Re: Brainstorm discount

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4237

Posted by stephenz
2005-09-29 09:06:41

> Can anyone compare Brainstorm to Notemap. I just searched outliners.com and couldn¥t find a good reason for me (a user of Infoselect and Notemap) to switch to Brainstorm or to add it to my software collection.

Franz,

If you are happily using NoteMap, you may not need Brainstorm, although that isn’t to say that the two programs do identical things. Brainstorm is built to facilitate the capture of ideas/thoughts and then to organize them. Brainstorm only shows you one level of detail at a time (although it has what it calls an aerial view, so you can view the overall structure, but you can’t edit in this mode). It would be as if you used NoteMap in hoist mode all the time. This is adventageous for focussing your thinking on one topic at a time.

While it is possible to use Brainstorm for a wide range of data management tasks (facilitated by several nifty functions, see below), the most logical use for Brainstorm is for thinking through a project or an article before getting down to the heavy writing. As such, it would probably fit into your workflow as a prelude to NoteMap. However, if NoteMap feels complete to you… that is, if you are content with your brainstorming in NoteMap… you probably don’t need Brainstorm.

The nifty functions of Brainstorm include:

1. Magic Clip, which you can set to capture any text you copy to the clipboard.

2. Namesakes, which is an automatic cloning of any item. That is, say you have the name of a client in one part of your model (that’s what Brainstorm calls a database), if you type that same name elsewhere in the same model, the two items become virtually one, so any sub items to that client are available there as well.

3. Powerful keyboard shortcuts for all functions.

4. Splitting your model into multiple windows, which you can navigate independently… that is, you can work in different sections of the same model simultaneously.

For me, Brainstorm has all but replaced NoteMap as my outliner, which is suprising to me, because I very much like NoteMap and appreciate its design.

Steve Z.

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