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by epaga·12y ago·view on hn ↗
Thanks for the ideas! Especially 2 and 3 remind me of stuff I've been considering anyways.

Re: 1 - could you be more specific regarding "dependency tracking"? Each entry is currently simply a text entry that you can move around with your finger. You can also set up arrows between entries. How would you envision tracking dependencies? Could be you'll need to try the app out first and would have more thoughts then.

Thanks again for the feedback!

1 comments
A lot of visual apps allow users to draw arrows, but why are people drawing arrows? Is the direction of the arrow significant? It's usually a dependency, e.g. MS Project saying that this task must be completed before another task = time dependency. A hierarchical outline is another way of expressing dependency (composition).

What eventually happens after drawing lots of arrows and creating outlines is that users want to make changes to their diagrams. But the diagram editor then ignores all those beautiful arrows and the poor user ends up moving singular nodes around and repeating the layout manually.

inShort hard-codes a set of rules for a specific use case. A lightweight drawing tool could still benefit from allowing some operations to be aware of inter-entry dependencies/arrows/relationships, e.g. grouping, change propagation, composition.

I'll try the app at some point, currently using iThoughts (for fast layout speed on complex maps) on iPad, EccoPro & ConnectedText on PC (supports dependencies and facets). An interesting open-source app is http://treesheets.com, which is a cross between outliner & spreadsheet.

I love iThoughts also, but more for classic mind-mapping on a certain topic rather than outlining or keeping a "life document" like Workflowy or OrgMode, which is closer to the typical usage scenario of Mindscope.
Quick feedback:

- couldn't find the "share button" after long-pressing a board

- breadcrumbs at top of page are useful, might be useful if long-press on a parent or grandparent breadcrumb brought up a list of peers

- could there be an option to disable transition animation? Rollover on selection of item is good, but the whole-page zoom animation makes me dizzy.

- need template support to reuse "forms" created by drawing lines

Overall feels promising. Scapple also looks cool, too bad it's only on OSX.