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Does Anyone Use The Brain v7?
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Posted by Gary Carson
Aug 31, 2013 at 05:41 PM
I’ve been thinking about upgrading from the Brain v6 to v7. Is anyone using v7? Is it worth the price?
I don’t really care about the cosmetic changes (the curved links etc). My main concerns are performance, ease of use and readability.
Performance:
Can v7 handle a large amount of material in the thought notes? I tried using v6 as a PIM, but it slowed to a crawl very quickly because most of the notes contained a page or two of text and images. I got the impression that the Brain wasn’t really designed to handle more than a couple of paragraphs of text in the notes field (if that). This severely limited the Brain’s usefulness as far as I was concerned.
Concerning the web brains, has anyone had any experience embedding a brain in a web site using either the generated HTML or the web brain service? From what I can tell, if you’re using the cloud service to host your web brain, you can use some embedded code to display the brain on another web site. This is a nice feature, but since the brain is hosted elsewhere, I was wondering if there was a significant lag time before the brain actually appeared on the second site (hopefully that makes sense).
Ease of Use:
I guess I’ve been spoiled by CintaNotes, which makes it extremely easy to capture information using keyboard shortcuts. With the Brain v6, you can drag hyperlinks and file icons directly into the plex, but when it comes to copying text into the notes, you have to highlight the text in a document or a web site or wherever, copy it, create a thought and paste the text into the note field. At least, I think that’s the only way to do it. Does v7 handle this any better? I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard when I’m doing research and so on.
Readability:
This concerns web brains again. I’ve been looking at some of the public brains hosting on the web brain service. They seem to work OK, but the thoughts are hard to read because the fonts are broken or at least indistinct. Has anyone run into this problem? (I use two monitors. One of them has 800 x 1280 resolution and the other one is set to 1080 x 1920, but the thought fonts are pretty illegible on both of them).
Anyway, any feedback on v7 would be appreciated.
Posted by 22111
Aug 31, 2013 at 07:00 PM
“I tried using v6 as a PIM, but it slowed to a crawl very quickly because most of the notes contained a page or two of text and images. I got the impression that the Brain wasn’t really designed to handle more than a couple of paragraphs of text in the notes field (if that). This severely limited the Brain’s usefulness as far as I was concerned.”
I would like to second that.
I just trialled PB6 (as it was called then; in retrospective, I would need to call it TB6, though) in a very limited way and with dummy data since I was unable both to get (even parts) of my real data into it, and to get any help from the developers/vendors/forum to do so.
But even with this rather little data, just some dozen of nodes, but with a normal amount of text within each, about 3 pages of text, which is not enormous (I had copied the same data over and over again to get at least some data to play around with, then added “real” data in order to trial search and so on), both the lack of speed of the program and the size of its data stored to hdd were quite impressive, in a very negative way.
On the other hand, we know that the spatial representation of data, for example in a mind map, is of real interest to quickly recall your “mind” representation of all the relevant elements; of course, this is much more important for planning and such, than it would be for most “reference data”.
But then, this spatial representation is not persistent here (as it is in classic mind manager software) but “plastic”, in TB (ex-PB), except for “stored views” (but which are not updated afterwards?), and for referential data, I do not see the possible advantages of TB over a classic outline view (which also groups things belonging together, and which also, by cloning, allows for sub-groups of things belonging to more than one group in the systematic classification).
That’s why I kindly ask to list such advantages, if there are any, of TB. In fact, I hope I have overlooked them, and yes, it is a “beautiful” program, but as somebody said in DC, this effect quickly wears out; especially if in daily use, its practical value is not to this graphic standard that it sets I might add.
I doubt that they did anything about speed, since users have been complaining for many years now about the paucity of the “editor” of TB, and I don’t have info on their replacing it, which would probably be a condition to any speed increase here.
Btw, does anybody know which database TB is using?
