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TheBrain v. Obsidian as of May 2021
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Posted by Amontillado
May 8, 2021 at 03:06 AM
Here’s something cool. A six part series on using Obsidian - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3NaIVgSlAVLHty1-NuvPa9V0b0UwbzBd .
If I weren’t so heavily invested - figuratively and literally - in Devonthink, I’d strongly consider Obsidian.
Devonthink does more, but Obsidian is very open in the way it builds vaults (folders). That’s nice.
Posted by jaroet
May 9, 2021 at 11:47 AM
To reply to the original posters question…
I have used TheBrain for several years (version 8 the full version ... skipped 9 and 10 and then the free version with 11 and 12) and for a while it worked very well. Specially the full version with attachements ect., but I guess for me it is not worth the costs to keep paying for it. And there are lots of alternatives these days. That said the main reason I left TheBrain was the ongoing high CPU issue’s (at least on a Mac). I have noticed this issue for several years and it’s never fixed although there where many claims it was. Even today this issue is still open. Create an empty brain with 5 thoughts and browse from thought to thought and youre CPU will easily go to 100+ percent and after a while you fan will go crazy.
And I have found out that although I was very in favour of the plex with the brain (I still like the fact that you only see the directly related thoughts relative to the current one) I came to the conclusion that I do not need it as much. I now really like the workflow possibilities of Obsidian (I moved completely to Obsidian as of June 2020). Daily notes, dataview plugin, calendar plugin, kanban plugin give me a very nice tool which I use exclusively now.
Specially the fact that I can integrate my time management (previously done with outlook) with my knowledge management in 1 solution is priceless in my thoughts.
And the fact that it is all free is amazing. In my point of view only a mobile app (for me mainly as a reference / read only version) is missing, but it is on the way. Another plus for Obsidian is the fact that the development pace is unbelievable and there are also many great plugin developers that make amazing plugins. It can be rather overwhelming even.
Good luck with choosing you solution.
Posted by moritz
May 10, 2021 at 05:40 AM
I am also much impressed with Obsidian and have made a donation accordingly.
For my workstyle, I discovered that the nature of “Zettelkasten” - i.e. need to type in an capture your thoughts and refine over time - represents a huge overhead for my primary Brain use case: Structuring “discovered” information (web pages, articles, concepts, people, projects, tasks, ...).
I have seen people showing a bookshelf full of paper notebooks and note cards, and hailing Obsidian (or Roam ...) as a good solution that allows them to go digital.
My PoV is different, in that I would have never done the paper thing to begin with ...
I am curating, editing, arranging, augmenting.
I am not writing books here (and don’t have time to).
Re:previous poster integration with time management - possible on 2 levels: Tasks are globally aggregated, and links to timeline are also available to link thoughts to milestones.
The tasks aspect in particular interestingly has led to an almost symmetrical workflow between TB (one click to get there) and Obsidian (when I was trying to use it for the same purpose).
I hope that makes sense to show the kind of bias that might lead somebody to consider TheBrain in preference to “type it all yourself” Obsidian?
Posted by user216
Jul 1, 2021 at 07:29 PM
Does someone try to use theBrain and obsidian (as markdown redactor and external file-storage) ?
Just put in theBrain link (via “obsidian types” link) to your obsidian note and read it content via obsidian but use theBrain as graph/navigator for/trow thoughts ?