Scapple Beta - New Users Please Read

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.

Ah, OK–makes sense. Thanks, Amber. I jumped the gun. Wonderful program.

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.

All the best,
Keith

Very nice. Thanks.

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

Dave

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

Kind Regards
Ulf

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:

  1. 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.)

  2. 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.

All the best,
Keith

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. :slight_smile:

All the best,
Keith

Yupp, discovered that afterwards… and also the various different ways to add nodes/connections even faster.

With that said, with hyperlinks between mutliple documents (or nested nodes… or something similar) I’d gladly pay 40 or 50 USD for this.

/Ulf

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.

All the best,
Keith

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.

  1. Nomenclature: you use the term “note” where others would use “node”. This is confusing. Can you actually place a full note here?
  2. The idea of arrows vs. dotted line is not immediately clear. I guess the manual will clear this up.
  3. If I right-click a note, I should see all options. However, the option to create new linked notes is not there.
  4. 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.
  5. 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?

Many thanks,
GI.

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.

Glad it helped!

Thanks!

A “node” is a point connected to other points by lines. In traditional mindmapping apps, nodes are always connected to other nodes, leading back to the central idea node. In Scapple, that’s not the case. Notes can be all on their own connected to nothing. What you create in Scapple are notes. It’s best to come to Scapple without any preconceptions gathered from other mindmapping software, and instead think of Scapple as a huge piece of paper, on which you can make notes anywhere and join them together with lines.

It is immediately clear - you’ve already covered everything you need to know in your sentence. The idea is that you can join notes with dotted lines or arrowed lines. There’s nothing else to know. These lines have no meaning to the software - the meaning is provided entirely by you, just as when you draw lines between notes on a piece of paper those lines are for connecting your ideas, not to tell the paper anything.

I’m not quite sure where you got the idea that all options should be available in the contextual menu, but they shouldn’t. Contextual menus should only provide the most common actions that users are likely to need there. The contextual menu therefore focuses more on making amendments to existing notes since there are already quicker ways of creating new notes using the mouse (double-click, and hold down the Option or Command keys while doing so to make connections).

You can already export to OPML (as a flat list - see the discussion above), and, as mentioned in my first post, if you download the latest beta of Scrivener, you can drag notes from Scapple into Scrivener’s freeform corkboard. I’ll also be adding the ability to drag into the binder, though.

Great, thanks!

Yes, it will work the same no matter how you buy it.

Thanks and all the best,
Keith

Thanks Keith. I agree with everything you say, except the contextual menu. But first, let me apologise for being lazy with the OPML export. Yes, it is there, I don’t know what I was thinking :frowning:.

When you say the contextual menu does not have to show everything, just the most common things, yes you are right. But don’t you think that adding new notes with dotted/arrowed links would be a common task? Seems to me that this would be an expected feature of the contextual menu.

This is all in the interests of making a contribution, and not a complaint. I like this minimal app. Just what I was looking for. Great work.

GI.

+1.

Uz Penwithians got as’pport yoos Carrick ikes, un uz Kev? :slight_smile:

I’ve tried, but have never really been able to gel with the plethora of Buzan-style mind mapping software offerings available. All a bit too visual and structured for my taste. When I feel I need a hierarchical structure, Incubator always seems to hit the spot. But now I’ve got Scapple I fear my handwriting will become unreadable, even to me.

Thanks Keith.

Whilst it’s definitely a common task, it is also one that can be achieved in a much quicker way by double-clicking. I’ll consider it, though.

Sadly, mine already is. Thanks for the kind words!

All the best,
Keith

I have tried a number of these mind mapping programs and have found them cumbersome, and unusable for the purpose of brainstorming.

Scapple is quick and stupidly easy to learn. I haven’t found any bugs yet either.

You write killer software, dude!