I love and use Scapple all the time. Great product.
Here’s the thing though, as a language expert, I’m somewhat conflicted by the choice of terminology for alignment when it comes to grouping notes.
To align a group of notes in the vertical plane, I have to choose ‘align horizontal centers’. And likewise, to align notes in the horizontal plane, I have to choose ‘align vertical centers’. It seems counter-intuitive.
I’m trying to understand how this might work from the developer’s point of view:
- all notes have a Vector2 for position (x, y)
- the note centers have different x-values in the ‘horizontal x-axis’
- all notes are then given the same x-value as the top-most note (note with highest y value)
In other words, I can see there are two camps here about what align vertically might mean.
Option 1
ALIGN VERTICALLY - align top-to-bottom (same x-value)
ALIGN HORIZONTALLY - align left-to-right (same y-value)
vs
Option 2
ALIGN VERTICALLY - modify vertical y-values
ALIGN HORIZONTALLY - modify horizontal x-values
I understand why a developer working with grids would choose the second interpretation, but I would argue that lay-people understand ‘align vertically’ to mean align a group top-to-bottom.
Maybe the issue is about aligning a single object vs aligning multiple objects. Alignment is literally ‘to put in a line’.
For a single object, ‘alignment’ is equivalent to position, so vertical alignment is literally vertical position, or y-value.
But to align multiple objects relative to each other, alignment means to put in a line ‘top to bottom’ (vertical plane) or left-to-right (horizontal plane). Their position is relative to each other, to put them in a line in the y-plane means having a normalized x-value, and vice versa.
It’s perhaps confusing that to align a group vertically, you only have to modify the horizontal x-value.
Anyone else struggling with this? Which would you choose, option 1 or option 2?