Author: admin

BrainStorm is 25 today. And still selling. I’m sorry it’s been quiet here on the blog but we have been deep in planning the program’s future. More on that later. In the meantime, if you’re interested, we have a memorabilia page tucked away on the site.

Hi everyone, David here.

A few times recently, BrainStorm users have written to ask why they can’t get into the forum even though they’ve signed up. The sad answer is that we have tried all manner of ways of stopping the spam applications but they keep pouring in. The genuine applicants are hard to spot.

A couple of months ago, we added a note to the confirmation emails to explain this and to ask people to write to us directly with their chosen user name. We would then activate them manually.

So, if you’re someone who’s tried to join the forums but without success, this could be the answer. Please drop us a line – ‘support’ at brainstormsw etc (I’m trying to avoid attracting even more spam) – and we’ll sort you out.

If BrainStorm ever crashes in Vista, right click the icon you use to activate it and select ‘Properties’. Then ‘Compatibility’ then the XP option.

I’ve been using it on Vista for a couple of weeks and, yesterday, experienced a couple of crashes. Hard to nail down because I couldn’t repeat them. But I’ve gone for ‘Compatibility’ mode and nothing’s happened since.

I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been using BrainStorm for 27 years and I’ve just discovered a new trick. I can’t believe it’s taken so long.

I’ve just hoovered up masses of information from the internet using Magic paste.

The result needs to be picked though to identify the important bits.

It’s just occurred to me to make a new model – call it nuggets – and set Magic paste on there. Go back to the large file and just highlight and copy the interesting bits. These don’t have to be whole entries, they can be phrases from within an entry.

End result: plenty of readable wheat and no chaff

Recently, I was talking with someone who has trouble with writing. She’s great at talking and is very articulate. Somehow, when it comes to writing, she has issues. The words never come out as well as she speaks and the logical flow gets lost.

I’ve just dropped her a note, the main content of which follows. It starts by talking about a mutual contact:

… I think he’s rather keener on MindJet’s MindManager now. But, at the time, he got a lot of value out of BrainStorm.

The two programs are not synonymous. BrainStorm grabs your thoughts and text clippings from anywhere quickly and easily and lets you bugger about with them – moving, structuring, editing and so on.

As I mentioned the other day in London, I use it a lot. (Background, I wrote it originally to help me with managing, editing and writing – in 1981.)

It occurs to me that you might find it useful, especially for grabbing the key points, establishing a sequence, identifying and filling gaps, and outputting a template for whatever it is you’re trying to write.

It sits in a space apart from outliners (although it resonates with them) and mind mappers (although it resonates with them too). It was written before both appeared on the market. It is text. It is simple. It is fast. It doesn’t get in the way of your thinking.

There are some screencasts here:

http://www.brainstormsw.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=12

I can’t remember which is best to start with, but ‘real life organisation’ would appear to hold promise.

The website, as you’ve probably realised, is www.brainstormsw.com and the program is free to download and use for 30 days. I can extend that if you need more time to evaluate it. The download is only a couple of meg and installation takes about a minute.

I’m not going to claim it’s intuitive – although some people fall for it straight away. It’s something to do with how we’re wired, I think.

In essence it’s a list. Any entry in the list can have its own list ‘underneath’ – double click on an entry’s icon or press ‘Home’ and it becomes a heading, ready for its own list. The same entry can appear in multiple places and they’re automatically hyperlinked. This has powerful uses which I won’t bore you with here.

The whole can be displayed as an outline for when you’re figuring out how far you’ve got or whether there are gaps or too much information.

And it can be printed, written to a file, published as HTML or OPML and so on. Frankly, the publishing aspects are not central. The ‘Write to clipboard’ is probably the most useful output because you can then drop the text (or the outline) into another program.

I thought that if this description helps my friend, it might help you.

PS I have just installed and created a small project in MindManager Pro 7. It’s a totally different animal and I really shouldn’t have mentioned it in the same breath as BrainStorm. It is a comprehensive graphical mind-mapping program with all manner of presentational features and project management tools. BrainStorm is much more of a personal tool: a mind assistant primarily for your own benefit. Think Segway versus jumbo jet.

Long-standing BrainStorm user, Jack Rickards was struggling with trying to list the entries in BrainStorm that contained the same text. He could "find" and "find again" but that wasn’t enough.

Here’s the email exchange that led to a solution that worked for him.

From Jack:

This may be a WIBNI request or something I have stupidly overlooked that is already possible in the all-encompassing BrainStorm.

I realize that one can do a "find" and continue doing "find agains" on a text string and, with a split screen, copy the result of these multiple finds into a new list. Is there a way to ask BrainStorm to generate a list of all occurrences of a text string?

I have, in a BrainStorm model, projects all over the place under various major headings. I have included in these project titles, a priority code and a now/later code, for example [A1/now]. Obviously I am looking for a quick and dirty way to generate all my "A1/now"s in a separate list.

From me:

On the "all strings" – I usually "Write" "Only entries containing this text" to the clipboard then paste. The pasted lines form namesakes with the originals (of course). You may want to write just one level.

Or not.

Let us know if this helps.

From Jack:

Thanks David. That works great. What an incredible and powerful feature for setting & retrieving tagged info’ throughout a BrainStorm model. David I suspect this is just one of many great features that are fully implemented yet not being pitched!

Phew! Glad that solved your problem, Jack.

Thinkerlog disappeared from view for reasons we’re yet to ascertain. We now suspect a dodgy blog post or, perhaps, a sudden ban on the word ‘weblog’ as a sub-directory name. Whatever the cause, we’ve shut down the original while we sort things out.

This means that all links to the old blog will go nowhere, so we’re bringing them here.

It means that the three or four years of blog posts are in limbo, but we’ll try and figure out how to restore them.

We’ll keep you posted.