ThinkingTools, softwares which helps in ThinkingProcess

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 5, 2021 at 12:37 PM

steveylang wrote:
>I much prefer ‘spatial organization’ of information in the initial
>creation and planning stages of a project or idea. Pencil and paper work
>great for me there, of course digital apps offer much more functionality
>but only if the interface is frictionless (which is where many apps fail
>for me.)
> >The best digital version for me has been Scapple

I agree that when it comes to speed of capturing and developing ideas, analysing problems etc., nothing beats pen and paper (I like to go for A3 size, but have used a large scroll of wrapping paper as well for really large-scale planning).

The challenge with spatial organisation digitally is that spatial software (such as Onenote) works better for analysing and mapping a single issue, rather than for organising a large database and visualising aspects of that database. Roam’s visual graph becomes pretty useless fairly soon as well.

The only workable solution I’ve come across so far has been the semantic zoom of Plectica (though it’s still not a panacea, as explained below).

Plectica has remained my go-to solution for visually analysing and modelling smaller scale problems (taking over from VUE, which was my previous tool for this), as it’s fairly quick to create nodes and connect them.

The ease of embedding nodes within nodes is also very helpful (as eventually everything is part of something else, one way or another, so it’s always helpful to be able to easily embed one node in another).

The semantic zoom then helps maintain the big picture, while easily allowing one to zoom in and work on a detail.

But even with Plectica there comes a point where you’d want to separate issues into different maps once it grows too big, as I’m not sure how it would accommodate a single giant database in a single map.

Perhaps someone one day will combine Plectica’s implementation of the semantic zoom with supporting a Roam type database, so that one can build specific visualisations without having to create a new file or database every time.

I was kind of able to do such analyses with ConnectedText’s Navigator feature, but it has its own limitations (and is sadly no longer developed).