Far from identical, but along similar lines:
<a href="http://treesheets.com/" rel="nofollow">http://treesheets.com/</a><p>"It's like a spreadsheet, immediately familiar, but much more suitable for complex data because it's hierarchical.
It's like a mind mapper, but more organized and compact.
It's like an outliner, but in more than one dimension.
It's like a text editor, but with structure. "<p>You can nest spreadsheet-like cells within cells within cells within cells.. and zoom in and out between the various levels of nesting.<p>For Windows and Ubuntu, with a beta for Mac OS X available.
I'm certainly drawn to the idea and am inclined positively towards it. I'm even willing to overlook the ridiculous hubris of "This new medium will be the way most text is read and written in the future."<p>However, there are many confusing things to me as a person who arrived at the site through HN. Since one of the developers is promoting the "app" here, it might be useful to hear from him on these points:<p>1. Is this an input format or is it a publication format, or is it a viewer? Does it rely on a time-tested plaintext markup format like LaTeX or markdown? Perhaps it is a HTML viewer for a LaTeX markup document with special structure, rather than an actual typset web publication format.<p>2. What is the conceptual structure of the document system? Giving me a screenshot does not show me anything about the way you are conceptualizing your document. Is there a separation of content and output, output and viewer?<p>3. Is any part of this open source? Are you incorporating any other major technologies which have already been developed?<p>I apologize if any of the above seems harsh, but this is an important topic and I have become slightly tired of seeing flashy presentations about poorly-thought out "revolutionary" new document formats/tools/whatnot.
Hopefully this criticism is helpful.<p>I find this really hard to read, sorry.<p>I can't just scroll through or scan read, and I'm met with a variety of different things all at once. Everything's always visible, so I don't know what I'm looking at. I've scrolled down on the lowest level, and read a bit but have no understanding of the context. Clicking on it makes me realise where I am but I've skipped over a load of stuff in the middle so I'm scrolling back up that to find where I left off... I think this is a visual thing though rather than a major issue with the <i>idea</i>. Fiddling a bit I've only just found that not every node has children, but this this is only indicated by nothing happening (which is identical to something that should happen but doesn't)<p>This is really a different formatter for the same structure of text we've already been using, so the hyperbole is a bit of a turnoff for me.<p><pre><code> \section{some title}
Explanatory text
\subsection{subsection title}
Sub text
</code></pre>
etc.<p>Or<p><pre><code> <section>
<h1>heading</h1>
<p>Text</p>
<section>
<h2>heading 2
</code></pre>
Why do we need something new? What's being added? What couldn't I do before that's now possible? These are the things I want to know when you tell me you've got a new hierarchical document. Can I already read these well with a screen-reader? The ordering in the source would (I think) read each column individually, which wouldn't make sense. Try loading your viewer without CSS. Imagine a screenreader hitting the massive block of JSON at the bottom of the page. Why is that in the body?
First of all, congratulation for pulling off a new and experimental user interface!<p>However, I believe, the idea that tree- or graph-like structuring of text is beneficial for reading and writing text in general, comes close to the graphical programming fallacy. Eventually, the spatial make-up fails because of the following three reasons:<p>(1) The manual difficulty of navigation and the count of subconscious visual cues necessary for retrieving a passage increase exponentionally as the content grows, (2) altough thoughts do seem to come in hierarchical structures, we usually don’t think of text, code, stories, memories nor knowledge as visual graphs and (3) textual hints for emphasizing and linking text are more efficient and flexible than visual hints.<p>At first glance, Wikipedia seems like an affirmative example for graph-like structured text, but that structure is usually not used for primarily intended navigation. The articles are actually expected to be self-contained for readers with only a fair amount of prior knowledge.
Scrivener has the same "mission" as this. To make text writing into chunks that you can rearrange.<p>It's more fully baked and I think has a better UI that Ginko (writing a book or long piece with 3 relatively small columns isn't ideal).<p>Unfortunately it is marketed poorly, so not a lot of people know about it, but I have found it very useful when doing writing for longer pieces.
Dear authors, my screen has hundreds of pixels vertically, I would like to be able to read more than 15 lines at once. The font size is insanely huge. It made me close the tab.
