Francis Pisani has alread written on his blog about ''The Brain, respectively he has done an interview with Hugh Harlan, the founder of the company behind the software. And as it seems it Mr. Pisani a great fan of this tool. I had the honor of having a few lectures from him at the University of St. Gallen. One task we students had to fulfill, was to provide discussion material and maybe some answers to a question with the software. And so did I use The Brain. You can see on the screenshot of how my tiny brain looked after a week.
As I have tried, I would say extensively, the software I can tell you some things about it.
First I have to say that I am convinced of the power of brainstorming and mind maps. I use them quite often to structure my thoughts. And I think that, as soon as you have some experience with this techniques, you can handle a lot of information quite comfortable, which means with ease.
This is what The Brain does. It allows you to build a network of all your thoughts and uses for this latest technology, which is also used for semantic applications. You can see this if you browse a little bit around in the directory of your installation. There you will find a java library (.jar) called Jena, which is originally from HP and is used for the handling of semantic data (i.e. RDF and so on). And as your Brain grows you will see that there are some nice benefits from this technology. You can for example build a new thought and with a tipping ahead suggestion already entered thoughts are shown for selection to you. When you select one of the propositions a connection to the existing thought is made by the software. No matte how far away (in terms of connections) the proposed thought is. That is really nice.
By the way, the software is made really intuitive and you can handle it the first time you start it. Nevertheless you may need some training, but there are a lot of video tutorials and hints to find on the web, for example via Google or in YouTube.
For each thought you can add web links, or link to files on your computer (which is only in trial mode possible or in the pro mode) and you can add notes, which can contain links as well. So just copy the important passages from the websites into the notes and add a link and you can be sure to find your information with the built in search.
The navigation may need some training, because you can get lost in your network. And yes, even if it is a small network of thoughts. Therefore a kind of breadcrumb navigation is built in, where you can track your path.
There is even a presentation mode and the software can also be handled with the keyboard. But here comes my first negative impression of the software. To build new thoughts you rarely get around your mouse. The shortcuts are on the Function-Keys (e.g. F1 to F12), which are not so much used from me. And since I have a MacBookPro on this key are on first priority some system functions (Volume up and down...). I know I could switch this off, but I do not want to do this. Compared with MindManager the keyboard navigation from The Brain is really ugly.
And there is a second not so nice thing about The Brain. It is scripted in Java, so that it is platform independent, which is really nice and I as a Mac-User really appreciate this. But the software uses to much memory in standard configuration. There are some nice, geeky animations, which look good, but no one need them. They use a lot of memory and even if you turn them out, the software needs a huge amount. On the windows notebook from my friend The Brain used, with the window open and no actions performed about 175MB (including virtual memory). Well you can argue that todays laptops/notebooks have enough processing power and RAM to handle this. But still, this is not desired. I maybe have more software in use than just the brain and they use enough memory. So I do not need a software in standby-mode to use this huge amount of memory. Even Skype (connected but no active chats or so) uses less memory than The Brain.
All together this is a nice software. A little bit geeky, but with amazing features and a good concept. I will track how this will evolve further, but not use it for now on a regular basis, since I am a man of the keyboard and I am greedy when it is about my resources from my laptop (even if I have enough of them).
Intriguing piece. I am perplexed by this post, perhaps a person here has links to more information they might be inclined to sharing?