Scapple for Mac (née "TheBoard"/"Vellum") - feedback wanted

Scapple Scapple Beta Testing (macOS)
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Sean Coffee said:

Either Keith has already changed it (have you?) or there is a simpler way. While playing with it, I just moved my mouse and doubleclicked and a new note began. No need to hit Escape at all! A much smoother operation–just move the mouse below the line you’re typing (or wherever you want–under another note, to the top) and start typing again.

Also, you can zoom in or out with the “pinching” technique on the trackpad (the default shortcut on my computer changes Spaces).

I’ve tried mindmapping apps before, but have never got the hang of them or their multiple lines, shapes, etc. This reminds me a bit of the note-taking aspect of Tinderbox, which I’ve been trialling, but which is much to complex (and expensive) for me to mess with. I love TheBoard (and I like BoardStorm as a name, as well).

Edit: One question: How do you disengage the “Fade?” I clicked on the Fade button to remove the checkmark, but that doesn’t seem to work.

Edit 2: I’ve been playing with it a bit and I feel strangely like e.e.cummings–creating whitespace around the text, connecting it with pauses, as it were. Making the box purposely larger than the text so that the connecting line is subtly distanced from it. I’m beginning to feel a poem coming on!

22

Ooh, a new toy to waste many an hour with! Fun. I’m just goofing off with this now to try it out and I’m liking it, but I’ll have to give it a go with a semi-real boardstorming session later to get a better feel for how I’d really end up using it. At the moment I’m sort of in a brain-rut thinking about jotting down novel/script ideas, and I use the freeform corkboard in Scrivener for that as it basically does everything I want and more. So with the warning that I’m presently approaching this from that position (ie, perhaps not the ideal user?), a few thoughts–

  1. Definitely agree with the desire for a speedy keyboard-only entry system, preferably Enter to escape and then Enter to start a new note. I’m fine with Opt-Enter or Shift-Enter for a line break in the note itself if it lets me use enter for a new note, although maybe I’m in the minority there. But Shift-Enter is a lot easier and faster to type than Esc. Even just sticking with Esc, though, allowing a new note with Enter or Cmd-N or something so you don’t have to switch to the mouse would be fabulous.

  2. On Cmd-N, it feels weird to have it create a new board rather than something inside the current board. I guess it’s Finder-like, opening a new window…okay, maybe it’s like a lot of programs…but I guess just because this feels like you’re working with a lot of different pieces inside the same window, I expect Cmd-N to make me a new piece in that window. Especially if this gets a little expanded to include a split pane for arranging notes for export, with the ability to add a new note there. You’re dealing in little moveable chunks, and I just anticipate the command will deal with new chunks. (I admit this may be due to spending too much time in Scrivener.)

  3. Meta-data color tags. Someone said something about them back near the top of the thread, and I am all for it. I’m thinking something like the keyword system in Scrivener, though not necessarily as complicated as far as having a hierarchy or drag-and-drop and all that. Mostly just a way to quickly assign a color chip to a note and then somewhere to have a little legend to define each of the colors. I don’t need to see the definition itself when I’m looking at the note, but I’d want somewhere to keep the list for reference. The main thing for me would be the ability to assign multiple colors to a note. I don’t mind if you limit me (er, within reason), but I tend to be very color-oriented when organizing or linking ideas, so my actual paper notes don’t end up with lines so much as tons of highlighter tick marks next to them to indicate what themes they’re dealing with. Then I shuffle through my stacks of paper trying to find all the pink, then all the blue, then all the orange, and then figure out if a paragraph has more orange than blue and whether the fact that it has both makes it the Ideal Transition Paragraph…

So I don’t need the app to try and organize for me based on color or do anything complicated–I don’t want it to touch that at all. But it’d be nice to be able to assign a few color chips to a note so I can use that for my right brain as ideas develop, and then I can move the notes around on the board to group them by color myself as I start to build the connections and spawn new ideas off them. (That said, this is part of why I love working in the freeform corkboard as a brainstorming app, since I care more about the color coding and clustering than the actual lines, so this may be less relevant to most users.)

  1. With that, possibly an option to color the lines as well? (That one could be arbitrary, like the color fill is now.) Just using the line color as an indication of what “path” or theme I’m following with an idea could be nice. Might be over-complicating things though, so I’m just tossing it out there. I could probably achieve the same effect with just the color-fill. The point of coloring the lines would be more so that when I have a bunch of lines bursting from a note scrawling across the page and intersecting with other lines that got in the way, I’ll be able to see from the start note which thematic direction the linked notes go in, without having to follow the line all the way to the end to see what color is there. If that makes sense.

