Just curious, as I’ve been trying it, and it’s a little short on things I was expecting (line colours, line thickness, arrows, bullet lists, that kind of thing) and I saw from the release notes the current version dates back to November 2019.
Previous posts have it that there is an intention to come back to it, but does anyone know when this might be and what it might mean?
Thanks
Firstly, it’s Scapple, not ‘Scrapple’—“traditionally a mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and wheat flour, often buckwheat flour, and spices”, Wikipedia.
Then
Mark
So it’s dead in any meaningful way until some unknown time in the future when something might happen. Shame.
How do you work that out from what’s been written here?
Scapple is being sold and will work on any current device, and it is being updated to make sure it will continue to work as devices change, and to enable it to work on iOS in future. Its design spec has been achieved - it was always meant as a simple tool which would not bloat, so the constant addition of features has never been promised.
It works now and is being updated. That is not ‘dead in any meaningful sense’.
Updates mention MacOS not Windows. Last Windows update was 2 years ago. No wishlist for features. Given all of that and given how long Scrivener 3 for Windows took to come out, Scapple looks pretty dead to me in terms of features I’d want in any kind of meaningful timeframe.
You may want extra features, but the developer has already said that there are unlikely to be new features, as the program already does what it’s designed to do. If you’re wanting it to do much more than that, then you may be unlucky: but that doesn’t mean the program is ‘meaningfully dead’, only that looking elsewhere for those features may be a better answer for you personally.
“My car does not fly, and the company has made no progress toward flight in the last three years. Therefore my car company is kaput.”
I am baffled by this “Scapple dead” thing.
I don’t want to see any improvements for the sake of adding bells and whistles. The program does what it was promised to do and it does it cleanly, efficiently, and effectively.
Over the years, before Scapple, I bought and used just about every mind-mapping program for personal and business use at a cost of many hundreds of dollars. Without fail, I would get sidetracked and diverted by another line/color/font style. Or a collaboration feature I will never need. And some of these things are so complex they come with overwhelming documentation and enough options to keep any program tinkerer busy for a long time.
Then, along came Scapple and my productivity climbed.
At the time I bought Scapple, when it was released, I was happily back to using big sheets of paper and a pen, having installed all the other behemoth programs. Scapple is as effective as that sheet of paper.
I live in fear that a bunch of whiz-bang improvements will be added. I don’t need any more useless rabbit hole-ridden programs in my life. I have stuff to do.
I would suggest that anyone who fears Scapple is dead or dying should uninstall it now and buy one of the great battleship mind-mapping programs out there, and there are a lot. But none will be as good or as cheap as Scapple
I really hope that L&L leaves Scapple alone.
I use both OneNote and Scapple to organize, brainstorm, mind map, plot stories, etc.
Because Scapple is so simple, it’s my go-to whiteboard for my Windows 10 machine and usually wins out over OneNote. (Also, OneNote doesn’t have a way to easily draw connections among text boxes.)
I would like to be able to draw curves in Scapple, but I can work around that.
Keep it simple and stable.
-Steve
I really need “connection label” function on Windows version.
But so far, it’s still no release updated…
We need the curves. There’s no good way to work around it in general.
I’m much more interested in Keith’s comment about porting the Scapple codebase from Objective-C to Swift … and about this being a background task while he primarily works on other things.
Is it reasonable to suspect that Keith’s main concern right now is porting Scrivener to Swift? And that, at some future date, this will lead to a convergence between the iOS and macOS versions of Scrivener (i.e. many more features available on iOS, easier future development for both)?
While it’s not beautiful, my workaround for drawing curves in Scapple is to enter characters [ . ] or [_] and connect those text boxes to draw angled lines. I also use this method to create dividing lines.
Tedious but doable. Thanks!
With each new Scapple file, I create a “template” of 3 points that are connected and then copy and paste from that if I need to draw multiple angled lines. That makes it less tedious.
Also, the underscore symbol or the letter x is a little easier to select and drag than something as narrow as a text box created using a period.
I would like to label connections so may have to go a similar route (at the risk of cxreating ‘noisier’ maps).
Otherwise I totally agree about sticking with the bare bones functionalitythat avoids the tempting displacement acvtivity of fine tuning presentation on what is really a scratchpad. If I need to present it I will move it to other tools, Powerpoint or Prezzi for example.
This is the Scapple for Windows forum. Everything mentioned about plans in this thread are about the future of Scapple in MacOS and IOS with no mention of Windows. It is a fair deduction that there is no meaningful work being done on the Windows version.
I own both the Windows and MacOS versions. I would consider it progress if the Windows version were updated to have the same features as the MacOS version. The Windows version is more basic compared to the MacOS version and missing some nice features. For example, Scapple for Windows does not support connection labels, which I consider an essential feature.
So when defending LL and Scapple, bear in mind Scapple for Windows is not as refined a product as the MacOS version. It has the same name and cost, but it is not the same.
Might want to stay tuned to the forum for a bit here, you will come to see otherwise. 
Oooh, you little tease :-))
I like Scapple a lot. As others have said it’s simplicity is it’s strength. Sure, There’s tweaks and ‘enhancements’ I would like but then the program already does what it says on the tin. I’ve just revisited Aeon’s excellent Timeline and found a whole of of new GUI things and enhancements that I never wanted or needed. To me, it’s almost a new program and a whole new learning curve to climb. I’m a bit put off if I’m honest. All the other mind mapping programs I tried are far to hard and you end up playing with the software and not actually doing any mind mapping.
In 1995 I heard a gent called Bill Rabkin, one of the first to be called a software evangalist, declare that “if you’re not being productive with a piece of software within ten minutes of starting with it, throw it away”. Scrivener tested that principle. Timeline does too. Scapple is the archetypal proof of Bill’s principle. If your not being productive with Scapple within 10 minutes of installing it, the problem is not the software!
Now, I’ll get off the soapbox and wait to see what’s coming.
People might want to look at https://www.scrintal.com which is currently in development and seems to have a host of features forthcoming but it may just be vapourware. There are a couple of demo videos on YouTube as well. Just a thought about the direction Scapple might also take…