Scapple for Mac OS X Now Available!

[nomipmas]

I'm just posting my honest opinion here, what I feel about this product at this stage.

Good points:
1. Simple, elegant and very interested to see upcoming features.
2. Easy way to take notes and cross reference them.

Questionable points:
1. For the functionality I do not think you should be charging for this product. If you have more features (cloud integration, saving in different formats [text hierarchy mode, pdf, rtf, etc] then that may be a different story. I think you should keep it in beta as a free download till you have a valuable feature set. Feels a bit like a money grab.
2. It seems like a scaled down (copy cat) version (albeit prettier) version of Tinderbox.

Cheers

[Niran]

I'm glad I paid for scapple. I appreciate its simplicity and elegance. As for being a "copy cat" of Tinderbox "lite". Tinderbox is not simple or elegant - powerful, but not pretty and easy. Tinderbox takes to much mental gymnastics for me to use. Scapple on the other hand takes very little mental load. Scapple has some similarities to Curio; but if I want to sketch out quick notes, scapple wins because I am able able to get my thoughts down fast without having to fiddle. The friction to resistance is low with scapple because of the reduced mental load - this is its power. As for icloud integration, since there is on iOS equivalent, why not use Dropbox ?

[AmberV]

> cloud integration

I'm not sure what that is. The whole point of "the cloud" as a focus of hype, is that it makes it possible for all of us to have synchronisation in all of our data formats, regardless of the software we use and whether the developers have to do anything to enable it. This is a point that iCloud misses on, because it has to be coded for (which we have done, incidentally) and is only available to a small subset of developers using one specific vendor to sell their software---but that's Apple's for you. For everything else, as Niran points out, all you need is an InsertServiceName account on your computers and devices. Job done. Software that hasn’t been updated since 1998 has "cloud integration" because the cloud is nothing more than keeping your filesystems synchronised across the Internet.

> saving in different formats [text hierarchy mode, pdf, rtf, etc

`File/Exports/` menu?

> It seems like a scaled down (copy cat) version (albeit prettier) version of Tinderbox.

We have a lot of respect for Tinderbox around here, and in fact I've been a user of it for around a decade, myself, and we regularly work together on sales. Deliberately making a copy cat version of Tinderbox is the last thing we'd do. Beyond that, I don't even know how to respond to this because these to programs are very different in all but the most superficial of senses. It's like saying Microsoft Paint is a scaled down copycat of AutoCAD because they both draw rectangles.