Peter's Blog

The Brain is a radical outliner/mindmapping tool with a very radical user interface, which you can try on their website if your browser supports java. I have tried the 30 day trial and by the end of the 30 days it has fallen out of use. The program itself has not been updated since March 2004 so is either perfect or is not under active development.

Two concepts I have been contemplating recently are starting to blur together: outliners and tags.

I have read of people who have moved from Outliners to Wikis as a means of organising their notes. I have found Wiki's rather simplistic and unattractive, especially as web-based editors are sluggish compared to desktop applications.

However, now I have changed my site to use awTags I see how tags can be used to implement a wiki. But this is better than a wiki: a link leads to a list of related articles rather than just a single page. In the manner of an outliner, an article leads on to a list of child articles according to which tag you follow. The article itself can be tagged with a number of different tags representing different concepts that the article itself can be filed under and these links can be regarded as parent relationships. This is just what TheBrain is trying to do: Mind Mapping but without the fancy graphics.

I have altered my wilki module accordingly and have used it right there. By typing in something as simple as

[wilki|tags/wilki]

I created a link to all my wilki module related postings filed under the wilki tag. Alternatively, I could have linked to the wilki introductory article and from there a reader, once they know what the wilki module is, can follow the wilki tag if they so desire.

This is all pretty abstract and I will have to see if it is actually of any use in the real world. On a practical level it will be easier for me to reference other articles by linking to the tag name, rather than trying to find the drupal node number of a specific article I am thinking of. The downside is that going to the introductory article is probably a better pattern to follow, especially as articles are listed in reverse chronological order, putting the most informative introduction at the very end.

Been playing with The Brain some more:

• By linking a folder to a thought and creating virtual thoughts for all files in the folder, I can apply meta-data and define new relationships between files, beyond what a simple folder hierarchy can do. It's an interesting concept, but I need to think of a use for it. Maybe creating shortcuts to useful files, each shortcut having a note to remind me what the file does beyond it's name.
• The context menu for virtual thoughts gives some of the windows explorer options such as 'open', 'edit', 'edit with VIM' etc, it is not restricted to opening them. This is useful to me, giving me the option of running or editing python files.
• Similarly, brain promises it can spider a web site, building a map of all the pages, each thought linking to the corresponding page. Unfortunately this seems to be broken:
  1. it stopped with a weird access error half way through my test
  2. the links it did create didn't work, some problem with absolute vs relative urls.
• It has some nice keyboard shortcuts, it is possible to do extensive navigation and map buildng using just the keyboard.
• If I just start typing a word then by default this goes into the search box and does an incremental search. Very fast way of finding things.
• I don't think the virtual thoughts for files appeared in the search list.
• Dragging an email from outlook causes the corresponding .eml file to be stored in the brain and opened when the thought is clicked on: nice way to organise email.
• Since the RTF notes support OLE I can embed excel spreadsheets in them. Maybe RTF isn't so bad.
• Except the program create a 388 byte empty RTF file for every though, even when I don't put anything in them.
• Program was last modified in March 2004. It's not perfect so is it still under development?
• It is supposed to be version 3.0.2 but the tooltip in the task bar and at least one comment in the help file says version 2.0.
• Despite it's flash graphics it is nice and fast. I can imagine the new graphical UI coming out, based on Avalon and similar, providing gimmicky interfaces like this.

Conclusion: I still like it.

Next in my Outliner quest is TheBrain. This is a radical looking outliner:

Each node in the diagram is called a 'thought' and it can have multiple parents, children and peers (not siblings, they can have different parents). This allows incredibly complex mappings of relationships to be created. For an idea of what it is like to use, try the WebBrain which needs java enabled in your browser. The mappings form more of an amorphous blob than a tree and so can model all kinds of things. It is more of a brainstorming tool than an outliner.

Review:

• it is fun to use
• it is easy to get lost
• you can assign web pages, applications etc to thoughts, so they launch when you click on them
• I tried mapping mail addresses to people thoughts but the mailto link was broken by the time it reached outlook.
• A folder can be assigned to a thought, in which case 'virtual thoughts' representing the files in the folder appear in the map.
• can export data as XML, although I haven't tried that yet to see how complete it is.
• RTF notes can be assigned to thoughts. Unfortunately these cannot contain hyperlinks but they can contain OLE objects (remember OLE?).
• It is easy enought to search for items or assign keywords and types to them. Tell the difference between people and computers in your map.

TreePad seems more a way of organising articles that TheBrain, which is a way of arranging thoughts and pushing them around as a way to see new relationships. It is interesting putting a family tree or company organisation chart into it and examining it from all angles.

I'm having fun playing with it. I came across other Mind Mapping tools in my exploration but TheBrain's totally unique UI appeals to me.