Vacation time… hobbies…

Aside from long walks by the seaside and reading, one of my favourite activities during summer time is to delve a little further into the myriad of apps I’ve bought over time, play around with them, and try to gain a little more expertise in order to hopefully learn how to make better use of them. In consultant parlance this could be summarized as: extract more value from their usage.

While most of the apps I buy are to be used in some way or another for business purposes, some others are just for fun or as I think of it: ‘family fun’. Examples apps that fall under this category would be: MemoryMiner, Lightroom, Posterino, FotoMagico, PulpMotion… this is not to mention RapidWeaver, iWeb, Sandvox or even… bit of a stretch here… Flux.

Some of this apps came in bundles or promos, some others I bought individually.

This year though I find myself spending time with an app I haven’t bought… yet. In fact I didn’t know about it until an ad of the ones Google serves along the posts in this blog hinted about it. I must say that the line “better than OneNote” caught my attention…

While in my opinion it has nothing to do with OneNote… I’m having nonetheless lots of fun with it. If I had to classify it, I would say it falls under the note taking, snippet keeper, life organizing category. And allow me to insist, I really find it to have nothing to do with OneNote. I’m referring to PersonalBrain from The Brain Technologies.

Its main work area, the ‘Plex’, is extremely visually appealing. The rest of the interface on the other hand seems to show that its first versions were developed with windows (the OS) in mind. Nowadays the app. offers windows, OSX and even linux versions… and perhaps that has something to do with that as well.

In any case, I would recomend it to anyone. Specially to any ‘visual thinkers’ out there. Some of the apps I already own overlap in one way or another with it, but I must recognize that I’m enjoying it very much.

Fire it up, dump a bunch of ‘thoughts’ into it and choose the “Wander” feature on the ‘Options’ menu. Beauty.

The more information I pour into it, the more useful I find it. I would advise to watch a few of the screencasts offered by its makers. While some are a bit lenghty, there are lots of tips to be found in them.

As a final note, you might also want to check a brief review that Macworld recently did on their latest version release. There is a nice screenshot of the ‘Plex’ there.

All the best, TFS