Anyone used TheBrain? Specifically, PersonalBrain 4?

The Pro Edition Trial looks pretty good. I like the interface. There aren't enough keyboard shortcuts, so the program probably has ergonomic problems (too much switching between mouse and keyboard required). Other than that, it looks like it could be pretty useful. I can't afford to get the Pro Edition, though. Will probably end up with the Core Edition if I buy this thing.

Any feedback or opinions in general? Thanks in advance

I'm using The Brain Pro (which I chose over Core because it allows multiple documents to be attached to a single thought - the "lesser" versions seemed to me to be too crippled and I knew I wouldn't use them).

The Brain is in a fight with Ultra Recall and OneNote for my attention. The Brain can auto-minimise to a small icon at the monitor's rim, which I find very useful. I am currently using it mainly for my family tree and as a way to find and open business documents which I need regularly but which are scattered around the network - a glorified Explorer.

The Brain lacks the ability to keep structured data structured, so for that sort of information (customer data, purchase patterns etc.) I use UR. I'm using OneNote as my library, but I am currently considering building a knowledge brain with The Brain because of its ability to have multiple links to multiple items, and to show these in the interface - something I miss greatly in OneNote.

The newest Brain release (4.5) is much snappier but I still notice a delay in opening thoughs that contain notes, even short notes, so some patience is required when using it.

Graham

Thanks. Have you run into any stability issues? Problems with corruption? Etc? It sounds like the program's pretty stable even with huge brains. I've been watching some videos that people have made showing off brains with thousands of thoughts, but I can't tell at this point how much maintenance is required (re-indexing, etc) to keep these monster brains running.

I've been playing with Pro v4.1.3.6 for a couple days now and I'm really starting to like it. The lack of keyboard short cuts hasn't been an issue so far because there are shortcuts for all the major operations (create child, etc). In general, it's a real pleasure to use. I haven't noticed any delays opening thoughts with attachments. The program takes a while to launch, though. Haven't found any bugs so far. The F6 keyboard shortcut (create child) doesn't "stick" sometimes, but that may be crumbs in my keyboard or something.

Gary Carson wrote:

Anyone used TheBrain? Specifically, PersonalBrain 4?

The Pro Edition Trial looks
pretty good. I like the interface. There aren't enough keyboard shortcuts, so the
program probably has ergonomic problems (too much switching between mouse and
keyboard required). Other than that, it looks like it could be pretty useful. I can't
afford to get the Pro Edition, though. Will probably end up with the Core Edition if I
buy this thing.

Any feedback or opinions in general? Thanks in advance

I've used TheBrain (version 4.2) for a while (few months).
It's an interesting software with specific pros and cons :

Pros :
- You can link (almost) everything to your Brain,
- You can link any Outlook items to every topics of the Brains (as shortcut : when you click on it, TheBrains opens the *specific* item),
- It's VERY easy and VERY natural to create links and an hierarchical organization of your data. (you only have to drag'n drop from an intem to another one. You can create siblings or child/parent links). I think this point is (imho) the best feature of TheBrain. It is the easyest and the fastest way of creating hyperlinks I've ever seen in a software !
- It's very visual,
- Each items can have a note (with an html editor) and have several properties,
- you can use keywords as tag,
- You can select a portion of text in you web browser and then drag it to the TheBrain icons wich remain permanently on one of the edge of the screen. This works also for files,
- You can paste a picture from the clipboard very easily as an item (One use of that for instance is taking a snapshot of a web site, then go to the brain, and paste the snapshot as the icon of your item. It stay like an icon, but when you pass your mouse pointer on it, the picture is enlarged.),
- You can assign type to links and to items with differents presentation of them,

Cons :
- It's very expensive (249 $ to have the benefits of all the features)
- It's very unergonomic...sometimes it can be very tricky to use it, you have a lot of manipulation even if you just want to copy and past items...and I really think that developpers should spend a while on making it easy and, most of all, fluent to use,
- The design of the interface is not so nice...
- It's confusing. I think it depend on the mind of every one, but the easiness of creation of the data organisation have its downside : very quickly, if you don't pay attention, you have A LOT of links everywhere and the interface don't have enough tools to filter, select, enlight, move and focus easily on the point you're working on.

I would say, as a conclusion, that TheBrain does (almost) exactly what the developpers says : it create another brain, as complex and as confused that the one we already have. If I use an Information Management software it's precisely to (try to) organize the muddle I use as a brain !

