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Southbeach Modeller vs TheBrain
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Posted by TempusFugit
Mar 13, 2016 at 06:43 PM
Anyone have experience with Southbeach. I am looking for alternatives to TheBrain for visual thinking beyond standard mind mapping.
Thanks for any input.
Posted by Paul Korm
Mar 13, 2016 at 07:43 PM
I use Southbeach modeler. I think of it as a concept mapper on hyperdrive. But I wouldn’t put it into the same category as TheBrain. A product similar to Southbeach is ThinkComposer. I don’t recall either Southbeach or ThinkComposer having any significant updates for 3 years or more, and I wonder if they are actively supported. Not that anything breaks. Both sites have extensive documentation and trial use is permitted.
TempusFugit wrote:
Anyone have experience with Southbeach. I am looking for alternatives
>to TheBrain for visual thinking beyond standard mind mapping.
Posted by TempusFugit
Mar 20, 2016 at 02:08 AM
Should I infer that you also use TheBrain? My Holy Grail is to find a Visual idea capture tool that shows interrelationships, dependencies and also allows fast assignment of temporal characteristics like “due” or “review for further action” dates.
TheBrain misses the mark as the UI for adding metadata to the “Thought” is amazingly clunky… and - they haven’t got temporality figured out yet.
My only hope is to master GraphViz within ConnectedText - in the near term. (So far as I have seen.)
It is all my own fault for never having learned how to Code.
-TF
Posted by TempusFugit
Mar 20, 2016 at 02:13 AM
Paul,
Further to last post…
1. You use Southbeach *preferably* to ThinkComposer??
2. You use TheBrain currently? Or abandoned entirely?
-TF
Posted by Paul Korm
Mar 20, 2016 at 11:43 AM
TF—I use all three—TheBrain, SouthBeach and ThinkComposer
TF wrote:
>My Holy Grail is to find a Visual idea capture tool that shows interrelationships,
>dependencies and also allows fast assignment of temporal characteristics
>like “due” or “review for further action” dates.
For that requirement I would be using a mind mapper like MindJet MindManager (preferably) or another mind mapper that supports task scheduling. I agree that TheBrain’s methods are slow—there is much improvement in the forthcoming version 9. But the developers are saying version 9 will eliminate the calendar integration, which is a big step backward. (My comments on v9 are based on beta testing, and the beta is open to all currently paid-up license holders, so there’s nothing secret about it.)
I like the way MindJet plays with Outlook and OneNote. MindJet has the “idea capture”, “show interrelationships and dependencies” and “fast assignment of temporal characteristics” down cold—far better than the other tools you’ve mentioned. (ConnectedText of course meets all these needs, except easy graphical visualization.) In my case, I use the MindJet clipper in Outlook to send links to emails, tasks, calendar entries to MindJet—where I can rearrange these items on the MindJet canvas, make connections, add notes and quickly build a visual planner.
TheBrain v8 (current commercial release) does a good job of importing MindJet files and so if you want to use TheBrain for collating a large volume of info and notes gathered over a long time (a typical use case for TheBrain) it’s easy to bring in data from individual MindJet files into a Brain that consolidates that data into a large framework. The downside is that it’s really difficult to get data back out of TheBrain.