2010-11-15 | Everything Box

I've been using PersonalBrain (PB) now for a few years, and I've only recently started to truly use it as my bucket for everything digital.

There's been some things holding me back for a while. Prior to 6.x there was no built in synchronization tool, and while I used the heck out of it for work, I only used it here and there at home. I'd also been testing other Personal Information Managers (PIMs) for the Mac for years, still looking for the perfect application. I've only just now come to the conclusion that there isn't one.

There are a few area's where PB has been traditionally weak. First, the Mac-ness of PB is lacking. Since I use a Mac at home, this matters to me. It's integration with the OS is above a normal Java application, but far below a Cocoa app. As moderate power user, this annoys the hell out of me. Also, as I noted above, there was always some friction in getting my database between home and work in sync. I used Dropbox, but there were gyrations required, and after using PB on the drive for years, I frankly didn't have patience to deal with having it on a USB drive.

Complex reporting on my data is another area that PB is just now starting to ramp up. Types and Tags appearing in the plex have been a huge help towards this. Another weak area is the lack of customization for my thoughts and links. Don't get me wrong, zoomable thought icons are fantastic, but a lack of directionality in links (as well as dotted lines) means you are losing a chance to show context.

All this was an annoyance, but I'd tried prettier mind mapping solutions, and other robust PIMs, and had already come to the conclusion that the only time I can really get a sense of my data, and the context around it is working in the plex. I'd discounted pure mind mappers a long time ago. They are nice for small maps, and excellent for presenting focused data, but once your topic hits a certain size they get unwieldy, becoming a chore to navigate. After realizing this I started exploring PIMs. The main theme behind most of them (respectfully excluding Tinderbox) is the folder structure. This is also nice to a point, but after a while they became unwieldy, and it was hard to narrow things down with too many documents in a folder. Sure, I then experimented with tags, smart searches etc, but it wasn't much different for me than using the OS structure. There was too much friction. Finally I gave up, and went back to using the OS Folders, and PB for contextual linking. I honestly haven't found anything that will beat PersonalBrains instant search, and then the immediate context you get from activating the thought.

I'd gone through all this, and knew that PB was, at least for me, the best choice I had, but I still hadn't truly adopted it for home use. It wasn't until 6.x came out that I realized what was stopping me was simply that it was difficult to get information in.

Several things in 6.x changed this. First, transparency mode and mini-mode made it easier to add things at my computer. With both modes I can still interact with other apps while PB appears in the foreground and easily drag items into the plex. Second, the thought creation window allowed me to add tags and thought types on the fly. Since I assign a type to every thought I bring into PB, this accounts for quite a bit of time savings. But what was really made the difference was something much smaller (in fact, it wasn't even a main release attraction), the improvements to the outline importing).

You see, while I use PB on my main computer, I mainly browse news and read articles on my phone, or more recently the iPad. That's all well and good, but there wasn't really a good way for me to transfer articles of interest into PB, so it just didn't happen. The 6.0 release, along with a few iPhone text applications being released that sync to DropBox changed everything for me. I won't go into the workflow here, see the Capturing Thoughts on the Go / Advanced Outline Pasting link below for that information, but these small changes greased the wheels for the transfer of links, and (dare I say it) thoughts. So now, PB has finally become my everything box.

I'm hoping that in the future, WebBrain will be robust enough to allow me to add thoughts when I'm connected to the internet. However, even when I'm not, I know that I can always jot down some notes in the correct format, and import it into PB when I'm back at my computer. Nice.