James Fallows on The Personal Brain

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 27, 2009 at 10:01 PM

It is hard for me to come up with a piece of software for which I have more ambivalence than I do for The Personal Brain. After reading James Fallows story about the Brain, I have begun to take another look at it. I watched some of the tutorials on the Brain web site and have gotten a better appreciation of the Plex area and how that is set up—where parent items appear, where sibling items appear, where child items appear, etc. The Plex truly is a unique and highly useful organization tool and because if it, The Personal Brain seems like one of the very few applications that could adequately handle ALL of my data in ONE database.

However, the Plex is also a facade. Because underneath it—the place where you write your notes, create tags, add attachments, etc…—is very pedestrian, to say the least. This is undoubtedly due, at least in part, to the fact that the Brain is a Java application. The worst aspect is the actual note editor, which is clunky at best. I’ve said this too many times before and those of you (if anyone is still reading) who recall what I’m about to write can just skip ahead, but first and foremost a note manager HAS to be a good writing environment. That means it should behave to the standards used by Microsoft Word and most other major word processors when it comes to editing text and using extended selection of text. For instance, in Word when you double click on a single word, the word is selected. If triple click inside a paragraph, the whole paragraph is selected. If after double- or triple-clicking you keep the mouse button depressed upon the final click, you can scoop up whole words are paragraphs either side of the word or paragraph you clicked on. This saves the very tedious operation of clicking carefully at the start of a group of words you want to move and dragging the cursor to the exact end of the group. Any note-taker that does not have this functionality is just not going to work for me, because the act of carefully selecting the words with non-extended selection techniques requires me to shift my focus and attention to the task and away from my thoughts.

Anyway, try writing in the Brain’s editor and see what happens when you try to use extended selection. It just doesn’t behave as I hope and expect.

Additionally, the layout of the non-Plex areas of the Brain feel too constrained. You can’t open a note in a separate window and expend it to the size that best works… or, if you can, I missed it.

So, I’m afraid that I personally can’t get behind the Brain, which is too bad because that Plex tool is pretty cool.

Steve Z.