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PersonalBrain Pro

Stuart Gripman — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:39:15 -0500

PersonalBrain helped us organize our thoughts, notes, and research while writing this very article.

Simultaneously a wonder of nature and source of constant frustration, the human brain can effortlessly choreograph the movements of a complex body yet fail to record the location of car keys. Imperfect, yes, but it’s all we’ve got. To help us exercise a little more control over our master, TheBrain Technologies offers PersonalBrain Pro.

PersonalBrain Pro is a tool for collecting and organizing thoughts, files, and webpages into a coherent framework called a “brain.” Just as important as the thoughts themselves are the relationships between them, and unlike most other organization tools, PersonalBrain avoids imposing external rules or structure on your brain.

The app should make sense to anyone familiar with mind-mapping software such as NovaMind and MindManager (3 out of 5 stars, Oct/07, p64). Starting with a central thought, you add child and sibling thoughts, and connecting lines show the relationships between them. While a given thought is just a few words, a detail area below the main diagram accommodates styled text notes, classification, and attachments. Attachments can be files on your computer or URLs, and there’s no limit to the number you can assign to a given thought.

Double-click a thought, and it moves to the center of the map in a smooth animation that pushes its siblings off to one side while its children sprout into view. As a brain grows, getting around can become disorienting, so PersonalBrain includes a bread-crumb trail of your session along the bottom of the display. You can also place aliases, or “pins,” of frequently used thoughts along the top.

We found PersonalBrain fairly easy to get the hang of, especially with the ample help available. One standout resource is the weekly Web-based demo, “PersonalBrain 101.” In a Web conference setting, the product is demonstrated by a living human who takes questions.

Unfortunately, seemingly obvious importable formats like OPML, plain text, and other mind-mapping files are absent. Apart from PersonalBrain files, the only import feature is one that scans a folder in the Finder and creates thoughts for each file and subfolder inside. Also, brains are saved as a document and accompanying folder instead of as a single package, which we found annoying.

The bottom line. Despite its quirks, PersonalBrain is the most compelling computer adaptation of mind mapping we’ve encountered.

COMPANY: TheBrain Technologies

CONTACT: www.thebrain.com

PRICE: $249.95

REQUIREMENTS: 1GHz CPU, Mac OS 10.4 or later, 1GB RAM

Excellent computer adaptation of mind-mapping principals. Abundant help. Universal binary.

Only one import option. Unconventional interface. Documents are not self-contained.

Scrivener 1.01

Tom Geller — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:51:07 -0500

Unlike a typical word processor, Scrivener invites writers to work in both familiar and novel ways.

Scrivener is a tool for organizing and drafting the written word, appropriate for formats ranging from articles to dissertations to screenplays to novels. In essence, it marries a rich-text editor with a project-management database, providing a flexible workspace that accommodates a huge gamut of styles. But while Scrivener is many things, it's not a page-layout program. Instead, it outputs drafts in your choice of RTF, HTML, plain text, Web archive, Microsoft Word, or MultiMarkdown formats, which can then be imported into a program such as QuarkXPress, Adobe GoLive, or Word.

Why would you need a writing application if you already have a word processor? Word and others, such as OpenOffice, have project-management tools that writers find useful, such as version control (known as Track Changes in Word) and outlining. But Scrivener goes well beyond standard word processors' capabilities by letting you rearrange, tag, and store text and reference materials.

For starters, individual project sections can carry metadata such as synopsis, status, and word count. These details appear when you view the project in Outliner view, which gives you a much more thorough overview than a word processor can. The Corkboard view mimics a real-world index-card system that fiction writers in particular will find useful, while the Binder view is particularly good for defining subsections within a document. A Scrivener file (which is technically a kind of Mac OS folder called a package) can store reference materials in numerous formats, including Web archive, PDF, and QuickTime audio and video files. That's especially handy for nonfiction writing that incorporates outside research sources. For example, if you're writing a report that quotes a prominent politician, you can include the video clip that's the source of the quotation in the Research section of your project.

Scrivener's many options inspire creativity. Only have 15 minutes to sit down and write? Easily partition overwhelming projects into bite-sized chunks. Got blank-page syndrome? Look at things in a fresh way by spending a few minutes fiddling with your project's overall structure, or label all the scenes where the protagonist appears. On the other hand, such flexibility opens a Pandora's box by encouraging you to imagine new ways to see your writing, ways that may require features Scrivener doesn't have. Literature & Latte's support forums are full of requests that the company plainly states won't be fulfilled, such as a plain-text view (for writers who get distracted by styled text), a thesaurus, and certain formatting functions. However, the company is admirably quick and thorough about answering user posts, even if it's just to say, "Sorry, no can do."

Scrivener even surprised us with unexpected capabilities. In one case, we applied Adobe Acrobat's Paper Capture function to a PDF file referenced by Scrivener, and found that we could search and select the text in the PDF file from within Scrivener just as if we were still working in Acrobat. Credit for such features goes to the developer's extensive use of Apple-native programming technologies to make the app look, feel, and act like it's a part of the Mac OS.

The bottom line. Several writing apps available for the Mac are more full-featured than Scrivener, mostly in specialty markets such as screenwriting. But for writers seeking a solid, low-cost, flexible organizer that encourages creativity, Scrivener's a wise choice.

COMPANY: Literature & Latte
CONTACT: www.literatureandlatte.com
PRICE: $34.99
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later
Flexible. Extensive keyboard controls. Excellent documentation and support. Universal binary.
Sometimes lags with large files. Some are features missing or incomplete.

iListen 1.7

Niko Coucouvanis — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:40:07 -0500

iListen is vastly improved, but that doesn't redeem its clunky Corrections window.

