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Visual representation of data
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Posted by Chris Thompson
Sep 1, 2010 at 10:37 PM
I would prefer visual tools that preserve spatial relationships in the plane. I find tools like The Brain hard to extract meaningful information from, because things move around, and the brain’s ability to remember spatial cues is lost. Spatial relationships can be, in themselves, metadata.
The problem then becomes that as your data relationships become more complex, you can only meaningfully represent a subset of your data in a single plane, which means that tools need to support multiple 2-D spatial views. I think Tinderbox does this relatively well.
I like MindManager’s layout algorithms too, as you can force the program to arrange items in certain kinds of spatial relationships, but the program’s tree-based data model is pretty darn limited.
It’s a shame there aren’t more spatial PIM tools. Mark Bernstein occasionally points to research papers on his blog discussing some pretty interesting spatial PIM tools, but they don’t seem to make it out of the lab very often.
Posted by Manfred
Sep 1, 2010 at 10:54 PM
If you want to see what it looks like, see http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2010/09/outliners-in-connectedtext.html
Manfred
Posted by quant
Sep 2, 2010 at 12:29 AM
yeah, I know. I tested it few years ago and again about two weeks ago when I was checking whether it can handle something with link descriptions in navigator.
I tested it very quickly, so the following “critisism” should be taken very lightly ;-)
- deleted one item, moved around, got error message “invalid class typecast”
- one click doesn’t seem to do anything on the navigator
- moving item reorganizes items in such a way, that I was lost (maybe just needs time to get used to)
- couldn’t find the zoom and rotate for navigator (is there?) and how many connections the graph should display
- the biggest problem was that I could not find a way to connect two items in the navigator, tried holding, clicking, shift, ctrl was connecting something, but I didn’t figure out what, definitelly not the item I had selected and then clicking on the other,
many of the points I mentioned above were straightforward in mindraider (I think it uses the same plugin for the navigator?) which I tested immediatelly after connectedtext.
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If you want to see what it looks like, see http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2010/09/outliners-in-connectedtext.html
Manfred
Posted by quant
Sep 2, 2010 at 12:33 AM
I should have mentioned that I have not read any help file or manual for connectedtext ;-)
Posted by Manfred
Sep 2, 2010 at 01:10 AM
Quant,
this has nothing to do with the navigator which I actually never use. It’s a new capability introduced in 4.0.0.1 about a year ago (September 22, 2009).
Manfred