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"The Brain" software is a pretty interesting 3-D mind mapping software and supports tagging and linking. The have a free single user version - http://www.thebrain.com/

... but it mostly blames Britannica itself for being late to the digital party with a crappy CD.

The user interface of Britannica was The Brain, some people loved it, I was among the many who hated it.

You are probably looking for a way to tag files. So you can search,sort and filter by tags. You are about a step away from discovering that mind-mapping applications are your cup of tea. I personally like "The Brain" of http://www.thebrain.com./ No, I am not in any way affiliated with the company other than as their customer (I did purchase the full $250 version with my own money).

What about Personalbrain? It is a multi level mind-mapping software, which is flexible enough to be used for a graphical tree of the family. Doesn't have the genealogy stuff built in but makes it easier to do funny and interesting anecdotes if you are trying to put together a living memory family history. 'course in that case you could also just use freemind for purely in OSS. Genealogy is hard and lengthy. 4 days to do it? eep.

"I don't need my linux box booting as slow as my windows."

Next generation User interfaces will need to be 3D eventually for some applications, check out taggalaxy or thebrain. Thebrain especially would benefit from decent hybridization of 2D and 3D user interfaces.

http://www.taggalaxy.com/

http://www.thebrain.com/

Try this, http://www.thebrain.com/, it's locally based, supports all that you mentioned. although you need to pay to be able to attach files. Excellent to keep track of task, documents, priorities, links with other projects. It's not something like MS project though, in the sense that it useful to estimate or keep track of time.

Email was designed before the advent of interactive discussion boards, there always needs to be a way to refer to a persons post by their location and absolute character location within lines of text/video/slides/etc.

We're getting there I was certainly glad when youtube added the ability to link to video the exact part of a video segment you wanted to show someone instead of them having to load it all at once and then scroll to the time.

The truth is User interfaces are still in the stone age, I've been looking at things like combining things like mind mapping programs + discussion forums + video/presentation software, if anyone gets it right it's going to sell like hotcakes.

I love applications like the brain and cooliris, because I can see the amazing potential there for the future user interfaces.

http://www.thebrain.com/

http://www.cooliris.com/

"We don't need a reinvented GUI, we need programmers that enforce just that little bit of GUI hygiene in the first place."

I don't believe this is the case at all, I am quite frustrated by modern GUI's and the rather enormous amount of complexity that has come about for information and data-types in general, try pasting text directly into youtube video, etc, adding/changing and editing things right now is a real PITA (pain in the ass) because many GUI's for editing absolutely suck, but hte problem goes deeper and I think many modern gui's suffer from lack of creativity in the programming space.

Some apps I really love that have enormous creative ideas for GUI development should anyone actually take these ideas and improve them and blend them right...

I've been keeping my eye on the following:

http://www.spacetime.com/
http://www.thebrain.com/
http://www.cooliris.com/

IMHO right now what is must frustrating about user interfaces is in fact the fact that one needs seperate programs to modify disparate and differing formats of video, audio and text. Mixing and mashing different data-types for even the most SIMPLEST and basic things one could do in the real world takes a hell of a lot of work on a computer.

I've often thought of writing a GUI totally based on proper hybrid of vector based shapes and typography, as well as the implementation of layers (ala photoshop) and nodes ala the brain for connecting data in different ways which would need to be prototyped and tested. I have so many ideas for GUI development that I'm bursting at the seems, but I don't have the time to poor into such a large project, though it's something I've personally thought about and writing about and hoping someone could pick up the design and run with it.

Use mind mapping software... they make professional mind mapping software for businesses.

http://www.thebrain.com/

And it organizes information much better.

... can't write or teach worth a damn, I've got tonnes of books written by experts that are not worthy of being called "textbook" or even for teaching much of anything.

If there's anything I've learned in my life is that ALL areas of knowledge overlap to many degrees, and you can begin learning something from many points along the line but, there needs to be a MAP, many people who 'don't learn properly' or looked down upon by others and university professors aren't simply 'stupid', many of them start off at the wrong entry point into a sphere of knowledge or discipline.

I've wondered about taking thebrain -- http://www.thebrain.com/ and it's SDK and wiki-fying it so that people around the industry can share what kinds of subjects and math they use for what the do, so students aren't totally blind, then off that map, you can hire the best text/teaching book writers to go at it and do their thing.

Most people tend to personalize their language or are not verbose enough for the beginner in explaining with depth all the many things that need to be learned. Often professors and experts do teach from the bottom up, they think perspectivistly from the top down, which ends up bastardizing and distorting the quality of education for many young and upcoming students.

