Dang, the people behind Brainio have just released a brand-new, all-rewritten version – currently free of charge! It does look extremely attractive (nice mixture of text, mindmapping and hybrid). More details on their website: https://brainio.com

Interesting to see how many notetakers are going down this route. Octarine is evolving in a similar direction, and of course it's built into Obsidian. Although Brainio's mindmapping is somewhat closer to the original concept (as embodied in Xmind, SimpleMind, etc.)

This has a simple, clean look. Access the web version (app.brainio.com) for a more robust view of the capabilities than the screenshots on the landing page.

Yes, I find myself instantly attracted to this app. Thanks for referring to it.

Great looking app.
One comment... As a mobile user I'd like to mention the lack of Indent/Outdent buttons.

Good point!

Mike Sautkulis wrote:

Great looking app.
One comment... As a mobile user I'd like to mention the lack of Indent/Outdent buttons.

Maybe it's just me, but I really struggle to adopt any new outliner or notetaking program that doesn't provide for bulk importing from other apps. Is that a difficult thing for programmers to do? I've seen a number of very interesting programs, such as (if I remember correctly) Capacities, Walling and xTiles, that say bulk importing is planned but have been saying that for a long time.

You are not wrong, but yes, bulk importing from e.g. proprietary formats is (very) hard. Which is why so many of the best notetaking apps use folders + markdown files as their basic content – because that approach is totally open and easy to import/export to just about anything.

exatty95 wrote:

Maybe it's just me, but I really struggle to adopt any new outliner or notetaking program that doesn't provide for bulk importing from other apps. Is that a difficult thing for programmers to do? I've seen a number of very interesting programs, such as (if I remember correctly) Capacities, Walling and xTiles, that say bulk importing is planned but have been saying that for a long time.

A phenomenon occurs every time I switch tools: a large part of the content accumulated over months in the old tool ends up being left behind and is almost never revisited.

Even today, I still have a few hundred open tasks in OmniFocus despite not having used it for a few years. The same goes for hundreds of other notes in Evernote that I also haven't accessed in a long time, and the list goes on; OneNote, WorkFlowy, Obsidian, AmpleNote, Nirvana, etc...

During the first month after switching, I still resort to the old app to look for the most relevant info, but soon my visits become increasingly rare.

So maybe these service switches actually serve as a good way to clean up digital clutter—the perfect excuse I needed to justify them :-)



exatty95 wrote:

Maybe it's just me, but I really struggle to adopt any new outliner or notetaking program that doesn't provide for bulk importing from other apps. Is that a difficult thing for programmers to do? I've seen a number of very interesting programs, such as (if I remember correctly) Capacities, Walling and xTiles, that say bulk importing is planned but have been saying that for a long time.

Heh, love that – maybe it's the Ultimate Justification for being a CRIMPer – to become a butterfly emerging from a constraining chrysalis, leaving the "digital clutter" behind...

Goodness knows I've exactly the same experience!

Fair enough! But a big reason I'm a CRIMPer is my never-ending search for a user-friendly app that makes it easier to surface emergent connections among notes and, far better, text (blocks) within notes. That makes it hard to give up my "installed base" of notes. True, I might not read them again currently, but I'm ever-hopeful that I'll find an app that re-energizes the notes I thought were relevant and helpful when I took/copied them. I use Obsidian but find the endless scroll of Linked and Unlinked mentions unwieldy and its Canvas feature unhelpful. I have had high hopes for Logseq, but its long transition to a database version may be outlasting me -- and while its users are very friendly, I wouldn't call it a user-friendly app with clear and comprehensive documentation.

I have to say, this is why I actually use a completely separate tool (the super-search engine FoxTrot Professional) to scour through my now vast archive of reference materials (including every kind of document format). But one of the reasons I like markdown-based apps so much is that they're so flexible – I have four apps that all access various parts of the same markdown repository, all of them slightly different.

FoxTrot holds it all together when I want to delve back into stuff I've long forgotten, and I'll use FoxTrot in preference to the search functions in Obsidian, Octarine, Typora or HelixNotes – not least because I can then decide which indexes to activate/deactivate. There are equivalents on many other platforms, of course (on Linux, you might want to try DocFetcher or DocFetcher Pro, although it isn't a patch on FoxTrot).