An in-depth TheBrain app-praisal !

Posted by Paul Korm
Jul 6, 2014 at 07:27 AM

Thank you, @donleone—an excellent review

A few of my favorite aspects of TheBrain

- attachments can be internal or external—they can be almost any kind of document, and new attachment types (new “templates”) can be added to extend TheBrain’s capabilities

- an external folder hierarchy can be added as “virtual thoughts”—similar to what DEVONthink does with indexed folders, the document contents of the folders appear inside these virtual thoughts, which are updated when the contents of the folders change in the filesystem

- calendar entries can be assigned to thoughts, and the calendar sync’ d with a Google calendar—I find this useful when working with TheBrain to keep a log of what I was doing

- there are numerous ways to add indicators to thoughts: Types, Tags, and Labels

- link lines can also have Types and custom labels

- TheBrain 8 Pro has a “clock face” that when clicked shows a list of all the thoughts in the current brain, grouped by last-modified date, in descending order

- TheBrain recognizes just about every custom URL scheme (I haven’t found one that it doesn’t recognize) such as evernote://, x-devonthink-item://, and so on —if you include Evernote URLs in a thought’s notes, then sync that brain and Evernote to your iPad, then TheBrain’s iOS app provides clickable links that will open that document in Evernote.

TheBrain is much more than a mind mapping software—the standard products in that category are highly limited when compared to TheBrain. I consider it more as knowledge management software, but even there I think TheBrain busts the category.