  2. OPML for easy import into Scrivener would be lovely. Or if you go with just text export, perhaps a way to define or insert a separator between notes (which then could be used to automatically split the document when importing it into Scrivener). It’d be nice to have some option outside of OPML of course, since you might want to just whip off a quick text list to file somewhere or send to your colleague. And then I definitely like the ability that’s already there, to print a PDF of the board so you get the layout and coloring and all that to share as well.

  3. I love the zoom slider at the bottom. I like working and seeing the space fill up and then zooming down so I suddenly have so much free space to keep boardstorming in. Somehow that’s energizing.

  4. Any chance you’d consider minimal rich text? It’s not a big deal, but a little bold to make a header or title for the note and then plain text under it to develop it slightly would help me focus visually. That said, I may be writing much longer notes than a mind-map/brainstorm app is supposed to get. But then that’s part of the beauty of this one’s simplicity–it doesn’t cut me off before I finished’ve typing out my idea!

  5. Which by the way is absolutely wonderful with this. I hate trying to use diagramy programs that give me an arbitrarily tiny text box to write in and then start scrolling my note out of view while I’m still typing the same blasted sentence. Argh. And then I have to resize. And then I have to fiddle and click again in the right spot to finish typing my note. Argh. Working in TheBoard is just so easy. Thank you.

  6. Also I like that notes aren’t connected until you connect them. While it’s true that the ideas must be connected somehow in my head when I jump from one thought to the next, they’re not necessarily connected at all in a way that I’d want to record, and I like that your application doesn’t try to consistently link them for me.

  7. Although with that, maybe if you did implement a keyboard shortcut to add new notes, if you wanted to get fancy (which I know you don’t) you could create two, e.g. Cmd-N and Shift-Cmd-N: one to just create a new note, plain and simple; one to create a new note linked to the last note. (Er, that may have been suggested earlier? I remember something about a “chain” of ideas.) It’d be a nice shortcut for when you did want to link ideas as you’re spewing them out, but it’d leave it as an option.

…Okay, maybe that was more than a few. It’s so much fun! I have to keep boardstorming ideas. But drat, my tea got cold while I was typing. Could you add something to keep hot beverages from getting room temp while you boardstorm? Rewarmed tea is a travesty.

P.S. Also I like that if I create a new note and don’t type anything in it, it goes away! It’s so irritating to have random empty text boxes littering my screen because I misclicked.

UPDATE: I refreshed my tea and came up with a set of ideas for how I’d use this and why it might be preferable to doing the same thing in the freeform corkboard for small-scale stuff, although since I’ve now spent the whole evening not actually getting work done, I may have to save that for tomorrow. Anyway, I did come up with another small usability suggestion–resizing. You can currently only resize by dragging the right or left edge, and it’d be nice if you could do the same with the top and bottom edges as well. Just because I approach it thinking, “I want to make this shorter” rather than “I want to make this wider.” It ends up the same of course, but I click the wrong part of the box first.

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the_board_thoughts.tbd.zip (3.69 KB)

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  1. Tab is genius. Also Shift-Tab.

  2. Reminds me of Sigma Tau Delta and writing messages on the college dorm white board about going “off to buy STD supplies!” Suggestion then for Boardstorm or the like to not capitalize the S, in an attempt to forestall that acronym as well. 8)

25

Thirded.

Spent two hours last night boardstorming size=85[/size] a new idea. Even in this state, it’s kind of addictive. I’ve always been attracted to mindmapping, but I never really did it very often, and until I used this app I hadn’t figured out why. Boardstorm’s size=85 [/size] “in the beginning, all ideas are equal” concept is much truer to brainstorming than a mindmap or an outline can ever be. I tend to write to figure out what I’m thinking on a topic – I rarely have much of a plan coming in. The act of mindmapping, though, sort of assumes that you have some idea of how to proceed, at least an inkling: it’s hierarchical from the beginning, so it assumes that some thoughts/ideas are more important than others. Not so with this new app.

Keep going, Keith. You’re on to something.

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Hi, nice to have so smart people suggesting more or less what I think after some minutes of playin’ around with this new toy :slight_smile:

and

and

and

So, please, Keith, keep it simple (I can hear the Army of Complicators comin’… :smiley: )
because no doubt

Giovanni

27

I have to chime in and say I’ve tried it and I really like it. I think I pretty much agree with what everyone has said about advantages that it has over other mindmapping software (I’m looking at you, NovaMind, and not in a good way). Basically I guess they all stem from the concept that notes are created as freestanding entities, not necessarily branches or sub-branches:

  1. It doesn’t force me to start working conceptually in a tree structure, branching out from one central concept. I never really got how that was so different from just making an outline. Main topic, sub-topics, sub-sub-topics, etc. TheBoard is so free. For once I actually feel like I don’t have to know the structure in advance.

