Scapple - New Beta Available (Updated 19/03/13)

Yes, there were error messages. I’m uploading a screenshot.

Me too - I second that. Apply Note Style used to work, but no longer. I’m also on Snow Leopard. (I’d love to upgrade to the latest OS, but have you seen the price of new Macs lately?)

Apply Note Style and Copy Note Style broke in this update because of internal changes with background shapes. I’ve fixed this for the next update. I’d love to say the bug fix is going to be up soon, but I’m snowed under with Scrivener and the post-2.4 release stuff at the moment, so it may be a while before I can.

thatwritergirl - re-download and re-install. The main interface file is not loading properly, which indicates a corrupt copy.

All the best,
Keith

Hi Keith,
thanks for that simple and beautiful new piece of software. I’m a true lover of scrivener, and I’m becoming a scapple’s one!
Having been testing scapple for now more than two months, I’m so sorry by I don’t have much bad to say! :slight_smile:
I had never been convinced by mind-mapping, considering unreal to have all new idea necessarily related to a previous one. And after any new try, I finally gave up. But you did something truly as flexible as a piece of paper, and even more since on a computer we can rearrange as far as the sheet gets written.
To implement, may I tell you just three small wishes:

  • When you stack elements without borders, they don’t really look like stack as you would write a list on a paper. Would you do an alternative “stretch stack”? Or even automatically change the stack type depending on existing borders or not. Please see image below.
  • Would it be possible to decide where the arrow arrives or depart from? I mean sometimes we would like arrows to be fixed to the left part of the border of stacked elements, when relating to another elements situated on left but above. It would keep something more readable, the line not crossing all the elements above the one at bottom. Well, an image will explain better: stack approach.jpg
  • When printing, would we set an option to include in print the file name?

Don’t worry, even without these features, I will buy when officially released, and I already advertise it to friends!
All the best for final testing.
Cordialement!
Jean-Louis
NB: when I have finished my PhD, thanks to Scrivener :slight_smile:, I’d love to give a hand to localise Scrivener and Scapple in French…

I forgot a small thing.
About the icon… isn’t it a bit dark ?

Thanks for the kind words, jlg.

No, because stacks depend on the vertical distance between the notes, so it’s not possible to vary this distance.

This is out of scope, sorry, and would require a lot more logic to the arrow drawing. Or, rather, it’s out of scope for version 1.x at least. The idea is to keep things simple.

As a header? That might be possible, I’ll add that to the list to look at that.

No.

All the best,
Keith

No problem, it was written in a ”jokey” way. :slight_smile:

Double-clicking is okay when you have to do it once (like when you open a document).
But if you have a ”crush” with 100s of ideas appearing, it’s tiring!

I’d be bolder creating notes if I could just single-click the canvas.
Double-clicking is less impulsive. Sometimes it makes me think: ”Wait, maybe I should rather drop that idea…”

Okay, I fully understand you have other, more important details to implement! 8)
Thanks again for a great tool.

Hello,

when you currently click a note, it becomes highlighted (gets a shadow).
Wouldn’t it be nice if the lines connected to that note were made salient too?

Please consider this! I enclose two screenshots – one real and the other manipulated – to see why such a feature is urgently needed!

Best wishes,

Bjørn

As-is:
node1.png

How it could be:
node2.png

Thanks, Keith, for your answers.
Jean-Louis

A negative to that, sorry. But looking at your screenshots, now I know you are winding me up - those surely aren’t part of a real map? :smiley:

All the best,
Keith

I am NOT winding you up! The screenshots come from me trying to note the different moves from a yoga course. The course is in English – and many poses have strange names like ”thunderbolt”, ”half moon”. The lines connect those to notes about the pody parts they’re said to strengthen. These, of course, I write in my own language (Danish – for instance, the ”hjerte” you see, means ”heart”).

I often have very original ideas, admitted, but my feature requests are serious.

Why, if I may ask, are you negative to highlighting the lines? :astonished:
When you have many lines crossing – and that might happen in a brainstorm for a ”serious” novel too – it’s almost impossible to see the connections.

Sorry, Keith, I didn’t mean to be gruff! :frowning:

Now, I just wanted to say that I would be very grateful to hear your thoughts about ”line highlighting”!
Why is that a bad idea for Scapple?

