So every now and then, when a relative calls from another country, it strikes me how much has changed, and how that little thing made the world feel smaller. You can call people on Messenger or LINE or Skype anytime without thinking about where they are or if you’ve talked long enough to use up your budget. I’ll never forget hearing Dialpad’s startup sound, as you’d have to try to make the call over and again over dialup, only for the audio to be so poor you’d have to still pay for a real international call.Ĭell phones a few years prior had already made “long distance” calls a thing of the past, and slowly Skype, then chat apps, then smartphones and services like Twilio made internet calls routine. In 2000 the first time I traveled outside the country, your options to call people abroad was to spend dollars a minute, or to use early calling apps over the web. Phone calls over the internet (both VoIP voice calls and video calls) still strike me as one of the biggest ways technology directly improved the status quo. I've also been using locally hosted MoinMoin wiki with a database in Dropbox since 2010, but in the end, it keeps a different kind of knowledge: structured linear guides I wrote for myself, checklists, rarely used bookmarks.
Again, the information density in Scapple is incredible. Linking between the boards would be nice, but I rarely encounter topics where I can't fit all I need onto a 1920x1080 screen. I group the anchors a bit but generally know how they are connected without trying to maintain the connections digitally. It makes me think of the crime dramas where they have the gigantic white board with the head of the organization at the top, then all the lieutenants, then soldiers, then henchmen. You can basically list anything you want with any relationship you want. I mostly agree, to me a Scapple board is a collection of short anchors to the stuff I've learned or decided before. Scapple is similar to flow charting software, but it’s contents are ideas, rather than a workflow.
While researching modern bi-directional PKM software, I saw some people saying that they don't see the benefits of connecting everything with everything because that's what the brain is for (and it also updates the connections on its own). Overall, I don't use connections there that much, only 10-20% of notes on my boards are connected. Scapple's landing says "it's a virtual sheet of paper" and it indeed feels close to that. I stopped after one minute because I wanted to get this post up here, but you can see below the direction my brain went and how it looks in Scrivener.Can't say for Roam but Obsidian feels rather constraining compared to Scapple boards that don't have the limits of one-dimensional text documents. Using Scapple, I kept asking WHY over and over as I went. I tossed together a silly idea based on one sentence: Monster eats children for breakfast. (You can also export it in a variety of formats if you prefer.) I can even add images that pop into my mind or change colors/borders/shapes of the bubbles. Change connections to add arrows if I forgot, or group bubbles in larger bubbles.Import file into Scrivener, which inevitably comes out too large in the window (images tend to show their true resolution).įor me, that’s a pain in the butt worth losing.
If I can read it, I get paranoid I’ll lose it, so I have to hook up the scanner and scan the bad boy into the computer.I’m thinking faster than my hand moves so good luck reading it! Once found, try to decipher my chicken-scratch because when I’m mind-mapping, I write FAST.You know, where I should have looked in the first place. Promptly misplace brainstorming paper and spend three hours searching for it, only to find it in a folder in my desk drawer.I’m a huge fan of paper and pencil when planning, but when I use those tools, my process looks like this: Writers have been using mind-maps to brainstorm since their invention, so why use a program like Scapple? It’s easier. Unlike Scrivener, Scapple isn’t made for writing a novel–it’s meant for brainstorming and planning, for organizing your thoughts before you write. While I could tell you a million and one things about Scrivener, Literature and Latte’s second program, Scapple, is something I’m still sinking my pen into. In other words, why should you bother with pen and paper around? This week’s Scrivener Saturday: A Case for Scapple.