Scapple wishlist

Scapple Scapple for macOS
1

Hi folks,

I saw an area for the Scrivener wishlist, but none for Scapple - sorry if I missed it. So posting here.

First off - Scapple is great. Here are some suggestions that could increase its productivity a lot.

  1. GRID

…aimed at making alignment easier and faster. This is the only aspect of the software I find myself cursing softly.

So for instance, my weapon of choice to tackle this would be to be able to switch on a grid, the visibility of which could be toggled on and off (on for adjusting the size to what you want, then switch off for uncluttered workspace). If I could only choose a grid of say, size 5 pixels, and all nodes try to snap to that when created or moved, there would be no more need to do the repetitive selectnodes + rightclick + align + align left. You could then have a hot key that when held down, overrides the grid and allows one to move the node freely if that is sometimes needed.

  1. Drag direction locking, a la photoshop.

The idea being to hold down a key or key combo that causes moving a node to be constrained to horizontal motion, or vertical motion. Super handy, and super missed at the moment.

  1. Print interactive preview that allows one to still drag nodes around

This is especially important for big spreadsheets where you might have a long row of nodes, and want to space them so they don’t lie over the crack between two pages. Right now, to do that, one has to go into Print, enter the scale factor (which does not get remembered so has to be entered each time), check how things sit by flicking through the pages, try to remember where the nodes need adjusting and how much, then quit out of print, move the nodes hoping you remembered the right ones and how much they were off, go back into print, enter the scale factor again, flick through the pages again, find you didn’t quite nail it… rinse and repeat. Becomes a show stopper when you have ten or more pages to print, each of which requires adjusting of node positioning.

  1. Subnetworks

Would be nice for many applications to be able to enter into a node where one can build a new network.

  1. Insert images

I’ve seen folks mention this before so won’t belabor it.

I think 1 and 2 are perhaps the biggest bang for development buck. I hope my words were able to convey how those two functions would greatly enhance user experience. 3 might be more work but personally feel its super important. 4 and 5 are just whimsical as they represent an expansion of core functionality rather than making the core concept of Scapple completely shipshape.

Thanks for your hard work - I really hope you stick with Scapple and keep it growing. It is off to a great start!

2

Ok - so updating suggestion 3) - A slight modification of the existing Page Guides functionality could solve this. If you can just add a field somewhere in the interface that scales the guides to correspond to a given scale factor in the print dialog, we’re set! We can then position things vis-a-vis the page breaks knowing it matches the scale factor we’ve chosen to print with.

All the best
Malcolm

3

Hi all
I have also a feature request for the great Scapple: I’d love to see the ability to create a bulleted and numbered list within a note such as:
Ways to stay awake:

  1. Drink coffee
  2. Drink more coffee
  3. Drink even more coffee

I know it can be done by manual formatting, but when one of the list items creates a line break, the new line starts at the same left margin as the bullets or numbers instead of being indented…

4

The large screen, the pencil…it has made the iPad be much more than a reading or lookup device. I’m finding that I prefer using touch whenever possible rather than the keyboard (MacOS) and my long-time trusty workflows are being disrupted.

I’ve read elsewhere that you’ve had trouble getting good coders, that you’re doing much more yourself. I understand your frustration. You’ve paid considerable Lehrgeld. But I urge you to reconsider in light of the iPad Pro and what it signals for where things are moving. I’m convinced that more and more creatives are going to accelerate the migration iOS as it’s capabilities expand. After a little time with the iPad Pro, one senses that day is coming fast. Snapple is a perfect application for it.

5

I was going to start a new thread when I saw malkazoid’s suggestion 1.

Being in the process of building a rather big, semi-organised mindmap of a novel project (Scapple is invaluable gift from heaven in this work), I’m really missing some sort of grid feature to keep my rows and columns nicely centered or left/right justified.

For me, it would be enough to have an invisible, interval-adjustable grid, so that I could (for example) hold down Cmd while dragging an item to have it centered or left/right margin justified to the nearest grid line.

Trying to get my ‘cards’ to line up neatly is a frustrating exercise.

Please consider implementing a flexible grid feature!

I’m also all for malkazoid’s second suggestion – constraining drag movements to N/S or E/W using a modifier key. ‘Shift’ would be the obvious candidate, emulating Photoshop.

Kind regards,

Joachim

6

Well, I’d like to suggest one small improvement that would make Scapple even more useful for me than it already is: Tabs. I would love to be able to open up different .scap files in tabs in one document, so that I can easily switch between one file and another.

7

You can left- right- or center-align a selection of notes after you’ve created them. It requires an extra step, but you can accomplish it with a selection and a couple of menu clicks (or keyboard shortcuts). You can also evenly distribute notes between the top & bottom or leftmost and rightmost notes in a selection. That’s kind of Scapple’s modus operandi: rapidly jot down ideas, then arrange. It’s kind of like Scrivener’s unique design philosophy (most applicable to fiction writers): create the content as chaotically as you like, and don’t worry overly much about formatting until you’re nearing completion.

8

My greatest wish for Scapple would be REAL Scrivener integration. Meaning, you can open a Scrivener document in Scapple, choose a folder, and see all that folder’s documents as notes. You can move those around as you please - and if you hit “save”, the position of each element is saved in the Scrivener document.

Basically a supercharged freeform corkboard. Would allow for organizing complex series of documents (like a big list of individual scenes in a long, long story) in a more visual, brainstormy way than Scrivener currently allows.

9

I love Scrivener and assumed Scapple worked as you describe pekka- so why bother with a trial?
I’d been working on various aspects of a series in many formats for eight years. Index cards are awesome and visualizing dependencies and relationships between Index Cards for continuity would be extremely powerful.
My incorrect assumption that a scapple Note would have the same Inspector accessible object properties as a Scrivener Text object such as Labels, Keywords, Tags, and other metadata fields.
Now I understand that Scapple is designed to quickly and simply capture and organize ideas in Notes for further development elsewhere.

10

A simple wish: Colored connection lines! (or for British users, Coloured connexion lines!)

I have a recurring task (stakeholder mapping) that requires me to distinguish four kinds of connections between the entries. I can do that now by making four separate maps, but I cannot convince my colleagues that this work-around makes Scapple the software of choice. With the ability to draw colored lines between notes, I might get them to adopt Scapple.

And if it’s not too much to ask, once Scapple has colored lines, could it support multiple lines (of different colors or formats) between any two notes?

11

I wish Scapple can have a latex equation marker function, so that I don’t need to insert equation figures repeatedly.

12

I wish that — when I make cards with each character’s name and then organize them properly with arrows and dotted lines and stuff which indicate different story lines and intersecting character arcs — when I do all that, I wish that Scapple would assemble the final draft for me. (I’d even settle for a good rough draft.) Would save hours, or sometimes years, of work.

ps