I’m only curious, as I personally think it would be very nice. :slight_smile:

Thank you!

Bjørn

No problem! Gruff is fine. :slight_smile: I was only joking about the wind-up, by the way - it’s just that your map is absolutely crazy, and not the sort of thing I would expect to see in Scapple every day. :slight_smile:

My objection to the idea about the lines is that for 99.9% of maps, it would look a little bit odd to have lines suddenly appear blue. I know that I wouldn’t really like that, as it detracts from the look of the map while items are selected and edited. It’s also non-standard in the mind-mapping world, to the best of my knowledge.

Now, what you could do instead, is just hit Shift-Command-A (Edit > Select > Select Connected Notes), which will select any notes that are connected to the currently-selected note.

All the best,
Keith

Thanks, Keith! :slight_smile:

The blue colour was just for illustration purposes.
I would be happy if the lines just got a shadow, like the notes currently do.

Thank you for the tip! It’s just what I needed.

PS

”Absolutely crazy” – I take that as a compliment! :laughing:

I love this new software – and forgive me if this point has already been made (I searched, I swear), but wouldn’t implementing Scrapple as a new feature in Scrivener be a more elegant solution than releasing it as a standalone app?

Certainly, the stand-alone route opens new revenue channels (i.e., people who want a great mindmapping app, but don’t need Scriveners word processing capabilities), but as a heavy Scrivener user, I would much prefer Scrapple as an additional option in freeform mode, accessible via a new icon in the top toolbar. The addition of Scrapple would easily justify a paid upgrade to Scrivener, which I’d happily purchase for the same amount as the standalone app will retail.

All that said, I’m impressed with Scrapple and look forward to purchasing version 1.0.

No, Scapple doesn’t fit into Scrivener at all; it would be utterly inelegant to throw a fully featured app such as Scapple that doesn’t even map onto Scrivener’s hierarchical structure into Scrivener regardless. Scapple is an app I wanted for my own writing needs, just like Scrivener, but unlike many of the other things I have wanted in a writing app, it did not fit into Scrivener. This has nothing to do with “opening up other revenue streams” - as nice as that might be - it is primarily a design decision. It would be a huge disservice to Scrivener to try to throw everything and the kitchen sink into it. While complex and fully featured, Scrivener has a particular scope enabled by a given set of features all of which integrate with one another. To suggest that Scapple belongs in Scrivener is like suggesting that Excel should be part of Word because Word has tables, or OmniGraffle belongs OmniFocus because they both help with organisation.

Scrivener has a freeform corkboard for freeform experimenting, but the onus is always on collapsing it back into a linear, hierarchical outline. Scapple is about throwing ideas around and making connections between them (without worrying about distinctions between titles and synopses, without worrying about meta-data), and those connections have absolutely no meaning in Scrivener. Moreover, just think of the inspector and all of the menu items in Scapple, all of the keyboard shortcuts, and imagine trying to have those in Scrivener. Apps can only have one menu bar, so none of the keyboard shortcuts would be possible in Scrivener and you’d have to find every single menu item five items deep in some submenu. It would be absolutely awful and clumsy, and not at all what I want from this app. In short, trying to shoehorn Scapple into Scrivener would cripple Scapple to the point of uselessness and clutter Scrivener with something that doesn’t really fit into what it does.

Not that this is really open for discussion anyway, but since you asked… Gad you like it regardless, though.

All the best,
Keith

New update posted:

Version: 0.9.0.4 beta
Build no: 3809

Version 0.9.0.4 updated to build 3814 - please re-download if you downloaded 3809 (which was only up for about half an hour). 3814 changes de-dent to Shift-Tab instead of Opt-Tab and makes the indent interval wider.

The update—available from within Scapple itself via either (1) Scapple > Check For Updates or (2) Scapple > Preferences > Automatically check for updates—working well here with both existing and new Scapple files.

Accept that no new features will be added before actual release, but on my personal wish list for the future would be the ability to set the default alignment of notes.

Know they are easy enough to change, but would still like a default setting one day—if possible.

Great piece of software.

Thanks for the update! It’s great.

I found a bug:

  1. Connect two notes.

  2. Double-click the connection (the line)

  3. Press ESC

In addition to aborting the new note, this operation removes the connection… :confused: