The prior topic had a short discussion of visualizing outlines, and mentioned Inspiration, etc.
The very best visualizer is TheBrain.com. "Thoughts" have parents, children, and siblings (peers), and when you click on a thought, it becomes the center of focus (in the center of the screen) with lines to every thought to which it has a relationship (links).
It’s a Windows program, and believe it or not, I love the program so much that I bought Virtual PC for my PowerBook G4 just to run TheBrain.
I’d love to see some integration of a Brain-like program with DT, but I recognize the design decisions are huge.
thanks for the link. TheBrain looks like an awesome program.
I think there are many other Mac programs that can link information in a similar manner (wiki linking is close) but don’t have the visual representation or the active user interface that TheBrain uses.
I’d like to see something like that for the Mac; it’s a natural combination really.
The key to TheBrain is that the active thought becomes the center of focus with all of its links radiating out from it. When you click on another thought, then it becomes the center of focus.
I wish I could find this functionality for the Mac, and I have looked very hard, but I haven’t found anything that dynamically changes the center of focus. [OmniGraffle and Inspiration are static, and since Inspiration is linked with an outliner, it can’t handle a “child” that has more than one parent (i.e. an outline is just a hierarchy rotated by 90 degrees).
If you ever find a thought visualizer for Mac that truly is dynamic like TheBrain, I’d really appreciate your letting me know.
I found DT when my son who uses TheBrain suggested it. He uses wintel and I’m obviously a mac person. I agree it has some really great features, although for research regarding multiple published scientific articles I think DT is better.
