Personal Memory Manager 6.0, Human Knowledge Management | From a user who just started | Creativity unleashed | Organize your ideas and projects | Interests | Affiliated Shareware Sites
Personal Memory Manager 6.0, Human Knowledge
Management
Review by
3D2F.com smart reviews May 11, 2007
Personal Memory Manager
is a unique combination of powerful knowledge management and
presentation engine with human user interface — clear, simple and
understandable. The software is ultimately close to the requirements
of user who wants to represent complex idea and knowledge structures
and DOESN’T want to study the program for several days or weeks
beforehand.
In plain words, Personal Memory Manager allows creating notes
(chunks of information), placing them on sheets, and linking them
by relations. Every note can have any amount of textual information
or attached files. When displayed on sheets, a note can have its own
color, image and name. Relations between notes also have their own
names; that makes it easy to plan complex structures by simply
refining relation types.
But the real magic of Personal Memory Manager is in its sheets
concept. Every sheet can be explained as a «point of view»
on an overall picture; thus, each note can appear in any number
of sheets, explaining different aspects of the problem. Moreover,
a relation between two notes created on one sheet will be visible
on any sheet where both notes are visible. This powerful concept
makes possible the creation of «overview» sheets; you have several
sheets, where aspects are explained in a few notes, then drag ALL
those notes to the «overview sheet» and see all the relations from
all the sheets at once.
[about version 5.0] At first I had little idea
what it could do, if you read ‘Personal Memory Manager’, it doesn’t tell
you very much. It is not like ‘Flight simulator’ which tells you
immediately what you can expect. Only when I fired it up and trial and
error’d a while it’s immense usefulness became apparent. Like a good,
proper male computer user I didn’t bother to use the help file or use the
instruction manual, they are often rather useless anyway so I don’t know
much about the usefulness of these tools in PMM. What I did find very
useful is the demo video. Download it and run it beside your opened PMM
and follow or duplicate the steps. Ignore the lack of a pleasantly
sounding (female) narrator. What do I do with it? I spend a lot of time writing
comments in discussion groups, political or historical platforms etc. I
also collect articles about a large number of subjects. Over the years I
have dumped this in a few, after a while, rather large documents. Then I
put them in PMM. In one sentence PMM is, runs
as: project-sheet-note-attachment (to note). I have made a large number of
PMM-notes, each note (appropriately named) contains copied
and pasted bits and pieces of all articles, comments and other data I have
written or collected over the years. Once they have been put into notes
there is no need to keep the original data, the notes contain the
data. You can however just link to various data via a note (or
attachment). I have chosen to put the data in the notes
themselves because you can write, correct, add or delete directly in the
note and rapidly switch between the notes. That still is a
bit vague I guess. So, there are PMM-notes
and PMM-attachments. These
attachments can be put to the notes and can be a path to a (non
PMM) file or a Website. Then there are PMM-sheets. For the time
being, compare a PMM-sheet to a bookshelf, a PMM-note to a
book and a PMM-attachment to a referring ledger in a book. I have e.g. sheets with
the titles ‘History’, ‘Politics’, ‘Religion’ and ‘philosophy’. In these
sheets I have notes like, ‘EU-constitution’, ‘Iraq-comments1’,
‘Iraq-comments2’, ‘Taliban-analysis’, ‘Quran-soera’s’, ‘US-foreign
policy’, ‘quotes’ (from philosophers-politicians), ‘Aristotle’,
‘Avicennes’ and ‘DU-report WHO’. And dozens more. All these notes
contain comments and articles (or parts of-) that I have written or
collected. Some notes have
attachments linking e.g. to url’s. I can however directly open a link
like http://www.whodunnit.com from text in a note as well. As some notes are
relevant to both the sheet-‘History’ and to the sheet-‘Politics’
I can ‘drag’ them from the made stack of notes to any sheet
I think is applicable (or sheets). In this way my sheet
‘History’ is packed with all notes dealing with or related to
history, the same notes can, if I think it‘s applicable exist in
the sheet ‘Politics’ as well. I can create all these various
sheets, notes and attachments from the main PMM-tree
opening page (one window) after I opened my first
PMM-project which is the first step, follow the demo video or help
file to get started. When you open the individual
PMM-sheets you can greatly expand your possibilities. By using the options
you can link notes to other notes in various ways, you can create clusters
of notes and link them to other clusters or individual notes within the
sheet. As PMM uses (colour) graphic displays in the sheets with many
options to link notes various types of ‘relevance’ connections can be made
between the notes. In this way I have created a kind of library with
bookshelves dealing with a variety of subjects. I can find subjects,
books, articles and every related subject, book or article. I can work in
or with them while remaining in PMM, rapidly switch from book(shelves) to
book, book(shelves) to articles or their attachments. While being at work
in my library I can grab something from non PMM files or the Internet and
put it in PMM. What can you do with it? A journalist can file, find,
add, delete, attach, rewrite, copy and paste just about everything related
to...well, just about anything really.
See the demo-video and use
your imagination, a screenwriter, director, producer or the stage
prop-proprietor can find a thousand uses for it and with it. A lawyer can put clients in
PMM, put cases, law articles, amendments and jurisprudence in notes and
link them in aptly named sheets. Use such sheets or notes with new cases,
find correlations and similarities between cases. The possibilities are
endless. If you want to give it a try
check the demo video or the help file on ‘how to (auto)save’ data and on
‘how to delete’. I had some difficulty in the beginning, but then I didn’t
bother too much with mentioned help accessories. All in all it took me
about eight hours to get acquainted
and stuff it with a lot of previously floating bits and pieces both on
my PC and on sites from my ‘favorites’. I have barely begun to link things
within the sheets, so many uses and possibilities I haven’t even sniffed
at. However judged from where I am, I like PMM very, very much.
