I have been a Scapple user for a while and I think it is a good application to process ideas, to make a storm or brainstorm. However, I think they have forgotten it and that with very little effort on their part one could have in their hands one of the best tools for reflection and personal organization of ideas.
Personally I conceive Scapple as a blackboard or infinite canvas, in which to paste my images and analyze comments and ideas. And on any blackboard or canvas, one thing is fundamental: being able to draw on it.
And that’s exactly what I think Scapple is missing and that I will give him a considerable boost to rise to number one in applications of its kind: a pencil tool to freely draw what you want. This would greatly speed up the connections with arrows, you could make circles, underlining, more agile relationships, puppets, figures, etc. It would be equally interesting that the drawings that were made on the images could be grouped and ungrouped with them at will.
It would be very interesting to have this improvement in a software update, so I beg you to take it into account. Thank you.
Greetings from Huelva, Spain.
Well that escalated quickly. From a somewhat simple request for a scribble tool, to porting the software to a completely different operating system on a fundamentally different kind of hardware and adding support for stylus input (naturally). The gravity of what one requests is sometimes not obvious perhaps.
As to the original request, the fundamental problem I have seen with programs that allow for a scribble layer in conjunction with a very easy to modify data drawing system beneath it is how easy it is for the two to get disconnected from one another. You move your notes, and the red circle you drew around them is now a red circle of a blank spot on the canvas where they were. So now you have to turn on “erase” mode and scribble the circle away and then toggle draw mode back on and circle the notes where they are now.
It as an idea tends to work better in cases where the data itself is not so fluid (or at all), where we are perhaps annotating an image or a PDF.
The problem that reveals would be solved with something as simple as the possibility of “grouping” the doodle to the drawing or note in question, option that otherwise exists in relation to notes in Scapple.
Yes, that is a more complicated approach than a simple single drawing layer for the whole board. Part of what makes it complicated is that Scapple doesn’t have a real grouping mechanism. Shapes are the closest thing, and in their “Magnetic” setting, do act a bit like groups, and doodles could be “stuck” to them like notes do.
