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