Great work!! I download Scapple Beta and play for a while. Here is my humble feedback. An important feature missing is the ability to create a single line not connected to anything. Why? I create a complex conceptual map and wanted a division between the top and bottom portion of the conceptual map with a line across. The way around, I had to add two unnecessary boxes and connected across to divide the top and bottom. Please consider to include the ability of creating lines with no connection to anything.
Another suggestion to consider: the possibility to open Scapple inside Scrivener. Food for thought. Thanks for the Beta. I like what I see and will definitely buy a copy when is ready. Your software rocks.
Mr.Wolf
Scapple is (going to be) grand. As a happy Scrivener use I will certainly want to buy a copy after the beta expires. I downloaded the beta today and was going to report the greyed-out spelling issue but I see that it is already in hand.
Keith, you are brilliant. I’d been looking for a mindmapping/note-sketching program, and pretty grumpy about the options, and here you’ve created THE one. And just in time for NaNoWriMo. As happy as a clam &c, I am. The clam wept, she did.
I don’t know if this is by design (I suspect not, given the syntax), but “Select Connected Notes” selects a single connected note below, whether from a top-level note or a mid-level note.
Another note: $10??? (Sorry–I know there’s a pound sign here somewhere…) Seriously? No, no, no, no: you undercharge.
Thanks ever so much. (Yes, we Yanks do like your Britishisms.)
Hmm, no, it should select all notes connected to the currently-selected note. So if the currently-selected note is connected to three other notes, then those notes should be selected too. Are you saying that it is only selecting one note that is connected to the current note, and not other notes connected to it?
I just played a little more, and “Select Connected Notes” selects the notes directly adjacent/connected to the initial note. (At first, it looked like only the note directly below the initially-selected note was selected … but this must have been a Henrietta, er, moment. )
This may be by design: Scapple selects connected notes, but one level deep.
Those are screenshots, by the way: image files dragged beautifully onto the Scapple document. (… more play … ) Oh! And Scapple treats the image like a note: one can CONNECT A NEW NOTE from the image! Heaven.
That is by design. You can walk the selection up to a more nebulous or greater selection scope by repeatedly pressing the shortcut if you need to select a large amount of the tree.
I’ve also added another menu item, “Select Connected Clusters” to the next beta, which selects all connected notes and the notes connected to them and so on, to save having to repeatedly hit “Select Connected Notes” to connect all in a group.
Would be helpful if exports to plain text didn’t insist that files have .txt extension. It is just plain text after all, so not much can go wrong. Export direct to .md, .ft or whatever without the second stop of having to lop off the .txt
I’m afraid you are going to meet this increasingly. The OS X file type identification system is more than a bit of a mess and really the only thing to do is to insist on extensions (and developers are encouraged to do same): .txt or .bother
I’m trying out scapple right now, and so far it definately fills my need for a simple, lightweight graphing-tool.
However, I have two tiny requests/suggestions: I’d like to have multiple connections between two nodes. For instance, If I have two characters as nodes and I want them to have different attitudes against each other, then I’d need two connections. And related to that, the ability to put labels on connections would be nice as well.
Edit: Strike those two. I realised it was just as easy to insert another node between the characters (instead of having two nodes with one or two labeled connections, have the connections set up as Character-node -> “label”-node -> character-node.
However, with that said, I haven’t found a way to split a connection and insert a node quickly. That could be handy.
Also, for a bigger addition: Hyperlinking between different grafs? Or maybe have a master document that could include multiple grafs with hyperlinks between them? Would that be possible
I may have missed this in the documentation, but I’m wondering about Scrapple and OPML exporting. With every document I’ve tried the OPML export results in completely independent “boxes” or entities. In some cases that’s perfectly fine.
Here’s what I’m wondering:
Is there some systematic way to have some boxes be sub-nodes of other boxes of text?
(If not, this really limits the usefulness of Scrapple for me.)
