Late to the party – just discovered Scapple and delighted with it in principle: a free-form place to jot down and move around ideas is just what I’m looking for!
There’s one simple feature it lacks though, which for me comes close to a deal-breaker: viz the ability to choose where connecting lines between notes get anchored (ie top/bottom v. side). Without that, something as simple as, say, wanting to create a tidy stack of notes on the left (ie all aligned & same width), a second tidy stack of notes on the right (ditto), and then draw various criss-crossing connecting lines between the two columns, goes totally pear-shaped, because Scapple insists on anchoring the lines at the top or bottom of the notes instead of the sides, making the connections impossible to see!! Going back to pen and paper for now…
I do understand why it would be too complicated for the program to draw curves around intervening notes, but simply allowing users to dictate which side of the note the lines emanate from would go a long way in helping keep connections from being covered up!
Less crucially, I’ll also add my voice to those asking for the possibility of formatting bits of text within a note: ie colour and font and font size. Personally, I use different sizes and colours and yes fonts (ie print v. calligraphic script) when I handwrite notes to myself — even on the back of a napkin — so that would make Scapple more of a competitor against old-fashioned pen and paper for me…
I don’t know if there are any plans for updates to Scapple (you guys have a LOT on your plate with Scrivener!) but when and if you do, these changes would really go a long way to make it a bit more flexible and useful!
My Feature Request: Option of hiding arrows.
Would be great to have the option to hide all arrows. Done this, the arrow(s) of one note appear only if I hover this note. So it is easier to follow the connections if I have a big map with a lot of stuff. Thx!
I just started testing Scapple for future use. (Windows) So far it poses a nice addition to physical paper notes, or in my case, white board notes. I like the simplicity of it. However there is one thing…Scapple Inseption. Judging from the importable files, I can not put Scapple files into each other. (When I tried it just opened the second file in a new window)
What I thought of was for example this:
-I make a “story” scapple where I jet down my idears for a story.
-I make a second “character” scapple where I write down basic character idears. Especially usefull to me if I have some characters appear in a series of texts.
Now I put the “character” scapple with drag and drop (or whatever) into the previous scapple. It’s just a link basically which can be connected via lines like a normal scapple notes. However when I click on it it opens the second scapple page and shows me the “character” page.
The above is already doable with textfiles and such, but I thought staying in Scapple to quickly develope ideas would be useful. Also I “intend” to use it as a organizing tool, where sth like the above would come in handy.
I read that no major changes are planned for Scapple, and I’m sorry if I suggested something already present.
I’d like line colors, but I think the idea behind Scapple is to allow us to get ideas and *basic relationships out of our heads and into a visual representation quickly.
Certainly, I use it to ponder large and small scale connections and line colors would help, but that’s not the function of the app, that’s how I sometimes use it.
The basic function is to dump and to organize and put back into Scrivener.
To that end, it would be nice if those relationships in Scapple survived with more organization than they do when dragged to the Binder, as I have to re-create them.
I have no idea what kind of headache or impossibility that is.
I love me some Scapple. It’s the only tool I’ve found that can capture my wacko thoughts while I’m plotting.
Two feature requests:
Tabs. It would be so awesome to be able to keep several maps together in one file.
Comment bubbles (like in Excel, for example) that pop up when you click on them but are otherwise hidden. It would be really great to be able to put comments on a note without it always appearing on the map and cluttering things up.
Fix upside down/inside out Scrivener display bug in MacOS version (workaround by importing as PNG is a PITA)
Allow drill-down into other Scapple files. Example: File one displays character relationships. Click/Double-Click on a character and see character arc flow in file two.
Hi, I love working with Scapple!
Is it possible to use two arrows between two notes, so I can connect in one way with a labeled arrow and with an other line with a different in the other way?
greets
merdel
Reviving this sentiment a few years down the track. This (especially the dragging order bit) would make Scapple near perfect for me. I also use stacks a lot, and reordering can be pretty fiddly. Dragging would be fantastic.
has anyone else here suggested / requested a ‘typewriter mode’ for scapple? what i have in mind is very simple - an option to keep focused on the current box and move it automatically to the centre of the screen.
i can see that it wouldn’t suit everyone, so if it was turn on-and-offable i think it might speed up text entry.
Just bought Scapple and I like it very much. I used to work with VUE (vue.tufts.edu/) but Scapple is much neater and more comfortable. One feature that I miss though, is the ability to get an overview of the occurrence of a certain term across the map. So if I search “and” I would like all “ands” to be highlighted. Right now, search seems to highlight one occurrence of a term at the time?
(1) Can we have “Arrow styles” just like “Note Styles”, so I can apply new arrow styles with just a single click? Of course this will imply two other things:
(a) We need to have “Arrow Format” when we click on the arrow, so that we can format the arrow to be easily saved, instead of “Note Format” (in the inspector). If I may suggest, arrow styles include:
Color
Thickness
Style (allow for dash style, solid style, dotted etc etc)
Arrow heads/ends (allow for empty, solid triangle, hollow triangle, or just a “>”)
(b) Have an easy way to “flip” arrows (shortcut key, menu item, button in inspector), by flip I mean to change the direction by which the arrow heads point.
(2) If a new note is created on the arrow, inherit the same arrow styles like so:
Before: A————>C
After: A——>B——>C
(3) This one is a bonus … if it can be done: Can we have an option to have the connecting lines try to “avoid” the Note bodies/boundaries by curving themselves out of their way? If it’s too much work, I am still just happy to have scapple connecting lines the way they currently are.
Thank you for reading and considering my suggestions!
In Scrivener, if I’ve copied a link in Safari and then go back to Scrivener to insert the link in a text, I press Cmd-L, and the saved link is magically inserted in the text-box or whatever it is called. I just press Enter, and the link is in place. In Scapple I’m supposed to insert the link manually (copy-paste, but still).
I’d like Scapple to function like Scrivener in this respect. Not a huge deal, but some consistency.
I use Scapple a lot and love it. I sometimes use it as my first step in writing, before opening up Scrivener. I also use it to map out links between key ideas - usually causal links. So being able to have curved arrows would allow me to map feedback - a key concept in the work I do.
Testing and discovering Scapple these day, making family trees of characters.
Love the ease of it. But would love it even more if we add some grid that we can snap to.
Because as I add more and more notes in a single pane, it tends to get messy.
I also trid to export to OPML to make a more “presentable” end result but the relations between elements seemed to be lost during export. But that may be me not understanding the basic structure of mind mapping.
Scapple is a perfect app, and perfect companion to Scrivener (another perfect app). I support the earlier wish that stacks would be more magnetic-- allowing you to insert a note into the stack without breaking the stack. Two wishes of my own:
I wish that there were a “tick-box” in Scapple that would essentially say, “SCRIVENER TITLES ONLY.” I use only titles when I brainstorm, and I am unable to drag index cards freely back and forth from Scapple to Scrivener, which would be a dream, because, in the absence of a synopsis, Scapple CREATES a synopsis which is a duplicate of the title. If I have fifty scenes, I would have to delete the unwanted synopsis fifty times, and this happens in both directions. I have tried many workarounds, but for me the current state of affairs is that I don’t go back and forth, because it’s too cludgy.
I wish that it were possible to “pin” notes to the board, so that I could anchor some ideas, and let others float free.