Mindsystems Amode on Bits

Posted by Dominik Holenstein
Jul 11, 2009 at 06:12 AM

Fredy,

PersonalBrain is more than just a one dimensional outliner or mind mapping tool. You are wrong when you write you could do the same on a paper. Imagine a PersonalBrain file with more than 100 thoughts in it with links to files, websites, including notes and child, parent and jump links between the thoughts. Can you scratch this on a single paper sheet? Further, my current brain has around 4’000 thoughts, all cross-linked with other related thoughts. This gives me a pot wehere I can throw in anything without loosing too much time in thinking where to put it. Just add a new thought and link it to the most apporpriate other thoughts. When you open a tought you instantly see its context. I am using PB for information gathering, taking notes and organzing my work.

PB has a unique instant search feature. You just type one or several words of a thought (wheter it is the beginning, the end or within the thought is not important) and a little window pops up with thoughts matching your search. I haven’t found another tool that allows me to search with the same speed (Zoot is one the exception).

Yes, PersonalBrain looks strange and is completely differnt from other approaches. I personally consider convential MindMapping just as another metaphor of basic outlining. PersonalBrain makes MindMapping more dynamic.

I have been using PB since v1.73 in 1998. Now we have v5 and the user base is growing. Further, the developers are really caring about their users. Yes, their Marketing and communication style may give you the impact of a hype. But the tool itself has proven to be mature enough and to be more than just a hype.

This post is too short to give you all the advantages of PB. I don’t want to persuade you becaue you decide what best fits to you. For me it’s this visual and perhaps chaotic apporach of PB, you might want to look for tools like UR (a great tool) or Zoot (another great one).

Kind regards,
Dominik

“And that brings me to thebrain.com. I know that a lot of people think that is the best of the best ( perhaps not for information gathering, but for serving as a thinking help at least ), so I spent more than an hour with it, not counting my reading those 100 hints which take the place of any not-web help function of it, and I was very willing not only to give it a try, but to be pleased with, and better, be enthousiastic about it.

Well, it is crap, in my opinion. It?s just an unidimensional graphic outliner, like all those mindmanager.com and others, with the difference of a mildly psychedelic screen layout, and ( not necessarily foreseeable ) hiding of all those branches the program decides you do not need at any given moment ; thus I spent the major part of my time to go back to those, i.d. to search where they were hidden, and I was hampered in my thinking process, not helped in any way. It seems to me ?The Brain? intends to focus your thought attention, by ( very basic if not na?ve ) graphic means, whereas in fact it hinders you to see relationships which, by doing a scratch on paper, you would see without any problem.

Hence, my experience with ?The Brain? is at the opposite of all that high ( but unsubstantiated ) praise of the program you can find in several forums, and therefore, I would be very happy if somebody could explain to me what the real advantage of this program might be. I am willing to re-install it on my computer just to see if you are right, and why I missed the strike of genius in it - but is there, or it is all about hype, as in most occasions ?
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