Jeremy’s Cecily was years ahead. In the past year we have seen the development of other tools which seem to work on this promise of spacial thinking. I attached two interesting videos here. I hope that someday cecily will be back on track.
Logseq-Whiteboards
Interestingly this is build on TLDraw which has already been brought to TW by @linonetwo
Liquidtext (before you fall in love: it is 200 Bucks a year)
There was another German one I saw last year that had infinite zooming, so you could create a box with boxes inside of it and boxes inside of those boxes, etc, and zoom down to whatever level of boxes you wanted to see. Can’t remember the name of it. It was cool, and had I had it many years ago, I would have committed, but at this stage of my life I am not ready to change tools anymore. That is also why I didn’t commit to Tana.
Thanks @JanJo I am delighted that Cecily made an impression. I was super excited about it in 2008 but felt that it met with a very muted reaction – perhaps partly because the CSS transforms that it relies upon were only supported by Safari at the time. Back in 2011 I planned to incorporate Cecily in TiddlyWiki 5 but still haven’t managed to do so.
Back in 2008, “hyperbolic fisheye views” were very popular as an interactive way to display hierarchical data (the graph view in Roam is a simplified version of the idea). Those views all rely on automated layout algorithms that decide where to place the nodes on a canvas.
I felt that these layout algorithms ignore a crucial part of human psychology: to see patterns everywhere. Given an arrangement of nodes on a page, the brain can’t help assigning meaning to the patterns that they make, even if those patterns are a mere artefact of the layout algorithm.
So, my idea was to make the layout of nodes/tiddlers be a manual process, allowing the user to convey complex relationships. For example, two tiddlers of the same size arranged side-by-side surrounded by a swam of smaller tiddlers invites the viewer to conclude that those two tiddlers are both important and related to one another, and that the other tiddlers have a subordinate relationship to them.
Another key idea in Cecily is the abstraction of a “map”: a named layout that captures the position and size of all the displayed tiddlers. The idea is to be able to switch between maps dynamically.
For example, tiddlywiki.com might come with a map for beginners which emphasises the introductory tiddlers by making them larger, and arranges the reference tiddlers in a pattern that conveys an ordering for reading them.
Another map might be for reference users which emphasises the tiddlers that list all the operators, widgets etc., with the documentation tiddlers arranged nearby.
There would be a tiddler menu item to allow users to see which maps include a particular tiddler, and to switch between them.
This is still an area of great interest to me, and I hope to be able to return to it in the future.
You meant IMapping?
https://infinitymaps.io/imapping-methode/
I also think this infinite box zooming is a great feature.
Hi @jeremyruston , I am glad to see you pick up the thead
I would like to have a red (Ariadne’s) thread running through the map emphasizing the focused tiddler with a red border. Possibility to scale titlers is a great Feature in sassily i would also like to have the possibility to have visual Links nested maps.
Yes JanJo, that is the one!
I would love the ability to organize tiddlers on a plane, but have different planes for different tiddlers – so that in one plane, I have tiddlers A, B, and C in various positions. In another plane I have A, B, D, and E; and they’re all in different positions from before (A and B are not in the same place, they’re positioned only for that plane).
I’ve been meaning to mess around with an alternate page layout that works like this, just not sure how to do it. Fields on the tiddlers? A layout data tiddler? I’m not used to thinking in TW programming terms to know what approach to try. Will probably try with fields first, just to see…
@drhayes if it helps get your started you can use a different story/history list for each of your “planes” and an alternative page layout for each plane.
Hi @JanJo
TiddlyWiki is quite rich, sometimes we need to be reminded: hey what your are looking for is already existed in TW, look in … and …
Hi @jeremyruston
I tried cecily in TW 5.2.6. I cannot zoom any tiddler. Does it mean Cecily is not for TW 5.2.6?
I think Cecily is quite useful for lecturing and presentation! It allow you to create a ntaural flow of information!
Using a different story list is a great idea! Thanks for that one.