"Believe it or not flowcharts and Venn diagrams are not obsolete."

Believe it or not I use mindmapping software to help plan out the structure of a program and draw relationship lines arbitrarily, I wish someone made these mindmapping programs and made them more accessable to programs and programming.

http://www.thebrain.com/

Also great flowchart drawing tools:

http://www.smartdraw.com/

At risk of getting modded down for recommending a Microsoft product here, you might want to look into OneNote 2007 (or one of the versions of Office 2007 that include it.)

It comes with a "print to..." driver so you can print to your OneNote notebook, and provides a good framework for organizing your notes, and you don't need to kill as many trees as printing to paper.

Another possibility is to get a PDF printer; you can either just organize your notes with file system folders, or if you want something a little bit more useful to track relations between different items, you can use something like PersonalBrain to for organization.

Okay, so if I could, I'd mod you up. Still, I feel like we've stagnated. Navigating a virtual building looking for Fred may not be a great thing, but how about a directory tool based on something like The Brain? It's about half way to true usability as a pardigm, but it's better than nothing.

Here's a different approach. If anyone hasn't yet seen it, I'd suggest trying it out. I never made any use of it (the conclusion from everyone who's tried it and loved it), but it was one of the few programs I've ever tried that seemed to make any headache from staring at a computer screen too long just go away.

That said, I doubt anything will come of any new approaches for years to come. We still have offices, and in those offices we'll work at desks to generate paper which we'll put into labelled folders, which in turn will get stored in file cabinets.

Those desks, files, folders and file cabinets aren't going anywhere, and neither are the metaphors, least of all for the reason that irrespective of whatever new metaphor one creates and implements, someone still has to manage and administer it all. So, short of some revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence and a corresponding increase in processing power, files and folders it stays, leaving some body responsible for doing the requisite work. Google afficonados, of course, keen on their next web application will be free to continue to pretend otherwise, and not bother concerning themselves with such things.

I guess this brings us back to the venerable command-line. In the future, I don't doubt that Microsoft will implement for their users some sort of speech recognition facility so that instead of clicking and pointing, users can grunt or shout at their icons, but the rest of us? We'll be doing productive work at a prompt by pressing keys on a keyboard.

I am not sure what their corporate package will set you back, but these guys over at The Brain have a very nifty tool which did search Notes Databases the last time I gave it a shot.

Have a look at http://www.thebrain.com/. It lets you organize your bookmarks and much more.

People who look at these browser screenshots and decide that the semantic web is/will be a mess stop thinking too early.

This graph-like presentation is just one way to show semantics, and it only works for certain things, like topic maps.

I'm sometimes using tools like outliners and the Brain (insert pun here) to present ideas and their relationships. This is not the way you would want to e.g. read/present a complex manual.

Other, more complex forms of presentation are required - and possible. Ted Nelson had a lot of ideas regarding hypertext and presentation of relationships that have never turned into products. I'm working on my own little, Xanadu-ish project that aims to make navigation in structured text easier. The benefit is not presentation "A" or "B" - but the fact that you will be able to tweak the presentation according to what you need to know. This requires semantics, which in turn requires new tools both for the author, not (only) for the reader.

One day, we will look back and wonder how we could live with an Internet where a search engine had to guess if we are looking for Lotus The Car or Lotus The Flower or Lotus The Software Company, or where separating articles by an author from those about him was nearly impossible. No-one in their right mind can claim this is good enough for the future.

Advantages:Provides visual cuing to conceptual relationships, works in way that non-technical people identify with.

Disadvantages: Windows only, I think the data store is proprietary or maybe just obfuscated, memory hog in a "longhorn" sort of way, did I say windows only. This sort of aggravates me I uses lots of OSes and none of the ones I use at home are supported.

Haystack http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/ Maybe more our speed, honestly it's been a while since I've looked at it, but because we're talking about it, time to go check it out again and see if it's out of beta.

Bottom line Brain Mapping software is very, very cool because it leverages how I think (very disjointly) and helps me overcome my weaknesses (AHADA, Dyslexia, gnat attention span syndrome, and having a job (as in getting paid for) using way more of brain than I generally am willing to give up BUT I don't think Brain Mapping will come into it's prime until I'm senile. But still it's getter than what I use now: A word document titled "stupid ways to develop medical instruments and what I will do in the future to avoid them" and "How to look stupid in clincial trials" which I suppose is like Beta for software developers.

