Scapple Beta - New Users Please Read

[PJS]

I don't see a reference to this, but if you Opt-drag an item, or a collection of them, only a short distance -- fail to clear original position -- you generate a duplicate. Can be wonderfully convenient if you want, say, several "Describe in detail" reminders to set here and there, but can be disconcerting if you're not expecting it.

Nonetheless, lovely.

Phil

[elmago79]

Great software! Just yesterday I was thinking I need software like a mind map but more freeform to describe a process and suddenly Scapple appears.

I don't know if this is a bug or a feature request, but there seems to be no way to remove formating from a note. I ended up deleting some note styles before descovering that what I wanted to do wasn't available.

[viki]

1) note style > apply note style > select red text > nothing happens to text, just the border disappeared

Curious, I can't reproduce this. The note styles affect everything - borders and so on - so the border will disappear. But are you saying that it didn't even change the text to red for you?

Now I can't reproduce it myself...

But I have another question. I write a note with two lines separated by return. When importing this note to Scrivener with drag-and-drop to corkboard view it produces a nice card with first line in title and both lines in synopsis (works great ). But, when exporting the scapple as opml and importing the opml to Scrivener, both lines were placed in the title separated by "
" and nothing appears in the synopsis. Is this just a side effect of opml export or a bug?

viki

[KB]

I don't see a reference to this, but if you Opt-drag an item, or a collection of them, only a short distance -- fail to clear original position -- you generate a duplicate. Can be wonderfully convenient if you want, say, several "Describe in detail" reminders to set here and there, but can be disconcerting if you're not expecting it.

This is in the Help manual but not the QuickStart guide - Option-drags do indeed create copies, as is standard for Option-drags in many Mac apps.

Thanks for the kind words!

All the best,
Keith

[djaneb]

This is brilliant. I have tried a number of others apps - as well as the requirement for a single top level, they have been too distracting - too visual, if you know what I mean.

I know it is feature ready - just want to ask about possibility of "Distribute - Vertical/Horizontal" as you already have the "Align".

Exported to opml 8 notes, 5 level 1, one of the level 1 had three level 2s but these did not appear as sublevels in when I opened the .opml doc in OmniOutliner, nor when I dragged into Curio 8. From a post in this thread I thought that was what was expected - that export attempted to follow connections.

Dragging into Scrivener freeform corkboard is absolutely brilliant and works well - gets rid of that middle export to some other format first. Also enables initial work before deciding on best "next step" for data (Scrivener, Curio, MindNode, OmniOutliner).

I'll certainly be buying this.

Deb

[KB]

This is brilliant.

Thanks!

I know it is feature ready - just want to ask about possibility of "Distribute - Vertical/Horizontal" as you already have the "Align".

Out of interest, what would this do?

Exported to opml 8 notes, 5 level 1, one of the level 1 had three level 2s but these did not appear as sublevels in when I opened the .opml doc in OmniOutliner, nor when I dragged into Curio 8. From a post in this thread I thought that was what was expected - that export attempted to follow connections.

Sorry, should have been more clear. Thee are never any groups in the OPML - it's always flat. It only follows the connections in trying to determine the order. The thing is that there is no logical order in the connections - notes can be connected in a huge circle, or you could have ten notes all connected to each other, so there is no way of determining any structural hierarchy except in very simple situations. All of that is left to the after-export stage.

I'll certainly be buying this.

Great!

All the best,
Keith

[djaneb]

I know it is feature ready - just want to ask about possibility of "Distribute - Vertical/Horizontal" as you already have the "Align".

Out of interest, what would this do?

So, I dump a whole lot of stuff, I identify some main points, I drag those main points into proximity and align them horizontally and vertically and drag them to top of canvas. The become visual headings. I drag other bits and pieces under or on top of them. When they get bigger I align those lists vertically.

That sort of thing.

Hey, but not a biggie! I just use it a lot in Curio to organise visually as I go along. Could probs do similar thing with note styles but aligning and distributing notes means less commitment and less to undo when change mind about relationships.

Deb

[Scylax]

I really, really love this! It certainly fills a need in my workflow perfectly, and I love that it's so quick and simple.

Having said that, and seeing what you said about features being finalised, I hesitate to add this, but is there any chance there could be an option to add a border around multiple notes (maybe just a dotted line)? I understand the idea of stacks I think, but I'd love to be able to retain the layout I've created but show that certain nodes are part of one concept, especially since the ability to add notes anywhere tempts me to make lots of separate 'mini-maps' I'd love to distinguish.

