An in-depth TheBrain app-praisal !

Posted by donleone
Jul 10, 2014 at 09:27 PM

here is an excellent “thoughts” provoking argument in favor again of TheBrain:

We are all very familiar with our “Tree” way of thinking & organizing
(after all it’s been around for at least the last 20 years,
and surely everyone on here has used it extensively
at one time or another in their outlining career)

But now imagine that you could
AT ANY TIME with just a SINGLE CLICK,
TURN AROUND your entire Tree
up-side down & criss-cross wise,
from any chosen sub-item that you wanted,
and see then your whole tree and its relations
now from THAT sub-items perspective?

Wouldn’t that be powerful ?

If your tree outliner could offer that,
would you not want that ability too?

And all that with just 1 single click,
without re-arranging or changing,
any of the actual order of your database

THAT to me is the big power of TheBrain.

So that you are not forced kept into a fixed top-down hierarchy
that once you establish stays pretty much forever like that.

But you can at any time chose to “tree-shape-shift” the entire thing :-)
and re-examine all of your data from simply a whole other perspective.

And now a 2nd point, as an addition to the review:

after having played now with TheBrain for some time,
i must say, that out of the 4 views possible in Version 8,
i ONLY find the so called “Outline View” (which again i initially dismissed)
to be actually after all the most user-friendly and most efficient of all,

since

a.) the Outline View almost completely avoids any lines overlapping subjects
as all the other views, as soon as they get many cross-connections in-between them,
truly start to become self-confusing, especially when the “expanded all” is enabled.
But the Outline View does NOT become confusing, because it always blends in only
the current level linkages only (just test it once and you’ll see what i mean).

b.) and furthermore the “Outline View” because, it alone is able to show the MAXIMUM DEPTH
automatically and natively (which “depth” in the Outline View is going “left to right” ways,
instead of top to down as in the “Normal View”, and with the BIG benefit again
that in the Outline View you can have an infinite left to right VISIBLE-retained depth,
whereas the “Normal View” all items that go beyond the 4 levels of depth,
become invisible and faded out, for the sake of “focusing”, but i find the infinite visibility
on the contrary to help me MORE focus as the whole thread is somehow “retained” in your mind,
instead of being always 4 level hoistingly cut off.

and “unlimited” of course in the sense, as far sideways as your screen space goes,
but also with the left & right arrow’s holding you can super speedily “fly through” all the open side-levels,
should there be very many that are open simultaneously.

Lastly, in that “Outline View”, the auto-hoisting is by necessity more an “auto-centering”,
and on purpose not hoisting, so that you CAN see more depth beyond just the 4 levels,
and thus indeed seems to me, a nice golden mean “view” between the traditional Tree outliners
and the more confucius views of theBrain, apart from its Outline View.

greetings
donleone