Braincat

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Posted by bartb
Sep 19, 2019 at 10:27 PM

This looks kind of interesting https://thebraincat.com ... sort of like mind mapping meets outlining meets idea analysis

Posted by satis
Sep 20, 2019 at 03:01 AM

The concept promotes a way to reveal themes in writing, but you can’t actually do writing in it - you need to have text or a csv or whatever for the app to break up and then make you categorize sentence fragments & ideas. For me that’s backwards, as my writing starts as lists and outlines and I move them around and build on them, then use the resulting template to show me the way to writing long pieces (and track what I’ve done and have yet to do). In other words, part of my job is to sift through the mass of data as I’m outlining, which this app tries to do.

I wish it actually did some sort of mindmapping, or outputting to OPML so perhaps it could go into an outliner or mind mapping app, but it doesn’t seem to offer that.

The idea behind reverse mind-mapping is to take overwhelming amounts of info, have the app break it down into short sentences from the data (which can get fearsomely long the more data you paste in), then have you tag each sentence, then sequence by category. That’s not too valuable to me; the whole idea of my outlining/mindmapping is to actively do this. At any rate, he discusses his reverse mind-map idea in this recorded lecture he gave at a local library:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp1Ez4EKv-c

The app seems related to the online training methodology the owner Jon Ward promotes on another website, zoomthinking.com. (Which links back to BrainCat.) Company website offers link to its Instagram which is ... private?

Not sure how much effort he’s putting into this product, as he also owns Cognetics and Zoom Thinking and is described as “Chief Marketing Officer for Calroy Health Sciences, as Branding Advisor to Capstone Strategic, as an educational consultant to Physical Gold Fund, and as an Adjunct Consultant to the Sheffield Group” and first “[e]migrating to the United States in 1992, he became co-owner of a flourishing ad agency in Phoenix”.

Side note: what is Calroy Health Sciences? It appears to mainly (only?) be selling a ‘neutraceutical’ that’s “all-natural dietary supplement that has been proven to support the body’s vascular system for optimal function.” And yet the legalese states the product is “not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

Back to the app: it’s fairly expensive and only one of the three videos on the site shows it in action, and only to a very limited extent. I don’t quite understand why it’s being promoted as an online service (and a fairly pricey one too, at $90/year at the discounted rate) instead of being offered as a desktop app.

In sum, I’m not too impressed.

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