An in-depth TheBrain app-praisal !

Posted by OutlinerBill
Aug 17, 2014 at 12:07 AM

Thank you for this extensive review. I haven’t read the manual throughout, however I have been using TheBrain (AKA “Personal Brain”) on and off for quite some time. I do currently use the Pro version with the annual subscription. All together I access the tool from the web (webbrain), a windows machine and my iPad (through the app).

Unfortunately I do not use it to its full potential, for one simple reason: I don’t trust the software.

It is not difficult nor surprising to find software with extensive import capabilities, and certainly The Brain is predictable here. The true test of a software developer’s faith in the appeal and quality of their product, though, is its capability to export your information in a way that is easily usable elsewhere.

On this, The Brain fails completely.

Given the complexity of the software and the years of development behind it, providing users with export capabilities such as OPML, or even directly into other popular mindmapping / concept mapping / outlining tools would be a trivial job.. especially considering the enormous benefit that would arise in many, many use cases. I can only conclude that the reason for this is a conscious strategy and decision to lock-in their customers.

If I knew that I could easily export my “brain” into other products, up to the level of their capabilities, I would happily continue building my brain to the level of having it be my primary knowledge management system, knkw that I could, for example, export a tagged subset into, for example, Mind Manager, iThoughts, Omni Outliner, MS Word, or even Excel (providing some rules to direct the info flow according to my needs).

As it is, I don’t trust the program and it remains but a peripheral tool to my workflows.