Zengobi Forums

[george]

Great discussion!

I wish there was a more visual way of representing an order other than stacking. It's very easy to rearrange items with a real physical stack of index cards. You can use your other figures to hold open a space while your other figures are used to move items around. You can fan them out in your hands to see several at once and insert a card here or there. Basically you can rearrange a stack very easily in any order.

On the computer that's a lot harder. You can't use two hands and ten fingers. You've got a mouse and that's it. I thought about using the mouse's clickwheel to let you spin through a pile. Nice, but it's a pain to rearrange cards and spread cards out to see several at the same time.

Worse, if the items aren't stacked in some way and you ask Curio to export them, it's difficult for you to know at a glance what that order will be. In other words, if they aren't right on top of each other then you don't know how they would be exported.

Rearranging them in a grid (even a rough grid) could be a solution. I can scan left->right and top->bottom to put together the export. Certainly very visual and you easily know how things would be arranged. Very storyboard-like. And you can shuffle items around pretty easily as well by moving them in their rough grid.

Rough is a key word there. Not a firm matrix or table. I'll just look at the top-left corner of each card when scanning across selected figures. And, of course, I could add an "Arrange > Grid" menu item to help neaten them a bit. Conversely I could add a "Arrange > Pile" and it'll pull them into a pile.

Another potential solution is using sticky lines. Draw interconnecting lines between the figures to define the order. (I'm not a huge fan of this idea.)

Another one is using numbers. Imagine a little colored number in a bubble in the top-right corner saying "1", "2", etc. To make this easier you can only have one numbered "collection" of cards per idea space. But we'd still need an easy way to define that ordering. (I'm not a huge fan of this idea either.)

I guess I worry about basing this on stacked piles for the reasons given above and because printing or PDF/image/web-exporting is messy since you can't see anything but the pile itself.

[fredmac]

First, a great start with index cards and an excellent discussion regarding how to organize the cards. I have just started experimenting with index cards in Curio, but do have some suggestions regarding organizational models that could work for me.

My first thought is a story board type model much like the Light Table view in Keynote or the Slide Sorter view in PowerPoint. This could also permit a list or outline type view of all of the cards in a sidebar using a model similar to Preview. In addition, Preview has the Contact Sheet which looks similar to the Light Table and Slide Sorter views previously mentioned.

Maintaining a few keys for sorting the cards automatically would be helpful. Order of creation is already there. Alphabetical sorting by title as well as numerical sorting by card number in an outline context would also be helpful for me.

Thinking about what already exists in Curio, could a List somehow be used as an ordering mechanism for a stack of cards? Also, could a Table be used for the Light Table or Slide Sorter component?

So, I am thinking about two views of a stack of cards once I decide to stack them. One would be a List view. The other would be a Card Sorter view.

[george]

Howdy everyone! I just posted a new build, 6102, of Curio 6.1. Same link as before:
http://d3gvd7s8v3rk54.cloudfront.net/downloads/Curio610ProPreview.zip

Mainly just a bunch of usability fixes when dragging things and better style handling. This should take care of odd font and line height problems.

I can't use lists for card handling as they are currently written because lists can't hold other collections. Ditto tables. But it is a tempting idea.

The light table is a great analogy!

[jmh]

I've only been scanning the comments here, but has anyone suggested an expose' like way of tiling the index cards. Then click on the card you want and it pops it out of the pile? This would be an interface that is familiar to the mac users, and it would allow hidden cards to be revealed. Combined with a way to 'restack' the cards, I think this would make them more useful.

[Khechog]

There's coverflow too as a familiar Mac way of looking through things.

[Khechog]

Expanding on the cover flow idea, which I'm aware has obstacles, maybe these could be overcome if you had a special instance of library for index cards which invoked Finder as a split screen with the idea space (just showing the cards on the idea space) together with scalable icons in coverflow view. Maybe there's a way of shuffling these too (select one, select a second - or several - then keyboard shortcut for 'put before' or 'put after'). The idea of flicking through a bunch of cards certainly fits with this. Anyway, I'm aware this one is problematic or maybe outright unusable, but maybe it'll throw light on other ideas.

[Sean Coffee]

I like the Light Table idea. What if that's incorporated into a three-view functionality...

There are three views:

Single Card • Works just like index cards do now.


Stacks •  George, I know you're not sold on stacks, but bear with me here. Stacks are groupings of cards that you make yourself. You can command click a bunch of cards and choose a Make A Stack menu item. You can drag a card onto a stack and it gets added. You can choose a single card and have the option to make all cards of that color into a stack. Stack view would show the top card only, would have a little dimensionality to it (ie it would look like a pile of cards), and you could move it around just like you do anything else in an idea space.

When you double click on a stack, it opens in a new idea space as...

[b]Storyboard View.[/b] This is the "Light Table" idea. Cards can be ordered by you from right to left, top to bottom. New cards can be added in this view. Cards can be deleted in this view, or merely dragged out of the idea space, where they "poof" OS X style, and go back to their original idea space.

You can choose to leave this space open, and it works just like a normal idea space. The cards can even be moved around -- the grid view here is fuzzy.

If you decide to collapse this Storyboard View, it collapses back to a stack of index cards on the original idea space.

