PersonalBrain Maps Your Mind But Overdoes The Eyecandy

Giles Turnbull ()

Another little screencast for you, this time about PersonalBrain, a mind-mapping tool. I recently spent some time exploring this app and found it an odd mix of the infuriating and the fascinating.

The screencast I refer to, about the guy with 100,000 items in his PersonalBrain, is here.

Like I say in the video, PersonalBrain doesn’t really appeal to me; but if you use it, I’d be interested to hear what for, and why you like using it.

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About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in Opinions, Reviews, Software |

  • http://www.blog.hellopanos.co.uk mono

    MindManager does it for me for some time now and I think I’ll stick to it for a while! :) Thanks for the review though!

  • CaryMG

    Dude ….
    I learned absolutely ZERO from that video.
    I don’t even know what the damn thing *does*. lol

    The way the guy in the video just pontificates & drones on & on & on & on ….
    YECCH

  • http://blog.thebrain.com Shelley

    As you acknowledge in your video, PersonalBrain is very different. For some people it’s like breathing while other users may prefer more conventional, 2D mind mapping software. You might find my blog entry on the differences to be of interest: http://blog.thebrain.com/beyond-hierarchies/

    However, before you move to something more static I thought you be interested in learning a few things that were missing in your video.

    First, the application can be customized to your preferences easily. For example, the spinning animation around the active Thought can easily be turned off in Preferences. Open Preferences from the PersonalBrain menu, select the “Look & Feel” tab, and uncheck “Active Thought Indicator”.
    Next, it seems much of your confusion with the software stems from misunderstanding of the relationships available in PersonalBrain. The Thoughts to the left of the active Thought are not Siblings but rather Jump Thoughts. They are associative connections and are not connected to the Parent, but only the active Thought. Siblings on the other hand are Thoughts that share the same parent. They are displayed to the right and have links to a common parent Thought. See my blog post on Thought relationships:

    http://blog.thebrain.com/thought-relationships/

    In your example, “CHARACTERS” is not linked to “Steve’s big adventure” but instead to “PLOT” and thus it doesn’t appear below Steve’s aig adventure. If you had made CHARACTERS a sibling of PLOT, it would have appeared, however you made it a jump…

    I thought you may also be interested in knowing that there are several other views available if you would like to see more Thoughts on-screen at once. The outline view shows information in a way that mimics a tabbed outline. The expanded view allows flexible control over what is displayed and where it is placed onscreen.

    Choose the view you want to see from top of the View menu and experiment to see which view works best for you. http://www.thebrain.com/site/video/tips_tricks01/

    Thanks for the video.
    Shelley

  • http://gilest.org gilest

    Thanks for your comment, Shelley, some interesting points there. Clearly I didn’t get very far up the PersonalBrain learning curve during my trial run… :)

  • Aquinas

    Hmmm… this certainly presupposes Physicalism.

  • Glenn

    As Shelley mentions understanding the relationships in your thoughts is key to the tool displaying them meaningfullly.

    The expanded view is defintely worth a look. It allows you to drag thoughts or bunches fo thoughts wherever you want them, dynamically, and all other thoughts shimmy around to make room. It looks very cool and helps to ‘organise your thoughts’.

    Also, I too had a problem with getting it to display child thoughts in a certain order. The simple solution I eventially came up with was to label thoughts that needed to be in a certain order as ’01. this is the first thought’ and ’02. this is the second thought’ etc. These then will order correctly.

    My only gripe is that I am a casual user and after my 30 day trial ended the Expanded view was disabled, which takes away an important way of orgainsing thoughts. I’m not sure I can afford US$150 to get this functionality back….

    Great tool though
    Glenn

  • http://www.dagr.demon.co.uk Graham Rawlinson

    The key to falling in love with PersonalBrain is seeing it not as a tool to help you think but as a tool to help you think about your thinking. Or even think about your thinking about your thinking. Being able to pull a thought forward for reflection, moving it around, tagging it, bringing all thoughts with those tags, or links, or types, this is a next level thinking tool, and works well as a complementary tool to iMindMap which can provide the ‘artistic visualisation’.

    What is the alternative? A hierarchical 1D Windows folder structure, or a semi-fixed 2D hierarchy. PersonalBrain i 3D or even 3D plus.

    Graham