A new way to read ebooks in TiddlyWIki

[jeremyruston]

I started a new thread to discuss some design sketches that show my original plans for Cecily in TiddlyWiki 5:

TiddlyWiki 5 Design Sketches from 2012

In answering a question from @arunnbabu81 in another thread, I dug out some old design sketches that I had done in the very early days of TiddlyWiki 5’s development, in early March 2012. This one shows some ideas for the main screen: [Main Screen Sketch] I was very keen at the time to embrace the new era of touch devices, hence the UI controls that slide in from the side. The icon at the top left brings up a view menu for choosing between several different overall views: [View Switcher Sket…

But to answer your question more directly, one thing that has changed since I did the original Cecily prototype in 2008 is that there have been a string of commercial and open source products that embody that central idea of an infinite 2D canvas onto which one can slide resizable panels, with pan-and-zoom as the primary navigation metaphor.

Most famously, there was Presi. Now one of the most interesting examples that I know of is Muse, an iPad app:

Muse — tool for thought

So, one good thing is that I have had the opportunity to play around with some very polished and sophisticated implementations of the basic idea. I’ve found that the original metaphor that I was attracted to is actually not sufficient to make a functional user interface. There’s too much scrolling and squinting, and the UI affordances don’t help with obvious use cases (“arrange all the tiddlers tagged foobar in a square”). Zoomable user interfaces have always been primarily concerned with navigation.

It’s still an area I think about a lot, but haven’t got to the point where implementation work has risen to the top of my stack.

[JanJo]

@jeremyruston

Most famously, there was Presi. Now one of the most interesting examples that I know of is Muse, an iPad app

Hi @jeremyruston the possibility to organize and present in a visual/spacial way like in muse or prezi? would be fantastic! Another great opensource-tool/library which could help to achieve this could be

https://impress.js.org

[arunnbabu81]

Thank you for replying. Excited to see how all these will develop in the future.

[Springer]

Thanks for impress.js link!

I did a deep dive into Prezi a few years back, and worked it hard for a couple conferences, until I got frustrated with some limitations (such as: only one style for each text block, so no academic Author, Title citations, plus how long I would spend tweaking its effects to get them just right and not make viewers feel seasick…), and with the opacity of getting Prezi to respond to customers on such issues – even paying ones.

I’ll check this out!

[JanJo]

Hello @Springer,
If you like impress.js, you should have a look at

http://strut.io/dist/index.html

which is a free online editor for it, developed as open source on GitHub

[pmario]

@JanJo

Another great opensource-tool/library which could help to achieve this could be

https://impress.js.org

Impress is a very low level library. There is no “offline” editor library at the moment. So it’s very hard to create something useful. … But the impress.js library itself is cool, if you know how to configure it.

[oflg]

@jeremyruston

It’s still an area I think about a lot, but haven’t got to the point where implementation work has risen to the top of my stack

The design looks very creative.
Visual needs are always a low priority, so there is no rush to change and implement.