Just realized my above question is a bit long.

In short, do you think a user interface for organizing knowledge (such as The Brain) is applicible to the Wikipedia project?

As an individual who has always had a fascination with epistemology, I find that I learn better when I see the big picture and the connections/relationships between sets of knowledge. This is the main reason why I so embrace the Wikipedia project in that the user is not limited to the "2-dimensional plane" that a single article might offer, but instead can move vertically between areas of knowledge by using the links within articles.

On that note, are there plans to make use of any innovative user interfaces for organizing knowledge? Specifically, I have in mind something akin to The Brain, a sort of visual neural network for knowledge that I first saw used at Ray Kurzweil's site. Could you forsee a tool similar to this as enhancing Wikipedia's functionality?

The only problem with PersonalBrain is that it's windows only and the $80 license fee is steep for something that isn't crossplatform. They have a java serverside edition... but it sounds like it's a couple of grand to license.....

If you're running Windows, it's at least worth checking out. http://www.thebrain.com

Last night I watched the third portion of Children of Dune with my girlfriend, and marveled at how bad the CG in it was. It looked like something out of a babylon 5 knockoff. However, it got me to thinking about VR UI, what will it be like? Even Microsoft is now moving us to a world in which we will attempt to escape the tree structured model of data management and move to using attributes. Then the desktop metaphor will be unnecessary and outdated, and it will be time to start looking for new ways to interact with data. The Brain is fairly interesting in this regard, especially version 3 which supports link and thought types, it gives you some idea of what it could be like to have all of your programs support an advanced filesystem which in turn gave them all metadata; it's easy to see what everything is. Picture bringing up properties on a file and having ldd automatically run and put its output into a window, and then being able to click on any of those files and bring up ITS properties and find out if it's a broken link or whatever. Now picture a three dimensional view in which you can simply see all this stuff when you examine that program's properties, because of visible links. And further, because the filesystem is relational and caches all this metadata, you will be able to see all of the other parents of that library, if you zoom over to it - all of the programs which depend on it. Their metadata is cached each time they are accessed, of course.

Now, Microsoft is not an innovator themselves. They purchase innovators, though, and continue funding them. For our purposes, of course, that might as well be the same thing :) So yes I think that Microsoft is one of few companies that really "get it". They tend to implement something and then use it for everything. .NET is likely going to end up everywhere through Windows. I'm assuming that their new integration of microsoft sybase - er, I mean, SQL server - into the operating system for the purposes of filesystem enhancement is going to change many of their programs substantially, and certainly all the server products will be utilizing its new features.

Meanwhile, we do have the means to create a similar filesystem on linux. Some would say that ReiserFS already is one :) I recall from what I've read that the next version of ReiserFS essentially will be. (Aren't the database functions somewhat unimplemented in 2? Maybe I'm behind, anyway, I decided to use XFS :)

Sounds kind of like the Personal Brain with some MRU sorting.

http://www.thebrain.com

It creates a tree of information where everything is linked. It's a bit pricey, but SO awesome for organizing information. Use it like a File Manager, it can launch websites or files. It's got a patented interface I believe. I'm lucky enough to have an old version that doesn't expire. The new versions look nicer, but I'll stick with free over functional almost every time. What I have works for me. It lets your organize your files the way you think, regardless of where they are stored.

It turns itself into an always on-top icon when you mouse away from it. It "sticks" to the side of your windows and slides back out when you click on that icon again.

Check out their website. The interface at the top is like a small version of their application.

The page shows the enterprise version of their software having won all sorts of prizes recently from various tech/sales/ad rags.

• Keeping a master database "brain" of all of the RPG characters, players, and NPCs, along with web resources and useful files (e.g. PDFs of character sheets).
• A logical map of the corporate network, including routers, switches, and whatnot. Since the "thoughts" can be links, files, or just text, I set it so that opening a router "thought" will start a telnet session, a server thought starts a terminal server session to that server, etc. Those were purely arbitrary. The links between network devices are color-coded by type (T1, dialup, DSL, etc). The network admin about crapped himself when I showed him--and then appropriated it for his own use.
• Story aid. My wife likes to write, and she can link up characters, locations, events, and plot points in entirely arbitrary manners however she pleases.

I'd still like to get into wikis, though. =)

The next killer app, in my opinion, is the application that allows you to not only save content, but also the context

This already exists. It's called The Brain and it's a replacement for standard filesystem browsers. It lets you file and browse anything (files, websites, binaries, etc...) and make your own interconnections between any objects based on your own [twisted] logic.

