An in-depth TheBrain app-praisal !

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 11, 2014 at 01:52 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
>I know I’m repeating myself and indulging in my pet obsession of
>classifying outliner etc. software, but this description further
>suggests that TheBrain is better characterised as a graphical kind of a
>wiki, since wikis are also meant to be helping with overcoming the
>limitations of the hierarchical tree structure, and they are also all
>about linking and attaching stuff.

Funny, I too have thought of TheBrain as having more in common with wikis than with mind maps, as it represents a more organic network of related ideas. As I’m sure is evident, there are significant differences, too.

- With a wiki, links exist with ideas within notes—that is, you parse the links to relate to specific ideas within the note, where as links in TheBrain are generally made among the notes themselves (you can add wiki-style text links in notes in TheBrain, but it takes a little more work than a useful wiki).

- A wiki eschews any idea of hierarchy in its links, but links in TheBrain represent relationships, depending how they flow. Hierarchy can be circular as this example: Pets > Dogs (child of Pets) > Fido (child of Dogs) > Pets (child of Fido). You can’t really represent this in a mind map or an outline without at least some extra gymnastics.

- Links in a wiki would tend to be stable and unchanging (at least I think so). Where as, links in TheBrain are made to be changed as needed—and TheBrain makes this easy. For example, if you want to use TheBrain as a Kanban for your projects/tasks, you would then change the parent for a specific task from a thought called ToDo to the next state, In Progress. This is easy to do in TheBrain. A sophisticated wiki like ConnectedText could handle this, but you probably wouldn’t use links to manage that kind of categorization.

Anyway, just some further thoughts.

Steve Z.