Since my last demos of the Tufte style went so well, and because I was encouraged to do so, I decided to throw together a more complete demo of how I’ve been playing with the annotation widget, since it’s expanded quite a lot into something I’m calling TiddlyMesh, or “StoryRiver Canvas” or just “Canvas.”
Okay, so what are you looking at?
Well, on the left side of the screen you should see that annotations now appear as Color coded links within the body of the tiddler, rather than as simply an annotation number.
That color is derived from the “color” field of the tiddler that is being linked to, and corresponds to the color that appears in the margin bar. Clicking that color in the margin bar opens a color swathe that changes the tiddlers color field. Clicking anywhere else in the annotation also opens the corresponding tiddler
You’ll also notice that, although the tiddler is composed of only one text field, it is being segmented into separate paragraphs by linebreak (or <br><br> tags). Each of these paragraphs is separately editable…
… and also can be dragged to be repositioned, which will alter the text of the tiddler
If you select some text in the edit mode of a paragraph, you’ll see the ‘Annotate’ button
Pressing that creates a new annotation of the default color, which you can click-to-edit.
Changing the text here will change the text of the associated tiddler.
Some other things:
- Pressing tab/shift-tab indents/outdents the paragraph
- Annotations are grouped according to the tiddler they are associated with
- Annotation numbers update according to their relative position in the story river
- There exists mobile options for this demo that, while aren’t detailed here, should be relatively straightforward to discover
- Image Paste is supported
- Probably very fragile
Other things I forgot to mention in the first pass:
Transclusions appear as visually distinct elements from other paragraphs
Pressing enter on a paragraph creates a new paragraph:
Backspacing on an empty paragraph takes you to the preceding paragraph.
Dragging between tiddlers is allowed.
