Does Anyone Use The Brain v7?

Posted by Gary Carson
Aug 31, 2013 at 10:37 PM

It looks like the font legibility problems I get with the web brains is caused by the font rendering in Firefox. I took a look at the same web brains in Internet Explorer (which I never use) and the fonts looked all right there. Unfortunately, IE load times are ridiculous. I was surprised at how slow the browser was.

As for the Brain itself, I’m not even sure why I’m thinking about upgrading. I was really into it for a while several years ago, but eventually stopped using it because I couldn’t figure out what to use it FOR. It’s not an outliner and it can’t handle large or even moderate amounts of data in its note fields, so it can’t be used as a PIM. As a File Manager, it seems like it just adds another layer of complexity and I’ve never had any problems with using Windows Explorer. These days, I’m into simplicity and ease of use. My ideal is a utility like CintaNotes which runs invisibly in the background.

I like the Brain’s Plex, though. It seems like it would be ideal for exploring connections between ideas as long as the ideas could be expressed in the thought titles themselves and you limited the notes field to, say, a couple of short paragraphs at most. Web brains are a great idea, however. At first, I didn’t like them because you couldn’t see much of the notes information as you moved through the thoughts, but when I got used to moving back and forth between the full-screen views, that wasn’t a big deal. Web brains are just as easy to navigate as a regular web site once you figure out how they work, but I think they’re probably baffling to most of the users out there who have never run into them before.

I was thinking about setting up a web site based around the Brain, but the pricing is ridiculous. It would cost me a $100 to upgrade to v7, plus something like $159 a year for the cloud service, PLUS the costs involved with running an external web site. I’d like to see the company change their cloud service to something like the Typepad blogging service (which is fantastic). You could then create an entire web site around your Brain with its own URL. That’s something I’d be willing to pay for if it was robust enough to handle large amounts of data.