TheBrain is a mind-mapping program that allows you to organize your files, web pages, schedule, and other relevant materials in a logical form, akin to the way humans organize our thoughts in our own brain. This can be useful for managing work or school projects, and organize your thoughts and materials for creative work such as writing a novel or design a new product, as well as many other applications.
First, you need to create a new project. This will be the "parent" thought. Then, you can add as many "children" thoughts to this "parent" as you need, and also create "grandchildren" and "grand-grandchildren" according to your needs. Let's say that you are using the program to write a historical essay. First, you create the "parent" with the title of the essay, and then you will add "children", for example, "Historic context", "Social life of the period", and so on. You can attach the URLs of the relevant web pages to these "children", as well as written files, videos, or audio files you may have created or downloaded previously. Also, you can assign a deadline to each part of the project. The beauty of this is that it gives immediate access to these elements so you can have all your material in front of you, without the need of making time-consuming searches. Also, you can combine the elements in creative forms to generate new associations between them.
The program offers a cloud service that allows you to store your materials and access them from any web-connected device. more
Comments (2)
I bought version 8 about a decade ago, and used it extensively to record all my research. Apart from the timeline feature, which was unusably buggy, it was completely reliable. I never lost any work. Unlike many programmes it saves continuously, without any prompting.
It was a little expensive, but well worth it for the promised lifetime of use.
When version 9 came out, I didn't want it. It seemed to lose the user-friendliness, as well as jeapardise the privacy inherent in v. 8.
Recently I had to buy a new laptop when one died, only to find that they had got rid of the server which authenticated that you had paid for it. I.e. they reneged on their commitment to allow you to use the software for which you had paid for indefinite use, failing to produce an alternative way of validating the paid version.
After fruitless attempts at getting help from the company (admitedly always polite and quite prompt) I gave up on the version I wanted, and resigned myself to paying again for v. 14 - software which looks flashier, makes a big deal of AI, but is much less user-friendly than v 8. Nevertheless I'll make allowances for the new ways of working.
Unfortunately it has just failed in its most important respect: making notes is not reliable. At one point I stopped being able to edit it, and could only continue after restarting the programme. This happened repeatedly. Now the programme has crashed, losing the entire article I had spent six hours on for today's Substack post.
There were several smaller problems with installing it, involving it giving instructions which were impossible or "Catch 22"-type situations.
I'm disappointed at losing $125, 6 hours work, and lacking the future use I had expected.