Tapestry
Tapestry Proposal
Today, 8:51PM Swaziland time. Started the note on Tapestry. Momentous?
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Problems and Solution Discovery
Potential Users Talking About Problem and Solutions
Users Using Their Notebooks
Books to study on journals/notebooks:
- http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674057570/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=marburg-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0674057570
- http://www.amazon.com/MS-The-Detour-Book-Moleskine/dp/8866130060/?tag=braipick-20
- http://www.book-by-its-cover.com/category/sketchbooks
- http://www.listsofnote.com/
Similar apps:
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Possible Implementations
- As a user, I want to import my multi-page PDF and have it split into individual pages
- As a user, I want to vertically split a page into two pages
- As a user, I want to horizontally split a page into two pages
- As a user, I want to specify the date for a page
- As a user, I want to view a single journal for a single day
- As a user, I want to navigate to the next day
- As a user, I want to navigate to another journal
PDF Viewing Spike
Motivation
Understand the Cocoa APIs for viewing and manipulating PDFs.
Acceptance Criteria
Write a desktop application for Mac using MacRuby that:
- opens any PDF
- allows navigating of the PDF's pages by swiping left and right
Implementation in Evernote
What about just making a timeline view for Evernote? Apparently, Evernote used to have some sort of timeline view but it was confusing:
http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/19285-i-miss-the-graphic-time-line-on-the-right-margin/
http://trunk.evernote.com/app/wonderful-days/iphone
- Answer: NO. Evernote is not well built for this. It's basically a catch-all. Could maybe export to Evernote if desired. But it's build to be a brain dumping ground with good search, not a browsing tool. This tool is about BROWSE.
- Could maybe read Evernote notes as a source for the stream viewer.
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Spikes
MacRuby Spike
Motivation
Understand the MacRuby technology and limitations and discover whether the tech is suitable to start building Tapestry in Ruby.
Acceptance Criteria
Testing MacRuby - http://lightyearsoftware.com/2011/09/unit-testing-cocoa-with-macruby/
Results
MacRuby is a valid way to write the app. Will need the book in order to fully comprehend the Ruby/Cocoa bindings.
MacRuby is a superset of proper Ruby, but looks like a functional way to write apps.
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Quotes About Journaling
- "The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates
- “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” - Joan Didion
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Maggie Litton's email
I need your help figuring out a better way to take notes about books I read. I actually like to do this. It helps me remember stuff better. Currently, I often do it longhand. The slowness of this method doesn't bother me (in fact, I think it helps with the remembering), but the inability to do tagging or search the notes vexes me to no end.
I've experimented with various electronic techniques, to much disappointment. I'm pretty sure there's a good way to do this. I just want to know what it is. And I'm really not interested in figuring it out on my own. I prefer that some magnificent method burst forth fully formed, like Athena from Zeus's head. I'm confident there are some Zeuses on this list.
I'm not hung up on a fancy tool. Plain text with some decent conventions on my part might be just fine. I'm curious about lots of tools, but unsure which to invest time & effort in: SImplenote? Evernote? Notational Velocity?
My use case is this:
- Long list of short notes on a particular topic: the book at hand.
- Each book is its own list.
- Tags would generally be specific to a single book, and therefore contained within a single list--they would not typically span multiple lists/books.
- I would like to be able to search those tags within a single book/list. The ability to search tags globally, across all lists/books, would be intriguing, but not at all necessary.
- I want to be able to note the page number/kindle location, one or more tags, and the content of the note.
- I want the list to be easy on the eye if I'm just browsing through the notes.
- I don't care about being able to use it on my phone. Using it on my Mac is a requirement, though.
Any suggestions?
More from Maggie:
When I search, it's mostly for tags, but might also be for some key term that book covers.
For example, I recently read The EMyth and found myself wanting to search for all of the times I noted creepy, flirty subtext between the narrator and the owner of the pie shop. (For anyone who's intrigued, check out the description of their lunch date, culminating on page 161 of my edition. It's thinly-veiled softcore. Funny. And gross.) I don't have a good way to tag themes like that right now, or to locate them later.
Similarly, I often want to locate these kinds of things:
- references to other books I might want to investigate
- favorite turns of phrase
- good advice, stuff to try in real life
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Thoughts - 6/3/2013
Visual file system
What if tapestry is actually a new kind of timeline-based file system, except more than that?
Create or Consume
Files don't matter. What matter is what we create and consume. We create not just "on our computer" in a file, but also on the web at a variety of sites. Tapestry could pull those in and organize them.
- Create
- create a word doc
- edit an excel doc
- create a simplenote
- tweet
- write a product review
- take a photo
- Consume
- watch a movie
- listen to a song
- travel to an Appt?
- read a book
- read an article
Verbs versus nouns. iOS organizes the device around verbs, which is very natural. What do you want to do? It's like a launcher. Action-oriented. But there is no noun view, except maybe search. Windowing systems organize around nouns (mostly) but use a filing cabinet metaphor which maps to physical space. I think that is a mental load that people don't need to bear - remembering where they put things. They shouldn't even have to know that they put things anywhere, rather just create them or consume them.
How do you find though, in order to consume? Maybe verbs are the right primary element after all?
Time, type, tagging
Tapestry organizes around time and type and tags rather than "location" or hierarchy, the way a standard file system works.
Versioning
Once the UI paradigm becomes organized around time first, versioning becomes natural and first-class. It's like living in apple's Time Machine view all the time, sort of. You can see for any doc each edit that you made and when.
Document view
When viewing a "type" timeline, such as all word docs, you can single out a particular document to expand its individual timeline and focus on the edits made to that file on certain dates.
need to draw this UI