Does Anyone Use The Brain v7?

Posted by Gary Carson
Aug 31, 2013 at 05:41 PM

I’ve been thinking about upgrading from the Brain v6 to v7. Is anyone using v7? Is it worth the price?

I don’t really care about the cosmetic changes (the curved links etc). My main concerns are performance, ease of use and readability.

Performance:

Can v7 handle a large amount of material in the thought notes? I tried using v6 as a PIM, but it slowed to a crawl very quickly because most of the notes contained a page or two of text and images. I got the impression that the Brain wasn’t really designed to handle more than a couple of paragraphs of text in the notes field (if that). This severely limited the Brain’s usefulness as far as I was concerned.

Concerning the web brains, has anyone had any experience embedding a brain in a web site using either the generated HTML or the web brain service? From what I can tell, if you’re using the cloud service to host your web brain, you can use some embedded code to display the brain on another web site. This is a nice feature, but since the brain is hosted elsewhere, I was wondering if there was a significant lag time before the brain actually appeared on the second site (hopefully that makes sense).

Ease of Use:

I guess I’ve been spoiled by CintaNotes, which makes it extremely easy to capture information using keyboard shortcuts. With the Brain v6, you can drag hyperlinks and file icons directly into the plex, but when it comes to copying text into the notes, you have to highlight the text in a document or a web site or wherever, copy it, create a thought and paste the text into the note field. At least, I think that’s the only way to do it. Does v7 handle this any better? I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard when I’m doing research and so on.

Readability:

This concerns web brains again. I’ve been looking at some of the public brains hosting on the web brain service. They seem to work OK, but the thoughts are hard to read because the fonts are broken or at least indistinct. Has anyone run into this problem? (I use two monitors. One of them has 800 x 1280 resolution and the other one is set to 1080 x 1920, but the thought fonts are pretty illegible on both of them).

Anyway, any feedback on v7 would be appreciated.