  2. A ramification of that: I really like not having to view my ideas in a radial shape. I guess I usually tend to visualize my writing (academic, at the moment) more as a linear chain of ideas, and I like being able to line my notes up in a way that reflects that. You could say that structurally there is no real difference, I guess, but it looks different, and the whole thing about mindmapping is that it’s a visual representation so…I appreciate that TheBoard doesn’t impose a shape on the proceedings.

  3. A second ramification: Another thing I have really disliked about mindmapping apps is that it always seems to be such a pain to draw inter-branch connections. What is up with that? Aren’t cross-connections the whole point? If you can’t do that, isn’t it (once again) just a regular outline? So again I like the way TheBoard is completely flexible in that regard.

Also, I love the slider for zooming. That is really brilliant.

Personally, I wouldn’t use much or any metadata (colors or keywords) and I’d be unlikely to use export options, with one exception: as has been suggested, I’d like to be able to import the board into Scrivener just for viewing, either as-is or via an export to .jpg or something. For me it would be pretty easy to create new cards in Scrivener based on the board, and my boards would have a lot of details that wouldn’t each deserve their own card, so I don’t care too much about translating what’s on the board into the Scrivener binder. But I would like to have the visual representation for reference either in split view or as a quick reference, with my lines and spatial arrangement of notes “holding” the ideas in the places I’ve put them, as a reminder while I write of how I’ve conceived the structure.

Thoughts on the name: I am becoming fond of “boardstorming” although at first it made me think of 1) barnstorming in 2) an imperial storm trooper suit. :laughing: Anyway, previously to that I had been thinking that there might be interesting possibilities in the linguistic (if that is the right word) connection between “card” and “map”, in words like cartography, cartographer. But I like the idea of using board in the name, because that’s exactly what it feels like, a big whiteboard. WhiteBoard? Or, um, CardBoard? (sorry)

So, last night I used TheBoard to thrash out the sequence of ideas for a tricky section of my dissertation–it really worked well. It felt a whole lot like sketching on paper, but cleaner, and more re-arrangeable. So thanks a lot for this! I think the concept is brilliant and I’m excited to see how it develops.

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Hi,

what about BoardWay? MindWay? WhiteMind? MyBoard?

just to boardstorm… er’, brainstorm around app name a little :slight_smile:

Giovanni

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My biggest frustration with any of the mind mapping and brainstorming applications is the assumption that you are starting with a blank slate and all the information will be entered and organised as you proceed. I would like to be able to import notes en masse from an application like DevonThink or Scrivener and then do the organisation and linking of ideas. I am working on a PhD and have an extensive set of notes with citations and keywords. I can drill down to a keyword but will still have dozens of notes that I want to organise. Currently, I have to copy and paste each note into a mind mapping application and the thrill soon fades when you are talking a hundred or so notes.

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BoardWay is pretty fun, I’m already breaking into theme songs, but I have to personally veto MyBoard as it makes me think of MS. Also iBoard, for similar fruity reasons.

31

ThoughtBoard.

Like a dart board, except you throw thoughts at it and see which ones stick…

David

32

Following up on this comment:

How about Chorographer?

humbot.org/static/new/chorography.html

Not only is it a somewhat obscure term, but it ends in “er.”

(“It has to be ‘The’ something. All the great bands start with ‘The’.” The Committments)

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Bug stuff (if you can call something in an app this embryonic a bug):

• Once you start making connections, then return to trying to make new, standalone notes, the app forces those new notes to connect to that last one you just made. I can’t figure out how to make it stop. You should, I think, be able to make connections midway through the process, then go back to making standalone notes.

• Undo doesn’t work when you delete a note. You should be able to get that back, I’d think?

Philisophical Stuff:

• You should always be able to open a new document and start typing right away. If you go the way of the TAB key making stacks of notes, I think the start point on The Board should be the upper left corner. Starting in the middle is a mindmapping thing, and it requires clicking and dragging and moving things about. Which leads me to:

• Prefer not clicking and dragging at the outset. Prefer keeping your hands on the keyboard to using the mouse. In my mind, this app has two stages – one where you’re inputing as much text as you can, and two where you’re off the keyboard and using the mouse/trackpad/pen to make links. (I can tell you from recent experience that using a Wacom tablet and pen to make the connections FEELS right.)

