On 2:59 PM, James R. Van Zandt wrote: > Benjamin Scott wrote: >> It sounds to me like that would enable Wave to be used as a >> collaborative whiteboard, which makes perfect sense to me. > > e.g. mind mapping: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map > > - Jim Van Zand Yes, what I have in mind would be very usable for mind mapping. I am also trying hard not to remember that it could be adapted to virtual role-playing experiences when a quick map is needed. I could even maintain a burndown chart with it...
We actually tried bending a mind-mapping tool to do what we wanted - there are a couple of plugins that do that for wave, along with a _very_ preliminary UML tool. However, mind mapping tools know all about mind-mapping, and UML tools know all about UML, and.... :( The beauty of this tool is it doesn't know much about the semantics of anything in particular. It just knows how people typically try to put pictures together without regard for what they mean. It deals with details like legible text placed in the indicated boxes, adjusting the height and width of grid rows and columns as people think of more or less text to stuff in them, and making lines meet where they're supposed to - anything you've ever had to stop what you're doing to fix on, yes, a whiteboard, during a discussion. Every whiteboard tool I've seen so far, including the kind that hangs on a wall with smelly markers, :) just lets you draw stuff but doesn't help you to glom it together so it always looks really lousy when you're done and needs to be redrawn in some other tool. I've even thought a bit about how a gravity well would work for making lines meet. The gravity well is a radius from a point along an edge. A line end falling within a gravity well will snap to the center of gravity. Beyond the radius, it won't be "pulled in" and would stand free. There would be a relatively large gravitational zone at the center of the edge. The quarters would have a somewhat smaller radius and the eighths would have a smaller radius yet, maybe even down to sixteenths. These fractional elements only capture if the segment is long enough that their radii didn't intersect the radius of a more dominant element. (Maybe even double it to guarantee clear space between gravitational zones.) For every point along the line that wasn't in the capture radius of one of the fractionals, a constant radius would apply, so lines within that distance of the edge would get dragged to the nearest point along the edge. The effect should be pretty intuitive to work with. Uh-oh - I'm talking about this thing as if it already exists, which is a really bad sign with me. :( I know where it usually leads. I get into more trouble this way... Where Wave crashes on the chore, the sirens call...... Ralph _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
