Rough 💭s on large spaces

[bentsai]

First of all, excellent work on tags. I’ll need some time to explore them. I might find that they help me achieve some of thee things I’m about to bring up, but I did also want to share some rough thoughts.

I’m starting to build up some busy spaces (> 100 cards), like my digital garden. I really love seeing everything spatially and arranging clumps of cards related to a topic/concept. I’ve got a “now” area, kinopio-related, things to blog, movies I’ve watched, stuff I own/want, etc.

As this space grows, it has gotten harder to manage. One area is moving/arranging. Painting requires more precision since there is less space. The select-all-connected is nice, but it’s not always practical to connect all cards in a clump. It makes the clump noisy and harder to see the other relationships. I think I want a way to group cards that are in close proximity.

Tags don’t seem appropriate. If you take the clump of cards about Kinopio. Tagging all of them with [[kinopio]] doesn’t make sense.

Nor do connections. Same clump, I already have various connections. Connecting all of these cards with a single connection type would really distract from that.

I’ve raised before idea that you could draw a region, and everything touching that region can be manipulated as a group. You could imaging filtering by group, where everything else is faded. And moving by group to more easily rearrange cards.

What I’ve found is that I frequently have clumps of cards I want to manipulate like this.

So then I’m wondering, what if I use spaces to organize? I take each of my clumps, and move them to their own space. The huge disadvantage here is that I lose the ability to see everything at once and the ability to connect things across concepts/clumps in a visual way (yes, I realize tags kind of do this, but only conceptually.)

Now, if you could “embed” a minimap of a space within a space, that might preserve the spatial relationships enough to really work. I don’t think I like the idea of arbitrary zoom and all the complexity that comes with it, but perhaps having a single scale factor could work (here’s where a visual mockup would go if I had skills and time). But imagine a space scaled to 25% embedded in a normally scaled space. You can see the small cards, their relative positions and connections. Clicking on that would nav you to the normal space, and then a easy way to jump out to any spaces that “contain” it. I’m def in brainstorm land at this point…

Thanks for reading. I appreciate Kinopio and the thought and care that goes in to it. ( ͡° ͜ °)

[pirijan]

i wonder if filters + tags might be able to help you define and toggle views of clumps?

I don’t have it yet, but I could even add a way to select all filtered cards

[bentsai]

@pirijan

filters + tags

I definitely like the filtering aspect. But the problem with tags is they are too noisy and intrusive in this use. I’d need to add the tag to every card. I can’t select a clump and tag, in other words. And also, it forces all the cards to include that tag in the name. Which is noisy and not necessarily semantically what I want. There’s no easy way to rename tags. More like a Trello-style tag.

[pirijan]

re the idea of clumping, the parallel to this idea in design software is ‘grouping’ . The way it works is you select a bunch of shapes together and hit cmd-G to group them. Once grouped clicking one selects them all, and moving one selects the other. The layers toolbar puts groups into ‘folders’, that part of the ui abstraction would have to be very different in the kinopio context

It’s a pretty advanced concept but certainly useful there. Something I’ll consider for the future

[bentsai]

@pirijan

It’s a pretty advanced concept but certainly useful there.

Yes, grouping is essentially what I’m talking about here, but I know it adds a bit of complexity, so I’ve avoided asking for that formally and also tried to think of other ways to solve this