Michiel Mans [about version 5.0]
It's always good to see a different approach to
keep notes and structuring ideas. PMM works rather like having
multiple sets of Post-it notes, each of which can hold a basic idea
and accompanying text, which can be stuck all over different sheets of
paper. Of itself that wouldn't be enough to provide idea
structuring, but PMM allows you to link different notes using simple
web-like link lines, which can represent different relationships -
either those provided by your software, or your own. What makes this
more flexible is that a note can appear on any number of sheets, so
you can have different cuts on your data. Notes can also carry images
as well as text, and can have attachments in the form of links to
external files or web pages. Altogether this is a simple but quite elegant
solution to capturing and structuring information. It's also good
value for money - just $99*. However, there are a few downsides. The interface
isn't always the most obvious, and you have to go into dialog boxes to
do anything (e.g. type text into a note, access an attachment), which
is rather clumsy. There is no facility to tidy up a diagram or fit it
to a particular sized window. Printing has few options and there's no
way to import/export to or from obvious products like Word. Although
it's great to be able to use images it only works with .BMP files, not
the more common .JPG - and you can't have a note that's part text and
part picture - they are always overlaid one on the other, which means
the text tends to get lost. However, PMM's limitations don't necessarily get in
the way of its effectiveness for storing and organizing information.
As always with these products, it's what fits best with your personal
way of working that's ideal, so it's well worth giving PMM a try. Brian Clegg
*Current price is US$29
(Student Version) or US$64 (Standard Version)
Organize your ideas and projects!
* PMM Personal Memory Manager is a memory management
tool. It provides the user with a way to organize the ideas and concepts
related to a project, to create different types of relations between
them and to visualize them. The software was built after the model of placing
sticky notes on a whiteboard; this is why the interface of PMM Personal
Memory Manager is divided in 2 types of windows: the Tree - keeping the
notes and the relations in a structured manner - and the Sheet, which
plays the role of the whiteboard, where you can place the notes as you
want and create relations between them. By writing down all the ideas
that come to your mind and keeping them organized with PMM Personal
Memory Manager, you will be able to see things from a different
perspective and focus on ideas that really matter. Organizing and managing a project becomes a much
easier task if you use PMM Personal Memory Manager. Its sheet concept
allows you to study all the aspects of the problem that you are taking
into consideration. You can add as many notes as you feel necessary on a
sheet and then interconnect them in multiple sheets through various
kinds of relations. Project management is often all about organizing your
ideas. To capture an idea related to your project, the easier way is to
create a note. When you create a new note in your project, after giving
a name to the note, you have the possibility to choose an image for it
and to add file attachments to the note. In the Note memo tab, you have
the usual editing options (font size, font type, print, find and
replace) and also you can see the relations to other notes and the file
attachments of the note. The Note Properties tab is where you can change
the color of the note or add an image to it that will be displayed as a
background for the note in the Tree view. In the Sheet tab of the Note
window, you can use drag and drop or double click to add the new note to
the appropriate sheets. After deciding which notes should appear in a sheet,
you can drag them from the Tree view to the sheet and then move them
around to create the desired scheme. Dragging a note onto another in the
Sheet view will give you the option to link to that note and specify the
relation between the two notes. The default relation types that are
provided in PMM are 'assumes', 'consists of' and 'leads to', but you are
allowed to add any number of new relation types that you want to use in
your project. PMM Personal Memory Manager has several printing
features: you can choose to print only one note (the header and the body
of the chosen note), all the notes in a sheet (the sheet annotations and
the notes collected in the sheet) or a Sheet window which will print the
note scheme with all the relations in it. The good PMM Personal Memory Manager gives the user the option
to choose a time interval in which the project information can be saved
automatically. This way, even if something happens to the program or
computer while you are working in PMM, you can be sure that your data is
safe and you won't have to do the same work all over again. The bad Opened windows get lost easily one behind another and
the only way to retrieve a window is from the menu bar. Maybe it would
be a good idea to implement a tabbed view, so the user will know what
windows are opened at all times. If the user resizes the program window,
the internal windows don't resize in order to fit the main window; this
way parts of the information from those windows won't be displayed.
Although PMM Personal Memory Manager gives you the
possibility to add an image or a logo to a note, the only accepted
format of the image file is .BMP. The producers of PMM should think
about allowing users to add images in other formats like .JPG, .PNG,
.GIF. The help file cannot be accessed from inside the
application because PMM Personal Memory Manager searches for it in a
default path which is not correct. The truth The application is a bit difficult to understand and
use at first sight, so it's a good thing that it has a very well
documented manual with many screenshots guiding the user through the
entire program. After understanding PMM's structure and principles,
you'll start to really enjoy organizing your ideas. Gabriela Ghinita, Windows Editor
From a user who just started
We are all aware that we live in the information
era. Communication is an essential part of our society and even though
there are so many ways of communicating and transmitting information, this
is a domain that will keep on developing. Every day we receive so many
pieces of information that our memory can hardly cope with a part of them.
It's getting harder and harder to remember all our ideas, plans and
projects after a short period of time has passed. Why not give our memory
a little help by using PMM Personal Memory Manager? 