Thanks to MacSpeech's relentless pursuit of voice-recognition mastery and its iListen dictation package, you can talk to your Mac to create written works - and with commendable accuracy.

The package includes the iListen software and a USB headset mic - the version we reviewed comes with the Pro Xpress mic. Training is key. You first read some provided text so iListen can create your voice profile. You'll also need to train yourself to speak clearly and consistently, and to vocalize punctuation. If you select Speech > Learn My Writing Style and specify some previously written documents on your Mac, iListen analyzes them to learn your vocabulary and writing style.

You can also educate iListen as you use it, via the Corrections window, which happens to be its weakest feature. The app keeps track of your entire dictation session, so it can help you tidy up the text before committing it to your document, but our 1.8GHz Power Mac G5 with 2GB of RAM regularly hung for 10 to 30 seconds on the test paragraph in the screenshot (and we have no idea where the text in the "I heard" field came from). You can also dump the session directly into TextEdit, Word, or wherever for cleanup.

iListen is smart enough to transcribe your speech into any text-capable application, and even to receive other commands that you typically input with the mouse. Just say, "Switch to command mode," and speak commands like Select All, Cut, Close Window, and Save. Only basic commands are included for MouseAnywhere, iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, and GarageBand.

The bottom line. iListen works well, but only if you use a MacSpeech-certified mic and properly train the software - which seems like a lot of work for a labor-saving device. But for certain users, smooth, accurate transcription is worth the investment in training time.

COMPANY: MacSpeech
CONTACT: www.macspeech.com
PRICE: $179 with Pro Xpress USB headset microphone
REQUIREMENTS: G4 or later or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, 512MB RAM, MacSpeech-certified USB microphone (included)
Near-perfect accuracy when used properly. Quick learner. Includes mic. Universal binary.
Lacks accuracy with built-in Mac mics. Corrections window can be annoying.

BBEdit 8.6

Niko Coucouvanis — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 14:37:43 -0600

BBEdit's new Markdown support lets you copy a selection of code as styled HTML (top), paste it into a new window (middle), and view it as code in a Web browser (bottom).

How do you make BBEdit, the Sawzall of text editors, even better? Start with luxury features, like on-the-fly spell checking, autosave, and "folding," which automatically hides completed sections of code so you can focus on the incomplete parts. The document window, where we used to wade through a good half-dozen toolbar icons, now sports just a few: the Save diamond and Write-Status pencil (two gimmes), the Text Options switch, Info, and the Finder icon, which you can still drag into a Web browser window or the browser's Dock icon for a quickie preview. BBEdit isn't as intimidating as it has been, and better yet, all of the document information that used to hide behind those toolbar icons is still available in the status bars above and below the document body.

The new Markdown features remind us why BBEdit rules. Putting code examples in a Web page or printed publication can be a royal pain in the x61\x73\x73. (Get it? ass Ha!) The new Styled HTML support lets you save or copy code (HTML, PHP, Ruby, SQL, and so on) as it appears in plain text, and BBEdit re-creates the code in styled HTML, so it appears as raw code in a Web browser.

Some new features won't be as handy to as many people, but this is the reason we love BBEdit; inexplicably, some of Mac OS 10.4's plist preferences are binary files, rather than the standard plain text. You generally can't even read binary files in a text editor, but as of version 8.6, BBEdit can open, edit, and save such binary files-no small feat.

The bottom line. If you use BBEdit, you need to upgrade. Otherwise, if you have any intellectual aspirations, buy BBEdit. It makes you smarter.

COMPANY: Bare Bones Software
CONTACT: www.barebones.com
PRICE: $125, $49 educational, $30 upgrade from BBEdit 8 to 8.2.6, $40 upgrade from BBEdit 7 to 8
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later
Code folding. Markdown support. Streamlined toolbar.
People like us tend to waste its power.

Ulysses 1.2.2

James Ellerbeck — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:04:15 -0600

Unlike the novel of the same name, this Ulysses is straightforward.

Ulysses is a text pad for creative writers or slightly scatterbrained folks who want to record their thoughts on-the-fly. Think Microsoft Word without the formatting clutter, and with more work areas displayed at any given time.

The app's interface is its core strength. Two editing panels sit in the middle of the screen. To the right of the panels are the note-taking area and a browser showing different areas of your project (writing sessions are saved as projects), and to the left is an area that shows the subdivisions of that project with color tags. These might be different chapters of your book, or plot sketches. It's an effective way to quickly bring up previously saved notes.

When you've finished penning your masterpiece, you can export it as plain or formatted text. The formatting is done through templates; if you choose this as an option, the first line that you type will appear with a certain font type and size, and paragraphs will follow a set style. Ulysses also has a simple and helpful built-in code of its own that adds formatting to elements in the body text. For instance, typing { - text - } outputs the text insert as a footnote.

Ulysses isn't a unique application. Mariner Software's MacJournal ($39.95, www.marinersoftware.com) is a speedier note-taker and equally well designed; PaperToolsPro ($55, www.papertoolspro.com) goes further than Ulysses with its footnote and bibliography tools. Both MacJournal and PaperToolsPro are relative bargains considering that Ulysses costs almost $130.

The bottom line. Ulysses is a tidy, simple, Mac-friendly tool for creative writing, but we doubt that a struggling writer is going to pay this much when cheaper alternatives are just as good.

COMPANY: The Blue Technologies Group
CONTACT: www.blue-tec.com
PRICE: €100 ($128 at press time)
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later
Simple and effective layout. Tailored for creative writing. Universal binary.
Expensive. Better alternative applications exist.