Indigrid Blog

Last blog post I mentioned a problem with the selections, and it has been problematic in many areas for months. As I began to understand it more—because it was an afterthought, "isn't selection is just a bit set on some structure?"—I realized I need to go back to first principles.

I repeatedly go to Polya's How to Solve It for inspiration, and one of the main steps is understanding the problem. And under that is draw a picture. And introduce proper notation. It is math book, but I think that is so great. Proper notation so that you have the units or concepts that you can then manipulate on their own.

And I always underestimate drawing a picture, because usually it seems too simple. Just a box with two arrows, I should be able to keep that in my head. But I'm wrong, it's not about what I can do—it is about making the problem as simple as possible for you. Because the end result is what you create, not the method you took to get there.

I drew this:

[img]https://innovati

What has gone well so far I have been working on saved views, which are like sheets in Excel or tabs in Chrome. Since view changes are already designed to go on the undo stack, it is easy to take one and reapply it.

It came together much faster than I expected.

What I got wrong 1. File management I underestimated the value of having an existing model of how file management works. And I didn't realize that people would want to separate certain types of ideas such that they aren't connected with other ideas.

One of the rules in the design philosophy is to not have file management, and the design benefited from the constraint by allowing huge outlines to be performant.

I'm hoping that saved views alleviate some of the pain from now having things in separate files, by allowing different "windows" to be switched to by clicking on the saved view.

But now I do see that it is important for a lot of users to have completely separate outlines in the form of

Solving problems away from the computer

Mid-February status