An in-depth TheBrain app-praisal !

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 6, 2014 at 11:35 AM

Excellent in-depth review of TheBrain!

I recently tried to move from an info management centered on TheBrain to one centered around OneNote, but couldn’t do it. OneNote, for all its great features, just was not as useful to me as TheBrain—mostly because of the way in which TheBrain makes information easy to find and relate. Of course, one thing that is easy to do is to link any thought to a section or a page in OneNote and vice versa, so the two make a nice system. But, for me, TheBrain is definitely the front end, the main dashboard. And, it should be said that such a system doesn’t translate when you sync brains between computers. (Any files embedded in the brain being sync’d will sync to the other computer, but any files external to the brain will not be.)

Another nice touch, when you open the dialog box to create a new thought, it behaves much the way Notational Velocity and its clones work… it immediately searches for existing thoughts and presents options, should you want to link to one of these, or it lets you create a new thought. The search box works the same way.

To get the most from TheBrain, though, you need to constantly “garden” your data. (Garden is the term the developers use.) That is, you need to prune it and trim it and replant it to keep it from overgrowing in some areas… think of some thoughts as weeds that may need to be removed from time to time. I guess what I mean is you need to keep grooming your information in order to stay in control. This is a good thing, though, as it makes me continually reflect on my information.

Finally, it is way too limiting to think of TheBrain as a mind map. (Sadly, the developers contribute to this misconception by so often comparing TheBrain to mind mappers.) Yes, you can do mind mapping (if you use that term in a more generalized way) in TheBrain. I think of each brain as a galaxy of information that matters to me, and each thought then becomes its own little solar system, with related information orbiting around it. Unlike our solar system, however, it is constantly evolving and accreting data. (Okay, I’ve mixed metaphors, shifting from garden to galaxy, but they are both useful images.)

Steve Z.