Brainstorm for Windows

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 29, 2019 at 10:05 PM

I concur with Marcos. I recently needed to write a very complex report based on a multitude of textual inputs, including my own notes and ideas occurring along the way. I put everything in Brainstorm and started organising it, easily creating cross-references where needed. Slowly but surely, the end result was fully carved.

Some time ago I had spoken to the new owner and noted that, as much as I like Brainstorm, it is unlikely that I can keep using it given its limitations—e.g. non-Unicode, non-rich text etc—and the other tools available out there. But I was wrong. I haven’t managed to find anything with which I can work so efficiently and effectively on complex texts.

To summarise its unique selling point, I believe that Brainstorm is the most seamless combination of an information collector and an information processor in respect to plain text. There are better offerings in both of those categories, but none IMHO which combine the two.

From modern offerings discussed here, I believe that Hyperplan and InfoQube offer similarly powerful combined toolboxes. A key common feature are ‘clones’, or multi-parent items, which work across hierarchies like transverse beams in a pyramid.

I appreciate the power of these excellent offerings, but when working on texts, I just want to see words. Brainstorm’s DOS-like interface is a place of calm focus for my textual thoughts.

Marcos D. wrote:
>Have it installed on a MacBook under Crossover and I start it sometimes
>just to remember how good a piece of sofware can be; and it has plenty
>of good documentation; for me its original developers were ahead of
>their time.