In the past I’ve reviewed Mind Manager – an excellent piece of software for producing mind maps – a tool I that forms part of my daily work flow for information gathering and organizing. However I’ve recently discovered something called "Personal Brain" from TheBrain.com that really takes mind mapping to a whole new level.

The problem I’ve always had with a mind map is that it’s essentially only two dimensional. You start at the ‘root’ node and work outwards in a hierarchy. You can create any number of hierarchy from the centre; but problems start to occur when you want to link from one hierarchy to another. Things start to get complicated and a complex map can be difficult to navigate and locate the information you need.

The Personal Brain takes a more 3 dimensional approach to organizing data. You can link nodes to multiple parents and to multiple children allowing for a network of cross links between information nodes. In addition to linking parents and children you can ‘jump’ create links to other topics. These are links to topics that are related but don’t form part of the current parent / child hierarchy. I guess an example might help:

Here we see my TulligWeather server is a child of Servers; but because it is weather related there’s a jump link to Met Eireann. In practice this makes it simple to create complex relationships between topics and yet make them easy to navigate.

As well as creating the topics you can add notes and attachments to them as well as giving them a type and adding tags. The latter allows you to view the tags as a virtual topic showing you all the topics with that tag. Here’s a shot showing a PHP tag and it’s associated topics.

Full search capabilities and and trail of recently accessed items make locating items in unrelated parts of a map easy. Additionally you can pin major topics to the top of the work area to help facilitate moving around different parts of your ‘brain’.

Personal Brain is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. That last one is a big bonus for me as I’m using Linux most of the time at present. The Linux version does have some features that don’t work like dragging files onto a topic to create an attachment; but for most things there’s a valid work around and I haven’t found anything that I really couldn’t do. There’s 3 versions available; free, Core and Pro. The free version has quite a few restrictions; but should still be usable. The Pro version includes integration with Microsoft Office, integrated calendar and a number of other useful features; but is very expensive at $249. I’ve been trialing the Pro version which is die to expire in a few days. Due to current financial constraints I’ll be switching to the free version at that time and I’ll let you know how that works out.