Southbeach Modeller vs TheBrain

Posted by Paul Korm
Mar 20, 2016 at 11:43 AM

TF—I use all three—TheBrain, SouthBeach and ThinkComposer

TF wrote:
>My Holy Grail is to find a Visual idea capture tool that shows interrelationships,
>dependencies and also allows fast assignment of temporal characteristics
>like “due” or “review for further action” dates.

For that requirement I would be using a mind mapper like MindJet MindManager (preferably) or another mind mapper that supports task scheduling. I agree that TheBrain’s methods are slow—there is much improvement in the forthcoming version 9. But the developers are saying version 9 will eliminate the calendar integration, which is a big step backward. (My comments on v9 are based on beta testing, and the beta is open to all currently paid-up license holders, so there’s nothing secret about it.)

I like the way MindJet plays with Outlook and OneNote. MindJet has the “idea capture”, “show interrelationships and dependencies” and “fast assignment of temporal characteristics” down cold—far better than the other tools you’ve mentioned. (ConnectedText of course meets all these needs, except easy graphical visualization.) In my case, I use the MindJet clipper in Outlook to send links to emails, tasks, calendar entries to MindJet—where I can rearrange these items on the MindJet canvas, make connections, add notes and quickly build a visual planner.

TheBrain v8 (current commercial release) does a good job of importing MindJet files and so if you want to use TheBrain for collating a large volume of info and notes gathered over a long time (a typical use case for TheBrain) it’s easy to bring in data from individual MindJet files into a Brain that consolidates that data into a large framework. The downside is that it’s really difficult to get data back out of TheBrain.