I've wanted to try it, but it's Windows-only. I've thought about building a simple MySQL app that does something similar, but it wouldn't have the cool 3D Java/ActiveX/whatever object browser that's mocked up on the front page of their website.

Take a look at The Brain for an innovation in browsing. I'd like to see more sites adopt this sort of navigation scheme. Something that's always bothered me about browsers (I use IE primarily, as I'm one of those unfortunates that is locked into Windows) is the disgusting underuse of the "Forward" button. I don't know how many times I've backed up on a path, gone down some other path, then wanted to get back to where I was. I could back up to the fork point, but didn't have any "Forward" options other than where I just came from.

with all this concern about hardware, whatabout software? my only saving grace is a search function on my PDA(palm). but I hate it's catagories being limited to only one section deep.

But honestly.. any machine or hardware that doesn't allow you to scan though notes and find a subject heading, is equivilant to paper. personally (and probably alone in this) I use the brain to keep note type data. searchable and VERY quickly structureable.

Anyone else found some good software for note taking and organizing (other than notepad and folders)?

As for the hardware, laptops are great, but unless it boots instantly, has a long battery life, and can jot notes like a tabletPC i'd find it more of a hinderance. and since college students can't afford a tabletpc, it seems we are back to palm type devices with a keyboard.

It needs to be said here is that BI is a new field and it is evolving. Are 100 million people going to use data visualization tools on a daily basis? Probably not however one can say that the adoption rate of such tools will increase in 5 years. I used to think that BI was just marketing spin until I started doing it a few years. Basically 10 years ago BI was not possible - companies could afford to create their own terabyte databases then mine that information. Today that is possible and tools such as Oracle Discoverer allow non-technical employees to execute complicated queries. That itself is crazy and it gets better. BI will make the decision making process faster and more accurate. Getting there will take time but it will happen. Dashboards are already a common name. For a glimpse into the future check out the following sites:

http://www.thebrain.com
http://www.visualthesaurus.com
http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap
http://www.earthviewer.com

My favorite is the sector map offered by SmartMoney. It's an awesome tool however it is pricey and put this in front of your average sales person and they will freeze due to information overload.

Oh so you got one, why use The Brain then :?:

That's bad. Even worse is that they're putting their ODBC connection (should be OLE DB, anyway) at the application level. Jesus christ... that's really amateurish. You'd think that even the most brain dead developer would have quit doing this years ago. I hope their web developer isn't one of the main developers. Try this link

I'm already using The Brain. It's *really* unique, and it works. It works very well. And, in addition to organizing files the way YOU want them organized, it also connects random thoughts, web sites, emails, etc. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's pretty damn incredible.

Experiments in "3D" interfaces always seem well-intentioned, but miss the point. When folks start placing the user in a virtual environment, making it necessary to "walk around" a cluttered file system or data structure, it becomes far more cumbersome than the file manager metaphor.

For my money and/or time, the proper direction for a 3D GUI would be something like a combination of Personal Brain and the GUI from Minority Report. (Don't laugh, I'm serious!) You want to give the user the ability to establish relationships between chunks of data, and visually echo those relationships in the UI -- thick cord connects to parent; thin line connects to peers; ghosted dots indicate references; etc.

So the "depth" isn't really about being inside a 3D space -- it's about always having related data nearby and available while keeping unrelated data out of the way. And, again, we know what's related, and in what way, because the user has established these relationships.

I use The Brain. It's the only way I've ever found of organizing all of my thoughts, emails, bookmarks, files, pictures, programs, etc. into a cohesive, useable unit. In my opinion, it's really how personal computers were meant to be used. I recommend everybody with a ton of bookmarks, sticky notes all over the place, and a ton of flagged emails to take a look at it and play with it for at least 10 minutes. What it does is really amazing.

Todd

This sounds like a program I ran across a few years ago. I just googled them again and found they are still in business. They are pushing the same idea, and have been for years now...

For the animation-loving...

For the animation-hating...

This sounds like a program I ran across a few years ago. I just googled them again and found they are still in business. They are pushing the same idea, and have been for years now...

For the animation-loving...

For the animation-hating...

How many banks really *block* a given browser? And if they do, how many really wouldn't work if you masqueraded your user agent?

Lots, and almost none, respectively.

This is the real pisser; Most banks use no functions which require any browser more sophisticated than lynx (or links) provided you use a version with 128 bit SSL, but they frequently restrict you to using only a particular browser.

