Months ago a friend pointed me to an application that I now consider as a true killer-app. I’ve been using it intensively and it was ‘love at first sight’. The application I’m talking about is PersonalBrain by TheBrain Technologies. Below I’ll mention a few of the things I like and add one important wish for the future of personal computing.
Mindmapping
Mindmapping is a great tool for thinking and learning. When I returned to university, I created separate mindmaps of the books, articles and subjects we studied. First, I used Mindjet Mindmanager for that. Soon, these separate maps became annoying. The typical (1-to-many) tree-shape of a mindmap became too limited for me. How do you easily connect different branches of different mindmaps? PersonalBrain allows you to create many-to-many relationship ‘mindmaps’. Also, PersonalBrain allows huge (really huge) maps. To get an impression of how big it can become, have a look at Jerry Michalski’s brain (his site here) .
Collect and a place for everything
I am probably not the most organized person in the world. When I read about the idea of having one trusted place for all your next actions in ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen, it inspired me to create a trusted system/place for my data, information, knowledge and even wisdom too. If I find something on the web, see somehting on tv, read in a book or article and don’t want to forget about it because for some reason it inspired me or moved me, I put it in my PersonalBrain. I prefer digital media, because it can be incorported in the brain so easily. The tool even allows me to do a full search through the websites or documents that I’ve attached to the thoughts in my brain. After a few months, my brain already contains around 8000 thoughts with many, many links. It works great for me: I’ve uncluttered my documents from my PC, thoughts in my head, and stuff in my bookcase, desk, drawers, my bookmarks and notes. They are all in my PersonalBrain, easily accessible via numerous links and associations that I added.
My wish: PersonalBrain interface and principles integrated in file system
As described above, I include a lot of shortcuts to digital media files in my brain. I don’t bother about filenames nor locations anymore. Naming and organizing is done in PersonalBrain. Now imagine the situation where your file system of your operating system is actually a relational database. You could add endless links and association between files or to thoughts without files. Microsoft planned such a feature (WinFS or Windows Future Storage) for Vista, but they couldn’t do it. I hope that this idea will soon become reality, and on top of that I would love to have the visual interface of PersonalBrain to browse through and maintain this database.
Anyway, i.m.h.o. it is a true killer-app. Try it. There is a free edition of it too. Check out a few of these video’s here, here, here and here to get an idea of the power and flexibility of this piece of software.
