Imagine an application that is a personal knowledge management system and that maintains links to the original source material, regardless of format. The source could be in PDF, EPUB, DOCX, Markdown, archived web pages, even Linux man pages, and the application would internalize that source and maintain cross-links from your notes to the original source.

Imagine being able to view your notes as standalone items as well as in the context of the original source. You could review them and see where your thoughts about a topic actually came from, and understand them better.

Imagine that application working across all three major desktop platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac), as well as the two major cell phone platforms (Android and iOS). Imagine all your data being synchronized across them as easily as you starting the application on a device.

Imagine all of this data being stored in as neutral a format as possible (your notes in plain text, with the links to the original source being stored in a way that would eanble you to find your way to the ideas without using this application). Imagine your data beings yours, first and foremost, stored on your devices rather than in the cloud.

Imagine the cloud being an option for storing your data.

Imagine this being available on a standalone device as well as all of the above.

All of these imaginings are what brainframe is meant to become. A reader for these formats. A way to take the information on the go. A way for you to read, to explore, to take notes, to connect ideas that were previously difficult to connect.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll go over why the current applications people use for this sort of work don’t cover everything. The applications are amazing, make no mistake, but they are incomplete implementations of this idea. Obsidian, Notion, Roam, OrgMode, and others all fill this idea to various degrees, but none of them implement it fully.

I am still teaching myself new technologies to help me make this. As a result, the weekly posts I will make here will not be about the creation of Brainframe directly, but rather about my thinking as I move forward with it. I hope you’ll join me on this journey. It looks to be an interesting trip.