Hi. I downloaded Scapple for the first time today and I’m playing around with it. I really like it. I especially like being able to group notes onto magnetic background shapes. It definitely is more attuned to how I normally organize my thoughts.
However, I have two suggestions that will provide Scapple a little more power when using it to outline ideas:
It’d be nice to have a disclosure triangle on Notes that have other Notes attached below them. Like in outlining programs, clicking the triangle will hide Notes that are below.
I’d like to have scrollbars on Notes that have a lot of text. Right now, if I paste/drag in a large text document, the Note shows all of that text. It’d be nice to be able to resize the Note so it’s smaller and have scrollbars appear so the entire contents of the Note don’t have to be displayed all at once.
I’m sorry, but your feature requests are a bit out of scope for what Scapple is trying to do. Having disclosure triangles that hide things would be hugely problematic given the freeform nature of the app. You could end up hiding things, creating new notes below them, and then when you unhide notes you find that they now overlap other notes you have created, resulting in a bit of a mess. But it’s not intended to do this sort of thing anyway as it is meant to be just a big write-notes-anywhere space. Scrollbars wouldn’t work either because when each note isn’t being edited it is just a static piece of text painted on, so the scroll bars could only ever be visible when you were editing a note, which would be limiting, and having scroll bars available across all notes would slow things down because it would mean keeping an editor around for each note even when they weren’t being edited. And again, it goes a little against the grain of what I wanted from the app in that it is intended to show you the whole of each note to allow for quickly getting ideas down, and not to be a container for vast swathes of text that cannot be wholly accessed without further actions.
I hope that makes sense - thanks for the suggestions anyway!
Hi, I’m new to Scapple (actually still in the trial period) and I couldn’t find anything about this issue.
I have copied a large number of notes from text documents in Scrivener to Scapple, most of them including synopsis text, plus manually added quite a few others, so now my Scapple workspace has become very crowded.
Is it possible to collapse the notes to their “titles”? By title I mean their first line.
This will allow me to tidy up the working space while still keeping the essential information visible.
Having for instance OPT+CLICK on a note could toggle its collapsed state.
No, there isn’t any kind of collapsing, or hidden notes, or meta-data, or anything else that isn’t flat on the board, right in front of you. It’s a little different from Scrivener.
Thanks for your fast answer.
I certainly understand that Scapple isn’t in any way similar to Scrivener, but I don’t think that collapsing a note (a simple display feature) could qualify as breaking the flat nature of Scapple, nature with which I agree, up to a point. For instance, the background shapes magnetic behavior actually introduces a kind of “attached to” relationship between shapes and notes, and I appreciate it.
Is there a wish list or other means to request new features? This is not the only thing I would like to see in Scapple
Indeed, but you will note that even with this slight tip of the hat to “grouping” (it’s really more fuzzy than that since the relationship between note and shape is not necessarily exclusive), in the form of magnetic background shapes, is still importantly not a way of obscuring information. Scapple is all face value, you can’t hide anything—at most you can fade it, but your ideas still take up that “physical” space in all cases.
OK, I understand and accept the principles. As explained they have their own merits.
I also adopted the proposed way to achieve something similar to collapsing the notes by adding the note’s “title” as the note, then, If needed, create a new arrow-linked note with any extra info text somewhere else on the canvas, where I keep all of the other “extra info” notes. It’s not the same, but it can do.
I’d love though to be able to set the arrows/lines colors. Setting their color would serve the same purpose as setting a note’s border color, ie: conveying a specific meaning or status with each color. This would be helpful not only for this specific issue, but with any other link, allowing for instance to differentiate between a causality relationship link between two ideas and a timeline sequence link.
Also, I’d appreciate to be able to navigate through the links. For instance, SOMETHING+CLICKING on a link could select the connected note on the other side of the link and make it visible. If the currently selected note is considered as the source side, then repeatedly SOMETHING+CLICKING on the link would toggle between the two connected notes. Oh well, just dreaming
Yes, this we agree with, and it’s likely something along those lines will be implemented in a future build.
It’s not quite what you are talking about, but note that Shift-Cmd-A will highlight all of the notes that are linked to the current one. At this point, if all of the connected notes are not on-screen, you can hold down the ‘Z’ key to zoom out while still being able to see all of the highlighted notes. Point the mouse at the one you want to visit, let go of ‘Z’, and now you’re at it.
In my experience, this combination of tools works quite well for what you are describing.
I’ve moved your post to an existing discussion on the matter. You can read the official response above, and as well I’ve compiled a list of additional discussions which go over the rationale for why this is not in the software:
Just bought Scapple. Great product, tons of potential.
Wondering if there is a feature or one to be considered where notes can be turned into a sub-note and attached to a main note. Sub-notes can have displayed or hidden visibility. When sub-notes are hidden, then when mouse hovers on the main note, all invisible hidden sub-notes attached to the main note are seen. When sub-notes are set to displayed, they resume visibility per normal.
This feature would allow managing and limiting the number of notes/branches created and viewed overall, improving focus on main higher tier notes.
yes, that would be helpful as a work around. I do think sub-notes that collapse/hidden-reveal functionality would be powerful and create a cleaner overall board.
