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. ( ͡° ͜ °)