Cartographist is an experimental web browser optimized for rabbit-holing.
- Instead of opening new windows (with cmd-click), Cartographist spawns horizontally scrollable panes.
- Instead of forcing you to find things in a linear history, Cartographist shows a tree-structured outline of your browsing.
- Instead of always starting fresh, Cartographist can save, and load "trails" — the exact state of the session you've left — supporting researching topics over long periods of time.
- one of Research Themes at Ink&Switch
- UI should be just content, everything else directly manipulatable, any buttons and menus take up space that could be there for the actual data
- mapping huge spaces onto small screens seems to be one of fundamental problems in "UI"
- somehow free panning in x/y makes me feel like looking through a loupe - I don't get that feeling when scrolling only vertically though
- I'm curious how many and what kinds of projectors would I need to have a wall for doing/thinking
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- another thing to keep in mind is the "data-ink ratio" idea from Tufte - for power users the best UIs allow for making a lot of information visible at once, with the least amount "UI cruft" possible
- another idea to gain pixel space is to filter out what's irrelevant
- maybe the problem is not so much about the size of the display, but about the DPI? (for reference: reMarkable 2 has 226 DPI, Apple iMac Retina 5k has 218 DPI, so only ~18% of what's possible on paper)
games are interesting here, for example The Witness:
- fractal software makes it hard to orient yourself, since everything looks the same regardless of the "depth" level - which is a feature of fractals
- Gordon Brander suggests looking into how orientation works in cities – through landmarks – how could this look like in software?
- for some reason I'm not using the color tags in macOS, which could be helpful? – or is this too small of a landmark to matter?
- bash prompt, miller columns, urls, breadcrumbs are all a way to show "you are here" in fractal structures
- laying out information spatially seems to work well for me for divergent thinking - putting ideas next to each other, recombining them, rich media and text intermixed on the same infinite canvas
- keeping in mind Thinking by Writing ideas, canvas for thinking should probably be a very personal thing
- all my attempts so far, to share the work in progress canvases have failed - they seem to be too close to my internal concept map for them to be useful to anyone else in the spatial form
- there are multiple levels to this: from Smalltalk-like self-hosted-ness and moldability (just change how the object behaves live, and use it to solve the problem at hand), to more nuanced in-tool generative potential (make your own swatches in Photoshop "on the side", show history of the design work by duplicating frames in Figma, etc.)
- the former (the Smalltalk-like approach), is related to the ideas of Fractality of Software Tools - everything is objects within objects (or functions within functions in Lisp-land), and when you can change how they behave, you can make your own tools in the tool
- the latter is also very interesting, but seems more like a "happy accident" than planning for this explicitly
the right interface can have an incredible power
- making something that was previously extremely hard, available to everyone (switching from Roman to Arabic numerals as an interface to mathematics)
- making invention possible (Feynman Diagrams)
- making Solving Things Visually possible (Cartesian Coordinates)
- Data Visualization can be thought of as an alternative, sometimes more powerful, interface to data
- working with the amounts of data for which we don't have enough Pixel Space (Collection-Browsing Interfaces)
new powerful notations "stick around" and infect human thinking for generations
- Notion, Roam, Muse, file systems feel "fractal":
- blocks within blocks in Notion
- boards within boards in Muse
- bullet points within bullet points Roam
- folders within folders in file system
- hash-maps are also fractal
- Figma is not fractal - tabs, canvases and layers are all different things, and can't be nested ad infinitum
- fractal tools seem to give more freedom, but at a cost - how to Orient Myself in these possibly infinite structures
Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism. The features of cognition include high level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment). The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness) and the assumptions about the world that are built into the structure of the organism.