Hello Keith
Thanks for considering this even if you reject it. I’m only pressing you because a) you seem reasonable and b) circling is a very common way in which people organise things on paper.
The underlying graphics layer would meet my needs to a valuable, though incomplete, extent. A simple toggle between which layer was active for editing would suffice I think, though even that might be overkill as you could disambiguate which item (a note or a graphic) was being clicked by the location of the cursor. There is no need to make Photoshop, the equivalent of Skitch is enough.
You have slightly misunderstood my original suggestion by running together the spatial idea of a graphics layer and the relations between notes. What I propose can be done on paper, so I think it can be done here. Take your cross example. If we select north and south and “circle” it, I would expect a shape that was not circular but rather enclosed north and south, yet missed centre. So it might look like a water balloon whose middle you had squeezed. The action the UI needs to capture is the explicit addition of a note to the relation represented by a colored shape. Just as you cannot link a note C to two linked notes A and B by moving C to sit or touch on their link line, you cannot add centre to north and south by moving it onto part of their shape. You could indicate that you wanted to add centre to the circle of north south, perhaps, as you link notes now by dragging it onto a note in an encircling group, maybe with cmd and opt pressed.
Representing further potential relations between notes in a data structure does not seem to me difficult. Getting the UI to allow the addition or removal of additional relations seems to me something you have more or less done already. Yes, you have one big task, viz. redrawing shapes whenever a note moves, so that the shapes always enclose only those notes to whom they are related by the encircling relation. Overlap of shapes is inevitable but is manageable even for unfilled shapes, and better with filled shapes whose overlaps would be visible by colour mixing.
You might say that this could wind up looking ugly. Yes, but it can do now. You won’t be able to protect users from themselves.
I take your point that the hierarchy cannot be exported, but that is already the case. If I make three notes, A, B, C, and join each to the others. We get a triangle whose visible hierarchy is unclear. Is it right to left, top to bottom, right to left? At present in Scapple, if one exports, one gets different results by moving the notes around, but not by changing the established link lines/relations. So how to export is an issue, but not one that can be solved non-arbitrarily since you allow multiple relations/connections–which is Scapple’s strength.
Thank you again for your response and for Scapple.
David.
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