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Card Stack as Medium for Thinking
A Card Stack may be a form of Medium for thinking similar to an Outliners are a medium for thinking. Is it just a degenerate outliner?
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Stacks are a container (an explicit ordering) for content that lives elsewhere
- Everything is a reference. Everything is transcluded. There's no sense in which removing an item from the stack actually deletes the item.
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Stacks are primarily about ordering and could have several simultaneous sort orders
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Stacks could have several view modes:
- Grow to fill the entire screen to allow you to "peek" into the full doc
- Titles only - like splaying out a set of index cards
- Fixed height - (3x5 ratio?)
- Grow to fit content
How is a stack different from:
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A prose document
- A document is not just a container for content. It is the actual content itself. Removing, re-ordering, sorting the content changes the actual content.
- With a stack, each item has a fixed width/height.
- Stacks can contain documents.
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An outliner
- An outliner has a concept of parent/child relationships (an outliner is a tree) whereas a Stack is a list.
- The Keynote stack of presentation cards does actually have outliner capabilities, so maybe this could be introduced.
- An outliner is usually for a fixed type of media, usually text whereas a stack is for multiple types of media (typically)
- The building of the outline and the creation of the content within the outline are the same thing. You do both together. In a stack, while it's possible to edit the content within the stack itself, it will probably be more common to think of Stack as a view into the content.
- Keyboard navigation is paramount with an outliner, whereas drag-n-drop seems more important for a Stack.
- An outliner has a concept of parent/child relationships (an outliner is a tree) whereas a Stack is a list.
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A spreadsheet
- Spreadsheets have x and y dimensions whereas stack only has a single dimension (x or y)
- Unless we give it indentation like an outliner.
- Only one item per column (or row), whereas a spreadsheet frequently has hundreds/thousands
- Spreadsheets can support either the actual content or references, but even with a reference the content lives somewhere in the spreadsheet, not outside of it.
- Spreadsheets support "multimedia" in some interesting ways, giving a limited palette for expression that brings out people's creativity.
- Keyboard navigation is paramount with a spreadsheet, whereas drag-n-drop seems more important for a Stack.
- Spreadsheets have x and y dimensions whereas stack only has a single dimension (x or y)
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An infinite canvas
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A list or queue
- Any difference between a List and a Queue?
- With stack, you get a glimpse or preview or reduced view of the item in the list.
- Lists in UX typically only use title and perhaps some other metadata information (type, created at, updated at, etc)
- Lists can also be sorted,
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A tiling window manager
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A split view window manager
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Transformations between objects using GPT
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Another worldview for schema migration / evolution
- Superset / Multiple Data Modalities
- sound of a train / the word train / image of a train / video of a train
- blobs of concepts - applications read from that in the way that you need it
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Pandoc - document is the superset document
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Sidestep the data migration problem entirely
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Obenaeur's itemized OS - how do you help people to normalize the software
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Limited transformations - DXOS apps by two different people - niche transformations
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Pretty fundamental
View Space as Stack, Infinite Canvas, List, Table, Grid
View as stack
Duplicate this stack
Are all elements inherently stackable? Is there a default Stack representation?
What are the essential elements of a stack?
- drag and drop to specify a manual ordering
- sort
Why do these definitions even matter?
Stack items are always references - they don't have their existence in the stack itself.
Changing our relationship to data is important to help us move towards making our own software.
We don't really need the permanence of the software.
what's the "material"
Stack Explorations
- sequence
- reorder the stack
- items persist beyond their creation in the stack
- navigation? Or meaningful ordering?
- Isn’t it just a list?
2023-11-08
Notes from a walk
Thinking about the stack this morning and what my ultimate goals are for it. I really want stack to feel like the Gmail interface that I use for email. Keyboard driven, nice keyboard shortcuts, consistent UI, you know, J and K for up and down, space bar for open, E for archive, that kind of stuff.
Access the context, action items that I want to take on the item. I can quickly sort and search, filter. And yet there's a stable ordering as well that allows me to work through it.
I want stack to feel like that, but for any item. So if you think about items, lists of items today, a couple of user interfaces that we use to interact with lists come to mind.
One is like Spotify playlists. We, I make playlists all the time, just an ordered list of items. And yet the UI for making those and for manipulating those is completely different from that Gmail, uh, some other list making tools, obviously like to do lists, represent lists. Um, I'd have to think of some other list experiences on the Mac. Anyway, the point is the interaction patterns around those UI lists are all different and keyboard shortcut, keyboard driven, this, all those things are different, um, stack could be because of the sort of OS like nature of the shared data substrate, a stack could be a method of manipulating a variety of different object types using the same UI is also relates to Rosano's idea of the universal queue that he uses for a lot of different types.
If you think about mobile, one of the advantages of mobile is that there's basically been a unifying around a single interaction pattern of scroll up, scroll down like a single list where you scroll up, scroll down, swipe left, swipe right. That UI or interaction pattern has been proliferated across a bunch of different applications and even the OS makers themselves provide primitives for that interaction pattern in their toolkits. And we really just don't have anything like that on the web or on Mac on desktop.
And I get it that desktop does a lot of different things and there's the app siloing thing as well. And so, you should definitely be able to customize the stack UI to specific types and context items and that kind of stuff. Context menu items should be customizable, but I just really want that universal sort of list modifying interface. Because I think it'd be generally really useful. Anyway, that's the idea.