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_posts/2024-06-12-BrainTool-1-0.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title:  "BrainTool 1.0"
+description: A milestone reached
+excerpt_separator: <!--more-->
+author: "Tony"
+audience: "nonuser"
+image: "../../../site/CollatoralMaterial/TabGroups.png"
+---
+# BrainTool 1.0 is Live!
+It seems like a good occasion to pick up the pen again and post an update. 
+<!--more-->
+
+## A Catch-Up
+If you haven't been following along, the early BrainTool story is [here]({{ site.baseurl }}{% post_url 2021-01-14-First-Two-Thousand-BrainTool-Users %}). In summary, I built it for personal use during a Summer sabbatical, put it online, got a good press review and suddenly had two thousand users. I've always wanted to craft my own, personally-created, widely-used, piece of software - the idea that my code is out there in daily use by real people has kind of a great American novel appeal to me. So I decided to try to evolve BrainTool into something that a lot of people would use to solve the common problem of keeping track of their online stuff.
+
+Over the subsequent 18 months I put a lot of work into BT while paying (some of) the bills with consulting. I hooked up with a great designer (Alex@whidigital), got a lot of user feedback and had line of sight to my 1.0 feature set and visuals. 
+
+![Figma](../../../site/postAssets/BT-1-0-Figma.png)
+
+Then in August '22 Alex died; tragically, unexpectedly and way too early. At the same time a fantastic opportunity opened up for me at [CodaMetrix](https://codametrix.com) where I joined the leadership team to run Engineering. I left BrainTool to coast by itself, with every intention of getting around to tying off those few loose ends. But the loss of Alex really took the wind out of my sails and at CMX the wind was blowing a hurricane. 
+
+Fast forward to today. I enjoyed playing my part in CodaMetrix's transition to becoming a major player in the healthcare AI space, but it wasn't a long term fit. At some point Google announced a June deadline to move to their new "MV3" browser infrastructure. So since I free'd up, I've been working on the MV3 migration, collaborating with a set of early adopters, and burning down my BrainTool 1.0 checklist. It's been satisfying, and sad, to bring Alex's designs to life. BrainTool 1.0 isn't yet everything I want it to be but I like how its evolving and the migration deadline has caught up with me.
+
+## The 1.0 Vision
+BrainTool encourages you to assign a topic to any web page or online resource you want to save, keep track of, or come back to. The Bookmarker tool makes it trivial to categorize tabs by topic, and the Topic Manager allows you to intuitively organize, annotate and edit your evolving hierarchy of topics. 
+
+In 1.0 Topics present themselves as BrainTool controlled tabgroups in your browser - webpages saved under a given topic become tabs in a named browser tabgroup.
+
+Grouping tabs into topics that can be jointly opened, closed or folded away lowers the impedance to closing tabs and allows you to focus on one project or group of tasks at a time. Between the hierarchy, notes and incremental search, its easy to subsequently find what you need and re-open the tabs to pop back into context.
+
+![TabGroups](../../../site/CollatoralMaterial/TabGroups.png)
+
+## The Itch
+The personal itch I was scratching in creating BrainTool was a need to integrate an ever increasing proliferation of web-based resources, tools and information sources, with the rest of my to-do's and notes, which I keep in a bulleted plain text format. So BrainTool saves your topics, tabs and associated notes and to-do's locally, on your machine, in that same [org-mode](https://orgmode.org) plain text structure. There's no big database. You own and store your data, and can access and use it with other productivity tools like I do in [emacs](https://emacs.org). 
+
+## Pricing
+As part of my initial run at BrainTool I did some research on pricing models for similar tools and based on that implemented a subscription scheme, charging $3.99/month or $40/year. There  was no enforcement so it has been satisfying to see a stream of purchases. That said, I received feedback that it was overpriced and that everyone is fed up with subscription services. 
+
+I'd love to be able to go fulltime evolving Braintool supported by its sales, but I'd prefer to have a million free users than a few thousand high paying ones. So this new version is unrestricted but has $1/10/20 monthly/ yearly/ permanent 'supporter' tiers.
+
+## A Call to Arms
+I like the way BrainTool is evolving and as you can see if you scroll through the reviews ([here](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/braintool-beyond-bookmark/fialfmcgpibjgdoeodaondepigiiddio/reviews) & [here](https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/braintool-beyond-bookma/igibjpnabjgljgnfajjpapocagidmeol)) it really resonates with some people. Maybe it will resonate with you. Give it a try, pass it along. Give me [feedback](mailto:[email protected]).