Sincerely,
Christophe

I personally have had no corruption or stability issues at all (though some users have had, with earlier versions - check out the forums), and I've never needed to re-index - that's all done on the fly.

Note that the delays in opening thoughts I have experienced have been for thoughts with notes, not those with attachments.

Christophe wrote:

I would say,
as a conclusion, that TheBrain does (almost) exactly what the developers says : it
create another brain, as complex and as confused that the one we already have. If I use
an Information Management software it's precisely to (try to) organize the muddle I
use as a brain !

Good point! The advantage I find to The Brain, though, is that one can create an unlimited number of brains to make sense of our own single brain. If only I could do that with the brain in my head ....

Graham

I have used PB from v1.73 to v3.0 and then stopped and switched over to ADM because the company did not put much priority on PersonalBrain then. This was around 2002. Then after the death of ADM in 2005 switched over to Ultra Recall.

After testing PersonalBrain v4.1 and the much better v4.5 (still in beta) I am starting to use PersonalBrain more and more again. The company (TheBrain) is supporting the application heavily and has an own user forum. Development cycle has increased a lot and many features I have requested for v3 are now available in v4.X (export to SiteBrain, claendar and reminders, types of thoughts etc., notes are stored as HTML instead of RTF etc.).

The power of PersnalBrain increases the more you add to it. This takes time, but it is worth.

Dominik

I have used PB for 10 years now and hate to think of not having it as a repository of my KEY information. Like Dominik said the more information it contains the more useful it is. I have approximately 30,000 thoughts with around 120,000 links between them in my main database. The multiple parents and fine-grained searching capabilities and other linking make finding critical data very efficient. New connections seem to "magically" appear at times because of the interconnectedness of the information. Highly recommended...

Al

Hi Al

I was interested in your reply, especially the volume of info bits you have stored in PB.

Would you mind giving us a bit more detail about how you use PB?

TIA

Jack

Many years ago, I suggested that the Brain and Personal Brain include an option of adding an arrowhead(=direction) to the links. This was for the purpose of creating an organization web for a large organization (40,000+ employees). The idea was that any part of the organization could place itself at the center of the universe (=Brain) and see how it related to other parts of the organization.

At the time the company was not interested in adding this feature (and so lost a BIG sale). Question: Does Personal Brain now have this feature?

Thanks!
-c

Cassius wrote:

Many years ago, I suggested that the Brain and Personal Brain include an option of
adding an arrowhead(=direction) to the links. This was for the purpose of creating an
organization web for a large organization (40,000+ employees). The idea was that any
part of the organization could place itself at the center of the universe (=Brain) and
see how it related to other parts of the organization.

At the time the company was not
interested in adding this feature (and so lost a BIG sale). Question: Does Personal
Brain now have this feature?

No. I've seen it requested but it has always been resisted - it's rather against their ethos of a brain of equal "synapses" to add anything that suggests hierarchy. Links can have defined thickness and colour, but no arrow heads.

Graham

In PB v3 I had around 3000 thoughts. In PB v4.5 (beta) I have currently 400 thoughts but the number of thoughts is rapidly growing.

I am using PB v4.5 for:
- Project and Task Management
- File Management
- Information hub for a huge programming project

The ability to cross-link the thoughts in any direction is the big advantage compared to the hierarchy paradigm.

Dominik

Anyone using the Mac version of Personal Brain? Or is anyone aware of any functional or performance differences between the Mac and PC versions?

Thanks!

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Anyone using the Mac version of Personal Brain? Or is anyone aware of any functional or
performance differences between the Mac and PC versions?

Thanks!

Steve Z.

Steve

Thanks to this thread I downloaded the latest PB beta to my Mac 24 hours ago (and the latest Windows beta to my PC). My observations based on this very limited experience:

- the Mac version has a somewhat unMac-like feel (unsurprisingly)
- it appears to lack integration with iCal, Mail, Address and Spotlight, although these are promised (and it lacks a proper Trash - which some Mac afficionados might regard as criminal...)
- it does appear to lack a few features of the Windows version, such as the ability to import web browser bookmarks, and full implementation (including keyboard-monitoring) of the "ESP" functionality
- it lacks the full keyboard-shortcut toolbox Mac users tend to expect with their software
- the user manual for version 4 hasn't been fully macintoshed yet

The PB user forum is quite enlightening on the Mac version, but - I thought - over-critical, in the light of the recent nature of the PB move into Mac-ery. (In the forum a search on "Macintosh" or "Mac" didn't turn up anything relevant, but "photos" did.)

