I have been using Scapple to map out how Doug Engelbart’s process fits the academic document process, which turned out to be quite useful to see where there was a mismatch (Doug was not concerned with the career of the academic, only the work, at least in his formal models). The process was also useful exercise in testing out how a real-world project would use a Liquid View, in that I could not simply freeform layout everything and anything, it needed to have a means through which it would be done in a Liquid View.
This is the full size screenshot:
I took the screenshot and annotated it in Keynote:
Jacob has cleanly separated the word processing view and the TOC outline view in Author so I can’t wait for Author to ship so we can start to experiment with these views…
Another exercise from today highlights the need to allow the user to add borders:
Comment from Mark Bernstein (email 6 August 2017):
“Perhaps it does, but the illustration doesn’t make the argument, at least not to me, at first glance. The right-hand slide, which I suppose is a Engelbart creation from relatively late (1990s?), is not a distinguished slide.
The left-hand slide, which I think is yours, is significantly clearer. It’s got two borders. The lozenge around “external environment” does not appear to have a purpose at all, and is also oddly placed; why not center the text? Why, for that matter, is the environment, which by definition encompasses everything, enclosed? The second border is better, but it prevents a confusion which would not in fact occur; there is already sufficient white space to distinguish this list from other lists in the view.”
My thought in reply to this is that he is right but we may need to figure out a way to add labels to arrows, which is only a related issue.