• Take some hints from little apps like Byword and Movie Draft SE and Ommwriter in the way they handle interface preferences. In short: there ain’t many. They all tend to create theme packages to adjust background/typeface etc. I don’t think any of those apps are serious writing tools in the way The Board can be, but I do like the way they do the fiddling for you. Compare this to Write Room, which is great in that I can set it up endlessly, and bad in that I can set it up endlessly. Scrivener needs a ton of interface options because it’s a big, robust application. A little app like this one should be aggressively anti-fiddle. If you shipped with Helvetica and dotted lines, I wouldn’t complain.

• I think down the line, Dropbox will be your friend with this app.

•God, I don’t even want to mention the iPad with this yet, and if you don’t want to broach the subject, you should certainly delete this. I do want to say that I’m glad this is starting out on the Mac. It’s a very keyboard-y app. I do think if you could open one of these boards on an iPad, make connections and small revisions and sync it with dropbox, that would be ideal. I could see spending a lot of time just typing and typing and typing, then store the thing away and mess with making connections outside my office on an iPad.

If it’s not obvious, I really, really like this.

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This happened to me last night as well–except the new notes was attached to several other notes. It happened after I had used Command-X to cut a phrase and make a new note with it. I eventually got it to stop, and couldn’t recreate it afterward. I may have hit “undo” and/or “delete” in the process. I will toy around with it and see if I can recreate it.

EDIT: It definitely has to do with the delete button. After trying to delete a letter or two in a note, then creating another note, the new one was connected to all the notes the one I had deleted in. I then tried hitting escape, undo, delete again, and other buttons to stop it, and wound up creating notes that I could type in, but the text didn’t appear until I moved out of the note, and it was doubled and backward. Example: I typed “delete”–nothing appeared. I clicked out of the note and saw “eetteelleedd.” Very Strange! And I can’t seem to get out of that mode.

EDIT2: I can’t recreate this on a consistent basis. And apologies to Keith–I know it’s way too early for bug reports. I’m truly liking this “little app” that you have created.

EDIT3: Okay. I can consistently replicate this one: “Once you start making connections, then return to trying to make new, standalone notes, the app forces those new notes to connect to that last one you just made.” If you delete a note that is connected to other notes, the next note will be connected just like the one you deleted. Type in that note, and then create a new note–that one will be a standalone.

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Well, I could keep quiet because everyone else is so enthusiastic, but my thoughts:
It’s not for me. I don’t slop down ideas and then figure out their connections afterwards.
I start with a main topic, see the sub-topics at once, and work my way through them.
Occasionally I re-order a topic for greater rhetorical or narrative effect.
In fiction, I only have two coordinates, time and space: when/where does this happen?
If I am taking notes on a book, I keep them in seriatim order, beginning to end.
That shows me the structure of an argument or story, how it fits together.
I dunno…maybe I’m too French: La logique est tout.
Anyway, good luck with this, Keith. Maybe it will draw you to the iPad at last!

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What I find hilarious is that apollo16 has Vic-k smack in the center of her example!

Think about it …

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Bardstorming!

[size=50]I am so, so sorry… :blush: [/size]

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…no you’re not. Bwah.

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I like it. Like others have mentioned, I think keyboard only entry is very important, especially in the early stage when I’m just getting ideas out. I want to be able to type some text, press enter to start a new note and keep going. Every time my hands leave the keyboard, I stop. And I don’t just mean I stop typing, I literally lose my train of thought. This was the only thing that stopped me loving it as is.

My preference would be for Enter to start a new note (this is consistent with some of the mind map apps I have trialled over the years) and Opt-Enter or Shift-Enter for a new line in the current note. Having said that, Tab could work too as long as I could somehow still type tabs in my notes - it irritates me no end when I can’t tab a new line to indent it when creating notes.

I really like this and it’s timing (for me) is brilliant. I was about to bust out a kludgy old mind-map/concept-map app for looking at the key ideas in my thesis and the links between them. It’s one of the few mapping apps I’ve seen that allows boardstorming (i.e. does not require a hierarchy) but it is so awful to use I’ve been putting it off for weeks.

Looking forward to seeing what you do with it Keith. I think it’s a go-er! :slight_smile:

PS Long term, this could be a nice entry onto the iPad. Of course, I don’t have one yet so there’s no pressure; I estimate you have about 12 months before I start getting antsy… :wink:

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:wink: