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TheBrain 9 reaches its beta phase
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Posted by Chris Murtland
Nov 18, 2017 at 12:45 AM
Welcome to the forum!
If you’re on Windows, you could give ConnectedText a try. It’s more text-based than visual, but it does have a “Navigator” view that is somewhat similar to the Brain, showing a visual representation of links among your notes.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 18, 2017 at 11:40 AM
Try TheBrain 9. It has been completely rewritten. The versions you tried before were all Java-based. They’ve abandoned Java and have written native applications for Mac and Windows. I use TheBrain 9 on both systems and it works very well, and the sync has been vastly improved. If you like the idea of TheBrain, you should give the new version a run. Although I also endorse Chris’s recommendation of ConnectedText.
Steve Z.
Amontillado wrote:
Greetings - first post, I think. I don’t think I’ve ever signed up
>before. I’ve lurked quite a bit.
>
>I’ve found TheBrain, sadly, to be unreliable in past incarnations. I
>think I got in at version 5 or 6 - maybe, long time ago - and it was
>awesome.
>
>Around 8, I started losing nodes and having rough edges crop up enough I
>didn’t want to use it. I’m afraid version 9 may have some of the same
>problems.
>
>Is there anything else that incorporates TheBrain’s concept of jump
>thoughts?
>
>In other words, I’d like a note taking application that would let me
>link to another node in a bidirectional way. If I navigate to a
>note/node that other things have linked to, I’d like to be able to
>follow those links backward.
>
>Anything like that out there?
Posted by Amontillado
Nov 19, 2017 at 01:15 PM
Thanks for admission into your rare company, I appreciate the chance to participate.
I crave, for some undefined reason, software for organizing and depicting knowledge.
I bet TheBrain 9 will be the answer. With respect, I think I’ll wait until it’s out of beta, but it sure sounds promising.
The genius in TheBrain, I think, comes from two things.
First, the jump thoughts, like WikiWord links except bidirectional. That encourages topic-based, hierarchical organization with interconnects.
The other comes from the limited view, which sounds counterintuitive, but I think plays on a magic aspect of our own internal organization.
There is a thing called the door effect. When you walk through a doorway from the office to the living room, you do a context shift. You’re no longer thinking in office mode, now you’re in living room mode. I suspect the same context phenomena is how chess masters can play multiple games.
When you click on a node in TheBrain, it becomes it’s own little context. A traditional mind map can display too much, if there’s any substance in my theory.
In fact, when people laugh at the old guy who can’t remember what he went to the kitchen for, they are actually laughing at an unwanted symptom of otherwise highly evolved, perfected context switching.
Personally, I’ve had that “problem” as long as I can remember. It’s not dotage, it’s muscular cranial organization at its best.
So, when, um, what was I going to say? Dadgumit…
Posted by Paul Korm
Nov 19, 2017 at 02:34 PM
I believe TheBrain 9 is about as non-beta it can be while still be called a “Late Beta” by the company. It’s the default download. If you go looking for TheBrain 8 you see “Although no longer supported, you can still download version 8 and earlier.”
I’m not a sales rep for TheBrain, but they offer a 30-day trial.
Posted by Paul Korm
Nov 21, 2017 at 03:04 PM
TheBrain yesterday issued an update to v9 (b231) that re-introduces two-way sync with Google Calendars.
This feature has been on vacation since TheBrain 8 and it’s good to see it come back.