Posted by Gary Carson
Aug 31, 2013 at 10:37 PM
It looks like the font legibility problems I get with the web brains is caused by the font rendering in Firefox. I took a look at the same web brains in Internet Explorer (which I never use) and the fonts looked all right there. Unfortunately, IE load times are ridiculous. I was surprised at how slow the browser was.
As for the Brain itself, I’m not even sure why I’m thinking about upgrading. I was really into it for a while several years ago, but eventually stopped using it because I couldn’t figure out what to use it FOR. It’s not an outliner and it can’t handle large or even moderate amounts of data in its note fields, so it can’t be used as a PIM. As a File Manager, it seems like it just adds another layer of complexity and I’ve never had any problems with using Windows Explorer. These days, I’m into simplicity and ease of use. My ideal is a utility like CintaNotes which runs invisibly in the background.
I like the Brain’s Plex, though. It seems like it would be ideal for exploring connections between ideas as long as the ideas could be expressed in the thought titles themselves and you limited the notes field to, say, a couple of short paragraphs at most. Web brains are a great idea, however. At first, I didn’t like them because you couldn’t see much of the notes information as you moved through the thoughts, but when I got used to moving back and forth between the full-screen views, that wasn’t a big deal. Web brains are just as easy to navigate as a regular web site once you figure out how they work, but I think they’re probably baffling to most of the users out there who have never run into them before.
I was thinking about setting up a web site based around the Brain, but the pricing is ridiculous. It would cost me a $100 to upgrade to v7, plus something like $159 a year for the cloud service, PLUS the costs involved with running an external web site. I’d like to see the company change their cloud service to something like the Typepad blogging service (which is fantastic). You could then create an entire web site around your Brain with its own URL. That’s something I’d be willing to pay for if it was robust enough to handle large amounts of data.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 31, 2013 at 11:05 PM
I use The Brain 7 every day at the office. It really works well for me. I have written about its advantages and disadvantages on my blog, here:
http://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/somethoughtsonthebrain/
Updating that post, I’ve returned to using The Brain, dropping Connected Text (not for any reason that is related to CT, just that I am more effective using The Brain).
And here’s another post about how I use The Brain (version 6, in this post) as a PIM:
http://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/personalbrain-as-a-management-tool/
I can’t answer your question about lots of text per note, as I don’t put anything but a few reminders or to dos in the notes. If you like the advantages of the Plex, you might try using an attachment to store the notes, instead of the notes panel. If you store the attached document within The Brain, the document is searchable from The Brain.
Anyway, I think The Brain is outstanding as a PIM, but you have to change your conception of PIM. I use attachments all the time, pulling in PDFs, e-Mails and other documents, and connecting them to related dates. For example, if I get an e-mail I have to act on, I drag it into the Plex under the date I need to act on it.
You can use the Pin function to keep much needed information at hand. The Calendar tool is actually quite good, though I don’t use it as much as I could, because I use my iPad for that purpose.
I only use WebBrain to sync my brains across devices, so I can’t comment much on it.
Having said all that, if you were not satisfied with version 6, then version 7 is probably not going to feel like a big improvement (although I like the curved links, as it makes them clearer).
Steve Z.
Posted by NW
Aug 31, 2013 at 11:32 PM
For many years I used PB to help me organise info for my web site. I always had the idea/goal of using PB to publish my website and eventually I did when the webbrain service arrived. However, I wasn’t convinced that it always worked properly in all browsers, esp those on mobile devices. Setting up the navigation so that it was easy for people to find their way about also seemed to take a lot of effort. When PB changed their web site to a more conventional site, I realised that whilst PB was good at collecting info in a way that made sense to me, it wasn’t ideally suited to sharing info with others.
With a shift in my computing from mainly desktop to iPad and the realisation that PB wasn’t the ideal method of publishing websites, I eventually switched to using Wordpress for my website. Also with my move to iPad and reduced use of desktop, I just couldn’t justify the expense of upgrading the TB v7 for personal use. If TB create ios and android versions, I may reconsider, but the sync will be likely be using their costly cloud services. It is a pity because of all the PIM type apps I have tried over the years, PB was the one that seemed gel with me.
Nigel