My kingdom for a hive mind: robot brain wishlist

This got too long for Twitter, where I extended my frantic googling and trial-downloading to take advantage of the time-honoured crowd. (Perhaps I should try Quora or other platforms, too?)

I want a robot brain.

More specifically, at least in my current task context (brainstorming, research and planning), I want an app that is a hybrid between the following:

• To-do list/task manager
• Project manager
• File, asset and research assistant
• Bookmarking service
• Inspiration library and mood board
• Portable note taker

OK, not asking for much.

Let’s dive into the use cases, though – I’m pretty certain there is some combination of existing apps that can do this, and part of the problem is finding the right app.

The big picture? Keeping track of my fledgling business ideas while keeping everything that inspires me in one place. The content I want to have at my fingertips ranges from PDFs to websites, online video, images, scrappy notes, code fragments and git links, even upcoming events.

Project brainstorming

Enable me to map out a project’s sub components and tasks while brainstorming – no need for a fully fledged GTD system, but a way to manage items in lists well at the top level is helpful. One issue here is the content is a mix of tasks and more “permanent” items, an example being:

• Register cool domain name (task)
• Domain name brainstorming (list of words and some URLs of domain name generators, maybe screenshots or pastes from those)
• Existing unused domains (list)
• Expiring domain searches (URLs, perhaps even calendar events!)

Low tech: Bullet points, post-its

Higher tech: Things, Google Tasks, Remember the Milk

Information collation

As seen in the example above, a key thing for me (and really, the first attribute I’m looking for in the Dream App) is managing a combination of notes, websites, pictures, perhaps even calendar events, emails, Google Docs and PDFs. All of these are technically attached to the main task “find a cool domain name” but I want to keep them sticking around for inspiration.

This leads on to the “mood board generator” kind of area where I can just have a task titled “New site!!” and attach a ton of images to it, then view them in awesome-style visualisations to create a mood board of what I want without any actual work. (This in itself is a quick weekend project I’ve been meaning to build…)

The main thing here is peace of mind. I want to go into my robot brain app and know that everything I ever thought would be relevant to my domain name search for a new social mobile location-based app with pirates is in there.

Low tech: Folders.

Better: “Research” tools – I’m currently trying Scrivener after evaluating a few others like Yojimbo which didn’t fit my head so well.

Information capture

The flipside of this is, of course, capture – and this is where I am banging my head a little bit with the current marketplace.

Here’s my ideal flow:

Ooh, cool Flickr picture! hit single button and it goes into brain

Ooh, nice informative TED video! hit single button and it goes into brain

Ooh, fun article on Hacker News with great comment thread about choosing a domain name! hit single button and it goes into brain

Ooh, nice apartment on Craiglist! hit single button and it goes into brain

Ooh, domain name generator site! hit sing-.. you get the idea

Here’s the magic I want to happen:

• When I magic-button a Flickr page, I want the image to get saved locally, the author name to be saved somewhere (for future attribution), and ideally the tags, title and description pre-populated (having a ton of 123859457595_3981201202o.jpg around is getting old)
• Similarly a Hacker News page should have the article link run through Readability and text saved locally, original URL saved, and the entire comment thread archived locally too.
• Craigslist pages should definitely be cached locally (whether it’s a cool apartment or a good deal you want to compare, expiring content is bad)
• A straight up bookmark (domain name generator site or web video) is fine to save as-is, importing Delicious tags would be a nice bonus. I actually dislike services that ‘bookmark’ by web clipping, but maybe that’s just me. I’d rather opt in to clipping the content (and automatically clip stuff like HN and Craigslist) than automatically try to cache everything.

To tag or not to tag? I don’t want tagging to be the user behaviour this centres around. We’re more intelligent than that. Maybe tags would be an extra bonus, but not the core way of finding information. (This is why Yojimbo is not working for me – my mind just doesn’t work that way.)

Low tech: Just use Delicious* or Evernote

Better: Custom pipeline between Delicious and end point which does cool stuff to specific content. (hmm, this is another standalone app…)

*I mean any delicious-like service here, though Delicious’ tag library is nice.

Note taking

Note taking should be as low friction as possible. Using an app on iPad, iPhone or Android, emailing myself, even SMSing… a Chrome app, a method of importing .txt files… there are a lot of places to take notes. I’d want to support as many as possible.

Low tech: import txt files from other note programs

Better: import emails, sync txt files via Dropbox from iPad/iPhone/Android apps (eg. Simplenote)

(Aside: the notion of a ‘universal capture’ tool has been tried many times, and I haven’t yet given all of the contenders in that space a go, but suffice it to say almost all the time when I want to grab a thought when I’m back at my desktop, I just email myself. I want to not do that.)

Challenges

There are a ton of UX and implementation challenges, but I think the biggest is simply going to be figuring out an easy way to navigate the content. My mental model basically has this as the root “item list” which itself leads into sub items, but this already throws up some issues: the world isn’t strictly a tree, and often you’ll find an item belongs in multiple categories (hello, labels/tags) or be looking for it in the wrong place.

How to deal with content from different sources is also an issue. For example, should quick notes taken on the iPad, and new bookmarks, fall into an “inbox” and need later processing? Or should you be able to save them directly to a topic (in which case you need the entire structure to be online somewhere)? Where does the data ultimately live – in the cloud, or locally? If you’re dealing with potential business ideas or other sensitive information, do you really want it in the cloud on someone else’s server?

Sharing is the third major point that springs to mind. Sometimes you want to share stuff (I want to share my folder of “Cool apartments on Craigslist” with my other half, but I don’t want him to see the collection of potential birthday present ideas in another folder). Sometimes you want to publish – throwing up my mood board to the designer working on my site, or a read-only collection of “how to learn Ruby” items to Hacker News. Sometimes you want stuff to be completely, utterly private. Hard to get right.

And so…

As mentioned above, I’m trying out Scrivener – it’s a writing app, and my ultimate goal is to come up with some proposal documents, so that just about works for me. It lacks in the universal capture department, though. So I’m continuing my search for other options – but it’s hard when it’s not quite clear what I’m looking for. A research tool with online capture? A bookmarking service with local annotations? A todo list with metadata?

Let’s just call it my dream robot brain, and leave it at that. (Though sadly there aren’t any relevant hits on Google for that, but the query does return this Asimov story. Enjoy.)

Addendum: Why don’t you build this yourself?

Maybe I shall. (Though right now, my skills would lead this to be a cloud app, which goes against my core “native app for data security” requirement… and yes, funny that a Chrome OS user would want a native Mac app, hm?)