its
famous dialogue with "What seems to be the problem
today?
The link above is to a beta of the most sophisticated
self-therapy tool created for the computer and it runs on
any
machine you care to try it on!
After
registering, the program prompts you with the question
about your state of mind. You answer by writing down what
psychologists are fond of calling "your issues" and then
you are
introduced to four helpers in cartoon form. You
can choose any
of them and they will converse with you and
help you clarify
your problem and think about it in
different terms.
Each of the helpers is a different
kind of personality and can
give advices, which might even
contradict the other very
different personality. By then
noting changes as they occur, you
involve yourself in an
ongoing process. This process can lead to
improvements in
attitude and mood as the brainstorming helps you
become
familiar with your "issue." And with familiarity comes
relief by looking at something you here-to-fore
avoided.
This is a beta and has some rough edges but
the good part is
that it is free. Also information
collected will help to make
this site even better.
Eventually Mr. Dzur hopes to turn this
into a paid
service. He was inspired to go into this line of
work by a
very significant personal crisis in his life, which
occurred after his wife passed away with cancer several
years
ago. He founded this company to make available to
the public
ways of quickly responding to stressful life
crises. His company
has board of consulting psychologists
and the site is worth a
visit or several.
5) http://www.ansir.com --
Ashir.com is more than a web site,
it is one premier
example of Mindware online app. Ashir.com
starts with a
personality test which uses a unique system called
the
Ansir Style of Relating. You take the test after registering
and are rated on 14 different personality attributes. Here
is
what they say about their test. "Discover your Self-
truth and
potential! It's free, challenging, and
enlightening! But be
warned, this serious test has 2,744
possible combinations and is
ranked-by participants and
Members alike-among the toughest and
most accurate on the
Web. Self-honesty is key. Read Profile
Briefs first, then
learn much, much more with Profiles In Depth
absolutely
free! Once you take the test, you are presented with
a
unique perspective on yourself and also become part of the
Asir community. It is fun, fascinating and most of all -
worth a
visit.
There are a wealth of resources
on-line to help you learn the
skill of mapping your mind.
So if you want the big picture, he's
a place to
start
drawing it.
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Our new
programmer, =Tim Fulmer has creating a program that will
allow us to convert many of the best of the past Mind
Media
Reviews to web pages and put them online with the
eight we
currently feature at http://mindmedia.com/ronline.html.
The
program will also give you the option to choose
between html or
text newsletters. We will put a bulletin
later in the month
giving you the specifics of this new
option. We are also adding
color graphics to illustrate
several of back issues of Mind
Media Review -- bringing
you the cutting edge content on the
evolving relationship
between mind and computer since
1994!
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Thank
you for reading and stay tuned for more! For comments
or
contributions, send e-mail to mailto:web@mindmedia.com
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2007,Mind Media 9360
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