Hope that makes sense! And thank you for creating this brilliant little app as well as the amazing Scrivener!

[janra]

Well, it's a lot more portable than my living room wall full of sticky notes.

[dafu]

Well, it's a lot more portable than my living room wall full of sticky notes.

Yes, but it's not nearly as big as your wall. It is very difficult to pace from one side of the laptop to the other. Unless, of course, you have bound feet but that's probably another story.

Dave

[al3x]

First of all I'll have to say that I'm really excited and impressed by the app (and I've already said that in other places too [1] ).

After playing with it for a bit I think I've run into a scenario where I think Scapple could do something a bit better: auto-positioning new notes when these are created using the keyboard alone.

Right now if starting from a note you create multiple new connected notes in a specific direction these are all completely overlapping. I don't want to make any assumptions about how complicated this might be, but I'm thinking that if this is not possible then at least having the option of moving a note around using the keyboard alone would be a good enough alternative for me.

thanks for a great app,

A://

[1]: https://twitter.com/al3xandru/status/256961791815475200

[karin.gottschalk]

Thanks for this application. Like others here I have tried a number of mindmapping applications and none of them really worked for what I need to do. This looks like a winner so far!

[SOScotland]

I really like the way Scrapple works - very close to my own method of planning things out. I've tried a couple of tests with it and found no bugs so far, but I have a couple of minor things that I would like to see (not deal-breakers, but would be nice to have)...

Double-headed arrows - I couldn't see a way to do these in the manual, but was a simple case of joining the nodes twice - that was a nice touch instead of another key combination to remember!

Boxes / circles - some people have mentioned having shapes as nodes, but it would also be useful to be able to put a box around a group of nodes - e.g. to group character attributes together.

I like the styles and that new styles can be created and imported. Would it be possible to filter on these - for example to only show the "Location" styled nodes (and maybe also anything linked directly to them) - similar in operation to the keywords in Scrivener, perhaps.

Bendy links - sometimes a link needs to stretch around other nodes - curves would allow this.

Thanks for putting this together - looking forward to the final version!

[KB]

Now I can't reproduce it myself...

Strange - let me know if you can get it to happen again.

But I have another question. I write a note with two lines separated by return. When importing this note to Scrivener with drag-and-drop to corkboard view it produces a nice card with first line in title and both lines in synopsis (works great ). But, when exporting the scapple as opml and importing the opml to Scrivener, both lines were placed in the title separated by "
" and nothing appears in the synopsis. Is this just a side effect of opml export or a bug?

There are two separate issues here:

The "&#10" thing is caused by Scapple escaping newlines for XML. According to Scrivener's code, it should be decoding those, so I'm not sure why it's not, but I tested in OmniOutliner and that doesn't decode them either. So I've changed it for the next beta so that Scapple no longer encodes newlines, meaning they should come across fine in future.

The other issue is that currently Scapple just exports the notes into the "text" field in the OPML, and Scrivener always interprets that field as being for titles. I've added an option to Scapple's OPML export to add a notes field, which, if ticked, will cause the OPML "text" field to be filled with a shortened version of the note, and the full note to be put in the "_note" field. This will fill in both the title and synopsis in Scrivener. That said, you shouldn't need to use OPML to move notes into Scrivener. Other than the drag to the freeform corkboard, I will be adding drag support to Scrivener so that it will be able to accept drags from Scapple into the binder.

All the best,
Keith

[KB]

I really like the way Scrapple works - very close to my own method of planning things out. I've tried a couple of tests with it and found no bugs so far, but I have a couple of minor things that I would like to see (not deal-breakers, but would be nice to have)...

Thanks for the feedback!

Boxes / circles - some people have mentioned having shapes as nodes, but it would also be useful to be able to put a box around a group of nodes - e.g. to group character attributes together.

I considered this but rejected it. It starts making things more complicated and starts hinting at hierarchy and suchlike.

I like the styles and that new styles can be created and imported. Would it be possible to filter on these - for example to only show the "Location" styled nodes (and maybe also anything linked directly to them) - similar in operation to the keywords in Scrivener, perhaps.

I'm not sure about that; let me ponder on it.

Bendy links - sometimes a link needs to stretch around other nodes - curves would allow this.

Again, that starts making things more complicated (not to mention the algorithms involved ). I deliberately limited things to straight lines. Unlike on paper, you can move notes out of the way so that the straight lines don't have to be obscured by anything.

Thanks and all the best,
Keith