Is there some way of “notetaking” in Scrapple so that relevant boxes/nodes have notes inside of them?
I appreciate the unstructured nature of Scrapple, and it’s wonderful. But if the whole thing always has be completely unstructured than it’s usefulness goes down for me. And that “pathway” to usefulness is OPML export.
While Tree is much more structured (so a different beast) it does have the advantage of having some order to OPML exports, plus “notes” in Tree get translated via OPML into Scrivener as the text for a particular binder item (what used to be a box/node).
Ideally Scrapple could combine unstructuredness with a dollop of possible structure so when exporting to OPML people could take advantage of the structured items and embedded notes.
Some way to already accomplish this? Either (structure, embedded notes) a possibility for the future?
Have you tried double-clicking on the line between notes? That creates a new note between them and splits the connecting line so that it points from the existing notes to the new note instead of to each other.
No, there’s not, because Scapple is completely freeform and you can connect notes in circle or spider’s web if you want, so there is no way of determining hierarchy. If that limits its usefulness for you, then it probably isn’t the tool for you, I’m sorry to say, seeing as this freeform approach that precludes hierarchy is fundamental to what Scapple is.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here, given that all boxes are notes…
Try creating a completely freeform map with a hundred notes and then join every single item to every single other item. Then try to work out how that would translate to a hierarchy. If a human can’t do it, AI is going to struggle even more.
Keith: I guess what is unintuitive is Scrapple seems to be able to build in a kind of “structure” and then ignores it when exporting to OPML.
Here’s an example of how structure could be included: any links made with a one-way arrow indicate the base of arrow is “parent” and end of arrow item is “child.” Then if there were 100 bits of info, Scrapple would know to only structure those with one way arrows, and it would know exactly how to structure it. In this way people who wanted some structure in OPML export would have it. Others would know not to use one-way arrows (or they wouldn’t care about OPML). I’m not saying “one way arrows” are the only way to do it, just that if there was one linking tool that indicated structure (parent/child) then that would take care of the matter. In the end you would have an OPML with just a list of items, except for the structured ones.
(On the contrary, if structure matters so little to you, why offer OPML support? Why not go whole hog with your beliefs and forego OPML?)
I realize I was a bit unclear about the notes issue. In Tree Outliner I can have outliner “items” plus add “notes” if I want within each item. If I export to OPML, then import into Scrivener, I get a binder that is structured according to my outliner OPML, PLUS any embedded notes are positioned as text within a particular binder file. It’s very sweet and nice.
What if A has a one-way arrow to B, B has a one-way arrow to C, and C has a one-way arrow to A?
Purely because it’s a common format and it’s easy to support. If users feel this particular export option is of limited use, though, or that it implies that Scapple is the sort of app that it is not, I would certainly consider dropping it.
Ah, like in OmniOutliner. Scapple avoids that whole title/note paradigm and just has individual notes.
Downloaded today, and loving it. I use iMindMap, Freemind, xMind (free basic version) and MyThoughts. All are good in their own way, but sometimes they feel like a bit of bloatware or otherwise the map looks simplistic and annoying (Freemind comes to mind). I have some observations already.
Nomenclature: you use the term “note” where others would use “node”. This is confusing. Can you actually place a full note here?
The idea of arrows vs. dotted line is not immediately clear. I guess the manual will clear this up.
If I right-click a note, I should see all options. However, the option to create new linked notes is not there.
Surely a strong interface into Scrivener will come? I don’t see an option to export into Scrivener, or even into OPML. The Scrivener link will be the killer point of difference for this app.
Just with half an hour of testing and I can tell that I will buy this app for $10. If I get it from the MAS, will it work as well with my non-MAS Scrivener?
Keith: Your arrow example (A to B, B to C, C to A) was a good one. Understood now. (I see how more structured products avoid this scenario just by their basic organizational structure.)
I’m liking Scrapple very much. Was just exploring how far I could extend it. I’ll surely buy when it’s released.
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