Mind versus tree navigation; html versus rtf editing

Posted by Tom S.
Mar 17, 2007 at 12:20 PM

Stephen R. Diamond wrote:

>As regards this
>particular deficiency in Personal Brain, isn’t the situation you describe the same
>as an outline where you have an excess of items at a level. The conventional solution is
>to introduce intervening levels, and then hoist when they get very plentiful. I
>understand Personal Brain has a sophisticated self-centering hoist, which I think
>may be an option in the upcoming version of Mind Manager also. Is there a reason why the
>problem you mention can’t be solved by the traditional tactics?

I’ll say up front that I haven’t tried PB4 which may be better with these issues. But IMO the problem with using the previous version for this was that it was really just a bare skeleton for organizaing items.

Think of it this way. Say you create a task in a typical outlining PIM as it exists today. Chances are it will have a backend which will automatically organize the data by due date. Either that or it will sync with something like Outlook where such things are taken care of. It will do the same thing for start date, contact, etc… True, still you end up placing the item in multiple places in the outline but its nothing like it would be without these standard orgaizational tools.

With PB, I wasn’t just connecting to different projects and such. I was connecting to everything. Dates, contacts, any standard item that is associated with a task or appointment. One thing that made it better was the ability to embed links in the item. This helped a great deal because you could link an item into the Yahoo web PIM tools. But it ws clumsy and not ideal.

Probably the best mindmapping PIM solution on the market is Mind Manager, which appears to integrate pretty well with Outlook. But, as Daly implied in his response, the price is prohibitive. Very prohibitive. Good grief.

By the way you mentioned the self-centering hiost that PB has. I hated it at first. I thought it was just fancy graphics that were there to dazzle me. Boy was I wrong. Great idea. Focusing on one particular item would have been very difficult without it.

Tom S.