When will web developers realize that A) we have standards and B) HTML is no TML? Stop trying to do precise shit in HTML and design pages which can be viewed on any kind of device already.

With all that said, I'm kind of thinking of putting together a website using dynamic flash (or similar, for sure generated with something other than generator) which works like PersonalBrain. It's such a cool idea, but I just can't see paying them for the privilege of using their silly java applet on my site. It should be a simple application... ha ha.

It's kind of a PIM/Explorer replacement. It lets you structure and link your info any way you feel like, and has a flashy but quite functional GUI. I've been using it off and on for 3 years or so. I tend to use it as more of a content manager and use Outlook/PDA instead for most PIM functions, but Brain does both well, if you take the time to link up your info right.

I could never quite figure out the reason for the rotating plex in TheBrain (a tool for organizing everything in a computer using a series of graphical linkages). But it is really saying the same thing the Apple II was saying. The rotating plex has the added feature that it can be set to reverse directions at random intervals. There's an open source version (without the links) here. Something along these lines would go a long way way toward eliminating the multiple entry point problem with Windows-type GUIs, though the TheBrain itself is far from going open source. Imagine something like TheBrain linking Java-based programs.

Remember this file explorer with the / in the middle and the subdirectories around arranged as a circle, and you drag subtrees near the center to expand them?

I think you mean this. Although I thought it was a load of crap...

someone did. Its called The Brain

It's not 3D, but i think it's pretty cool.

The Brain

They try to sell it as a way to organize documents, or thoughts or whatever in a natural way. In reality, I think it's kinda clumsy and silly. But I think it's a great tool for brainstorming or collaborative creativity. It's easy to look at and you can even hook it up to tEh INTArnET.

RDF - the XML format for metadata - essentially describes relationships between resources and is a superset of the problem area you describe. I had a cursory look to see if people had taken the obvious step of using diagram tools to edit rdf and yes they have:

Using DIA and GraMToR and GraphViz and IsaViz and lots lots more

You might also be interested in They Rule which draws some interesting social networks!

While this is all standard 2d editing (I think the 3d editing thing is nonsense btw, unless you actually have a 3d coordinate system then you are actually describing a 2d network diagram) there are other visualisation options which may be interesting. Mindmapping tools allow you to navigate the network of concepts may be interesting as are star trees. Both provide a focussed view on a small part of a much larger network with some context information to help you choose how to navigate. They are more useful for display than authoring.

Hope something in here is useful

-Baz

So it's actually working on the basis of webs of related sites - not a novel concept, but useful.

I suspect that some of the commercial knowledge management tools have been doing something much like this for some time, and TheBrain.com has had a product to manually build this kind of network of clusters for some time. The key thing about this is that with web indexing/cataloging the information needed to do the automatic linking is available.

TheBrain.com seems to have a working demo of using it for the Web at WebBrain.com based on the Open Directory Project. It's not a great example because of display limitations that don't really let you see more than one cluster of information at the time, but it's one example of the general concept. Once you dig down in an area you can see how it shows links between related categories as well.

Note: the demo above says it requires Java 1.1 and IE 4.01 or Netscape 4.07+, to bypass that test try here. Seems to work fine in Netscape 6.2, and will probably be OK in Mozilla if the JRE is available.)

Part of the reason I like windows is because I don't have to think about things like that. Oh sure, I never have the best security, but I don't use outlook or IIS, I don't run exes that spammers send me, and I'm behind a firewall, as well as running zonealarm. I'm fairly well protected.

Anyway, while it's possible that someday someone will hax0r windows update and slap some virii in there, I'm not too terribly worried about that, especially now that most of the big DNS railroading exploits are supposed to be patched. I just want autoupdate to keep my system relatively current so I can get back to what it is I do best; Downloading pr0n.

1. Leave a task and revist it later, restoring the set of documents being used (this is why people clutter their desktops).
   
2. Find all the files associated with a project or subproject possibly by a specific person.
   
3. Track, annotate and reconstruct past versions of a file.
   
4. Find files by when they had activity (not just the LAST modification date), by association with a business entity, by content (OK now but could be better) or by keywords (Should not be left up to applications).
   
5. Distribute a document to one or more persons for comments and review, approval and alternative edits.
   
6. Track the current status of a document.
   

When it comes to organizing my files/folder/shortcuts, I very rarelu use the Start Menu. Instead, I've been using The Brain, which treats documents, programs, shortcuts, program groups, etc as "thoughts" which you can link to any other thought. Pretty cool.