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An in-depth TheBrain app-praisal !
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Posted by Dr Andus
Jul 12, 2014 at 12:05 AM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>- With a wiki, links exist with ideas within notes—that is, you parse
>the links to relate to specific ideas within the note, where as links in
>TheBrain are generally made among the notes themselves
Oh, I see, so these are higher level document-to-document connections then. Thanks for pointing that out. As you say, a standard wiki link is between a bit of text within a document to either the entirety of another document or to a particular section or anchor within it.
@donleone
Thanks for the detailed explanation.
donleone wrote:
>i am actually starting to get tired of all these “lines” criss-crossing
>all over the place so much,
>that is un-avoidable if you got (and love to make) a lot of
>side-connections
This reminds me of a recent feature in ConnectedText’s Navigator tool (which is for visualising the network of links as an outline) that allows you to remove specific individual nodes (representing documents) one-by-one manually, exactly to ‘thin’ the outline, so it becomes more easily analysable for a given purpose (by reducing ‘noise’).
Posted by Dominik Holenstein
Jul 12, 2014 at 12:47 PM
This is so true!
donleone wrote:
>i am actually starting to get tired of all these “lines” criss-crossing
>all over the place so much,
>that is un-avoidable if you got (and love to make) a lot of
>side-connections
But you can change the appearance of the lines weaker by changing its color.
Further, to avoid to add too many jump connections you can add links within the notes section of a thought to another thought. This gives you more the feel of a Wiki.
Dominik
Posted by Gary Carson
Jul 12, 2014 at 02:57 PM
Does the latest version of the Brain handle notes any better than the older versions? Specifically, does the plex still slow to a crawl when you have a lot of information in the note fields?
I gave up on the Brain because it wasn’t scalable and the note field was so flaky. Until the scalability problem is fixed, I don’t see how the program could be used as a real information manager.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 12, 2014 at 06:28 PM
I’ve never had any trouble with the Plex relating to notes, but that’s because I never put a lot of information into a notes field. I don’t think TheBrain is intended for that use… i.e. using the notes field to store lots of information, the way you would Evernote or DevonThink. I think if you try to use it that way, even with the latest version, you will continue to be disappointed.
This isn’t to say the notes field isn’t useful. It is handy for short notes or logging times and dates.
You could put long documents into TheBrain as Word files or RTFs. If they are embedded in TheBrain, the search function can find text inside them fairly easily.
Anyway, this is my experience with the app.
Gary Carson wrote:
Does the latest version of the Brain handle notes any better than the
>older versions? Specifically, does the plex still slow to a crawl when
>you have a lot of information in the note fields?
>
>I gave up on the Brain because it wasn’t scalable and the note field was
>so flaky. Until the scalability problem is fixed, I don’t see how the
>program could be used as a real information manager.
Posted by Joshua Cearley
Jul 12, 2014 at 10:22 PM
I tinkered with an old version of TheBrain, and I think its a neat application of the semantic web concept however the ~200$ pricetag (coupled with the need to web-activate it at that!) is a bit excessive. The only other program I’ve seen that is that steep is maybe Tinderbox, though in fairness there is a lot more that Tinderbox can do for you than simply display a springy semantic web.