Personal Brain development

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 4, 2008 at 07:38 PM

cpb wrote:
>Otherwise a fun toy!

I understand that Personal Brain may represent the state of the art in eye candy, but I cannot agree in calling it a toy, especially given the praise it has received in this here forum by several people at times (myself not included).

I think I first registered Personal Brain in 2001, impressed at the time by its graphics, but also finding it way ahead of anything else I had tried in its ability to present complex relationships. Its main drawback for me was the inability to print, for which I turned to programs such as Cmap Tools.

I would have gone on using it, but for its lack of development. Its company focused on US-size enterpises (I remember calling them and learning that our 20-people organisation was too small to be considered a customer for their Brain Enterprise Knowledge Platform) and even withdrew the ‘brain publishing’ feature and the development kit that enabled users to share their ‘brains’.

Notwithstanding, I have done quite a bit of work with PB, including using it in rather undocumented ways for some impressive presentations. Obviously I was not the only one; 5 beta sports a dedicated ‘presentation mode’.

It should be noted that PB’s main concept, the graphical representation of relationships, is probably the most scalable such application that I have seen. Try building a software mindmap with a couple of hundred items and you’ll know what I mean; PB can easily handle thousands of items and you won’t see the difference in speed.

Last year’s announcement of a new version (even if its Java reincarnation slows it down comparatively) was excellent news, and I must say that its development remains impressive; it is quite clear that its company has listened to its users.

I am sure there’s more feature one could desire and some of it may be accomodated. Frankly, I cannot imagine how filtering could be one; if the nodes in between are filtered out, how would one navigate?

Anyway, the standard disclaimer holds: I am not in anyway connected to PB’s developers, I’m not even an everyday user of the software; I just think it is worth taking a look at with an open mind.

alx