Oh, and when you highlight a stack on an idea space and hit the space bar, you get a preview look at all of the cards in it.

What I think you have here is an intuitive approach that is Mac, Curio, and Real World Index Card-like. You have infinite freedom to move cards around. You have stacks that allow you to keep a group of cards handy without wasting screen real estate, and you have a storyboard view that lets you order the cards.

Further, if that Storyboard view could be customized and even shared online, what a great way for collaborators to see at a glance what's going on. Curio would become a perfect storyboard pitch tool for ad agencies; would replace whiteboards in writers' rooms; etc.

Thoughts?

[george]

Very good feedback. I do have to make sure all of this works with everything else in Curio and doesn't feel like a bolted-on subsystem that only works with cards.

The main philosophy of Curio is to replicate what you do on your whiteboard or notebook. Index cards are a perfect complement in that environment along with mind maps, lists, table, etc.

For instance, I've seen lots of design environments on TV where designers post a huge grid of index cards on a whiteboard (or corkboard) when either describing a timeline or showcasing several options of which idea they want to run with (generally in case of the latter they use color coded cards or little colored ink spots on the cards to identify themes or contributors).

This is a wonderful discussion! Anyone else want to chime in?

[Amafortas]

Hello all,

I think focusing on ways of manipulating and organizing notecards will be crucial to their development as an indispensable feature of Curio.

However, I would also like to suggest that some sort of scrollable feature of the text in a notecard would be very, very useful. I realize that the notecard metaphor presupposes relatively brief textual snippets. However, being able to shrink the size of the notecard will still having access to the text in it would be useful.

And as long as I"m creating a wish-list, let em say that it would be useful to put one notecard inside another. . I remember George mentioned that this sort of function is difficult to implement, so perhaps this is not a useful comment.

Have a good one,

~A

[AsafKeller]

As I see it, index cards are a powerful tool brainstorming tool: jot a few ideas, rearrange them to create an outline. For this, the ability to reorder the cards is critical, and the light box metaphor should be a nice solution. A bonus feature would be the ability to stack the cards, simply to save space. No need to read them when they are stacked. If one wishes to read the cards again, a contextual menu could spread them again onto the "light box" in the last sequence they were at. No additional bells and whistles necessary.

[NightStalker]

I have to echo George's sentiment here, and say what a great discussion this is. Sean in particular keeps coming up with great ideas. But it is the fact that George is in here, boots and all, responding, that makes this thread so good. It makes all of us feel we are being listened to. Thank you George

My 2-cents worth (although I keep throwing in 2-cents worths... ) is that I think it is essential to be able to create index cards in any order - random thoughts etc - then rearrange them into any order. And insert cards anywhere. And move cards from one place in the pile to another.

My earlier idea of a stack that you can riffle through would perhaps be catered for by the "light box" idea, or even the Expose type of approach. It may become a bit unwieldy if one stack ends up with a hundred cards in it though...

So being able to create separate stacks, and drag cards off one onto another at any level would be great.

Keep up the great work George, and keep the comments and feedback coming everybody.

[AsafKeller]

[quote="NightStalker"]So being able to create separate stacks, and drag cards off one onto another at any level would be great.[/quote]
Great idea. Grab a card from a stack and drag it onto another stack. As you hover with the card over the destination stack, that stacks springs open so that you can insert your card in the desired order. The destination stack then springs back closed.

[Hugh]

I agree with almost all that Sean Coffee says above — with one exception. I'm not certain that clicking on a stack should open up a new idea space. If it did, would it therefore be consistent with all other idea spaces, so you could create on it mindmaps, lists, videos etc? How would it then re-stack? No, it wouldn't be practical, and it wouldn't be consistent with what I understand to be the Curio philosophy.

But I do agree that a lightbox or stack-sequencer tool is needed. A window into a "spread" view where the cards could be re-arranged or dragged in or out would be enough. I don't see any other way that a stack could be re-ordered or modified (without completely rebuilding Curio in Java ). Philosophy-wise it would still work: in real life we know videos don't record or play in notebooks or on whiteboards, but we as users accept that in the digital world new windows open up with controls that to allow them to do so. The lightbox window would be similar.

That of course presupposes that when you put one card on top of another it wouldn't just reside there, but would trigger the creation of a stack figure that would appear in some way qualitatively different (to echo Sean).

My 2p.

P.S. I'm one of the many who are pleased and grateful to see index cards, but I wouldn't like to see the idea over-balancing the Curio approach. Of course I'm sure it won't.

[WritingStudio]

A couple of random wish-list items:

A "set stack order" button of some sort that would let me save the cards in the order I've arranged them, with the addition of a "snapshot" feature like Scrivener has.

I know there's a 'save as' and a 'revert to saved', but I'd like something just a tad handier (and quicker).

[Vermonter17032]

I love the index card feature and agree with Sean Coffee that there needs to be some method of changing the order of the cards.

I also agree with Hugh -- and I'm pretty certain this is your position, George -- that Curio NOT become a index card application. I.e. that the remaining functions of Curio not become slaves to index cards.

The matrix solution seems like a good approach. That is, layout the cards in rows and columns, then select a command that reassembles them into that order, with the option of going column by column or row by row.

Anyway, thanks for taking on this new feature and implementing it so quickly.