It's probably unfair to give my overall impression on the basis of such short experience, but I'll do so anyway: PB's come a long way in functionality since I last tried it several years ago, it seems to me likely to be much less useful as a mind mapper (despite superficial similarities), much more powerful as a graphic equivalent of Windows Explorer, UltraRecall, the OS 10 Finder, or DevonThink or VoodooPad (with any of which it might also be combined), the more powerful the more you put into it as Al has done. In other words, I'd hope that the greater the weight of data, the greater the chance it would throw up hitherto unrecognised connections; it's probably slightly like DevonThink in that respect. But as others have said, the Pro version looks to be the only way to go, because of its multiple-connections functionality. And $249 is still a very large sum for software!

H

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Anyone using the Mac version of Personal Brain? Or is anyone aware of any functional or
performance differences between the Mac and PC versions?

Thanks!

Steve Z.

To add - I haven't noticed any real performance differences - but probably betas aren't the best releases on which to make such judgements.

Hugh,

Thank you for the summary of your observations comparing the Mac and PC versions of ThePersonalBrain. It sounds like a tempting piece of software, but -- you're right -- at $249 it's pretty expensive. I'd probably go for Tinderbox before PB if I were going to spend that kind of money at this point.

Thanks, again.

Steve Z.

We can only hope to see ThePersonalBrain at giveawayoftheday.com. ;-b

I have looked at The Brain in the past, and partly as a result of the activity here, I downloaded a new trial and put it through the paces.

The result of this is not so much an opinion as a question:

What is it that you have left of The Brain when you strip away the - admittedly pretty - face ... eh ... surface? Isn't it just links? And aren't there easier (or less cumbersome) ways to create links?

Tell me what I am missing, please.

Manfred

Manfred wrote:

I have looked at The Brain in the past, and partly as a result of the activity here, I
downloaded a new trial and put it through the paces.

The result of this is not so much
an opinion as a question:

What is it that you have left of The Brain when you strip away
the - admittedly pretty - face ... eh ... surface? Isn't it just links? And aren't there
easier (or less cumbersome) ways to create links?

Manfred

Isn't it just links? Yes, but aren't outliners all just links, of one sort or another? ;)

To be less facetious - four points:

- PB is graphical - for many people seeing links/relationships in a graphic is more understandable than reading of them in a textual PIM such as UltraRecall
- PB handles criss-crossing multiple connections, which unlike those in tree-form mindmappers, better represent the real world
- PB's USP could be regarded as a sort of of permanent three-level hoist/focus - that may make relationships, especially in a complex network, more understandable still
- PB offers the possibility of highlighting unexpected relationships in a large database as Al and others have stated - there aren't many PIMS that can accomplish that (DevonThink and what else?)

But I guess the question has to be whether those benefits are worth $150 more than the price of a non-graphical PIM such as UR Pro (or $50 more than the price of the partially graphical and very different Tinderbox).

H

Hugh,

actually, I was not so much thinking of traditional outliners as an alternative, but of other hypertext applications that implement links more easily, like personal wikis: Voodoopad, Zulupad, ConnectedText, for instance.

They are not hierarchical either, and they also
* "handle criss-crossing multiple connections, which unlike those in tree-form mindmappers, better represent the real world"
* "may make relationships, especially in a complex network, more understandable"
* offer "the possibility of highlighting unexpected relationships in a large database"

Linking gets done by simply enclosing a word or a phrase with "[" and "]" or "[[" and "]]" (or camelcase). And these applications do so at the FRACTION of the cost. (And ConnectedText even has a graphical interface that allows you to look at the relationships, if you so desire.)

All they lack is the fancy graphical interface, which, in my experience, only gets in the way. Let me therefore rephrase the question: "What beyond the graphical interface (and perhaps Wysywig in the notes) does The Brain add that would go beyond such applications?"

I have written about the advantages of link-based systems, their advantages, and their relation to traditional outliners in this forum before. So, I won't flog a dead horse.

Manfred

I don't think you're flogging a dead horse at all, Manfred. All the points you make are good. I was simply trying to stack up the best "devil's advocate" case for PB that I could think of... (And I'd forgotten the virtues of ConnectedText.)

Thanks! As I suggested, there is a large overlap in functionality between these programs, and in the end it comes down to (often) very subjective preferences. Nothing wrong with those either!