Ideas to make Scapple a bit better

[Missionary]

Hello Scapple lovers,

I really enjoy doing mind map on Scapple on my MacBook. Just love it! Then I tried to compare Scapple with other mind map apps to see what Scapple could be lack of. What I can see is that

1. Scapple does not support embedded videos: So all I can do is insert a website link into a note, and select the text link and right-click to look it up. It does pop up preview of the link with the video. But the thing here is that it takes a little bit of process to see the video and at first glance I would have no idea what that link is about (it does not have the option to convert the link to designated texts)

2. Scapple does not have built-in set of icons. I do not mind much as I find another solution (using keyboard shortcut ⌃ ⌘ spacebar to pop up emoji generator). However, the emoji is quite small so I have to increase the text size. What I want is just to focus on the emoji size not the text size next to it, but it seems like when you increase/decrease text size, it would affect the whole note. More set of icons and specific text/icon edited not the whole note would be nice.

3. Connection Label is uneditable. I just want to make it larger or change its color to make it stand out.

4. New types of connection lines and editing? What if I want a straight line not dotted line? What if I want to change connection line color?

I still encourage to keep Scapple simple and intuitive to use. But on the other hand, these changes would enhance the power Scapple could give to its users. It does not make the software more complicated, contrastingly it adds more variety and freedom of choices to make.

[xiamenese]

From the fountain-head:

@KB

To put everyone’s mind at rest, Scapple is going nowhere, and is still in active development. Here is what is going on in that regard:

1. We are slowly porting the Mac code from the Objective-C programming language to Swift as part of a gradual and ongoing modernisation process.
2. Once that’s done, the Swift code for the main “thought group” view will be adapted to work on both macOS and iOS. (This involves writing iOS-specific code for drag and drop, editing notes and much more.)
3. Once that’s done, we’ll be writing the rest of the iOS app.

So yes, our plan is to bring Scapple to iOS (eventually). Please note, however, that there is no time scale on any of this. I’m full time on other code that I’ll have my hands full with for the foreseeable future, so the bulk of this work is currently being done, under my supervision, by Ian, a developer who joined the company last year. We’d love to get the iOS version out some time in 2022, but given our past over-optimism with release dates, I’d say that it could equally end up being 2023, 2025, 2050 or 3128. Scapple’s external simplicity is not indicative of its internal workings. So: it will just be out when it’s ready.

Also, although we will of course be fixing bugs, we have no plans for adding new features to Scapple any time soon - the idea was always that it would be simple, stable, and that we wouldn’t be constantly adding to it.

All the best,
Keith

Mark