PersonalBrain 6 beta released

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 22, 2010 at 03:12 PM

Harlan, welcome to this forum (as far as I remember this is you first post here); it is an honour to have developers like you among us!

Sometime ago I had written in this forum that in the future users will expect their software to be cross-platform and web-aware (meaning accessible in the cloud). I stand behind that statement; Evernote, for example, may be mediocre as an information manager, but its accessibility is as yet unmatched—with the exception of a missing Linux client- and has become its key selling point.

I’ve been a registered user of Personal Brain since version 1 (I think 1.5 to be precise) and have always found it a unique piece of software that keeps evolving its strengths. When it became cross-platform it fulfilled one of my main expectations; now with web access it is sure to become a much more regularly used tool for me. Two points regarding the syncing capability:

1. I think Harlan clearly explained the technical reasons for syncing a brain through webbrain.com. I would add that the most important practical reason for me wanting to do so is to be able to add information from a portable device, such as an iPhone, which cannot edit the actual PC brain file. So for me the functionality will be complete when it is read/write—as I understand web access is as yet read only.

2. On the other hand, I believe that for quite some time we will still rely on a structured file system. In this regard, I do not consider the syncing of linked files through webbrain especially useful; I think a reliable service such as Dropbox or Nomadesk is more suitable for large external files like PDFs and the like, which may or may not be linked to a brain or other information manager database.