I like this a lot!<p>The research manuscript example is exciting. It would be great if authors could link directly to the part of a paper that they are citing and be able to open that up if you want to dive deeper. Linking methods to results to discussion for specific experiments would make reading through dense papers a lot easier, and maybe have a notation/jargon definition section open at the same time. It's almost like a tiling window manager for reading.<p>I'm a little bit concerned about how it looks on smaller screens. It looks fine on my work monitor but I only have a netbook at home right now and a lot of websites have overlapping elements that keep me from reading articles. I haven't looked at this from that computer yet though. Maybe it would help to have collapsible columns if there are issues.<p>Good luck, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes!
Gingko is intimidating. It looks like a neat way to work<p>but when I see a big button called "try it now" (red flag), with testimonials (big red flag), no download (small red flag), and no mention of licensing, privacy, or cost (edit: it was just hidden), or... anything (big red flag). My experience tells me to avoid it, and to council everyone else to avoid it as well.<p>I don't want to be gouged, aggregated, or advertised to. I would love to use your tool. I just can't be sure you wont use that desire against me. I can't find anything on your site that will assure me that wont happen.<p>edit: AHA. I did find your pricing.<p><a href="https://gingkoapp.com/p/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://gingkoapp.com/p/pricing/</a><p>So at least you're mechanism of monetization is there.
I like the use case for reading movie scripts, it could help to keep all levels of the story in mind:<p><a href="https://gingkoapp.com/Alien-1979" rel="nofollow">https://gingkoapp.com/Alien-1979</a>
This is a good concept but the execution needs some work. I'm confused that everything is visible all the time - if that's the case, why am I clicking on things? But clicking on things seems to be necessary to 'focus' on a given subject; otherwise, as you scroll, the columns get out of sync and seem to bear little relationship to each other.<p>I envisioned something very different from the screenshots. I expected you to be able to expand and collapse nodes, with the collapsed nodes existing only to provide a summary of the surrounding information. I can see the appeal of having everything visible so that you can just scroll through the document as you would now, but in that case the scroll positions of the columns need to be dynamically linked and there needs to be more feedback about which nodes serve as a summary or context for which other nodes.<p>In general, I think the process of reading a Gingko document is not clear to a first-time reader. Fixing this will require changes to both functionality and design.
Reminds me of Ted Nelson's Zigzag, only he had N dimensions and a cell structure. <a href="http://xanadu.com/zigzag/" rel="nofollow">http://xanadu.com/zigzag/</a>
Does this really need to be a web-app?
Storing my Documents in the Cloud is not possible and not even desireable in most of my work environments. Even in my private life i like to be offline to work on the kind of tasks that Gingko would help me with. Just charge me a one-time fee for an Windows App (Win8 Guy here, Mac Apps would be reasonable aswell) and let me handle my data my way.<p>I've thought about building something like Gingko for a long time, so thanks for providing an alternative option!
would love to see a self hosted ginko. It used to be that there was a lot of self hosted project, now everyone wants to keep you data... I wonder if the trend will change again.
I want the tool you're building! It's got huge overlap with a project I was just in the planning phase of, a cloud-ified FreeMind.<p>However! There's one fatal-for-me flaw in your current implementation: only three layers deep. Deal-breaker. I'd love to hear about it if/when you change that behavior, so that I can start trying this seriously.<p>I saw your comment about future possible options to self-host, or offline mode, or something like that. That's definitely interesting to me. Self-hosting would be ideal, really. But I also very much like having the option to use your servers.<p>When you mentioned exporting to Markdown, you mentioned breadth-first. I'm not at all sure that you want breadth-first. The documents I'm imagining writing will make more sense exported depth-first.<p>I think it would benefit from a little visual cue to see where one card ends and the next begins, even for cards not currently selected. My first attempt would be to let the grey background show through the white cards, but whatever.<p>I agree that the default text size is a bit too big. Maybe some scaling could be added as an option when configuring a tree.
I'm sorry if I'm rude, but the more I think of if it, the less I see the point.<p>The initial described problem (organising ideas in a hierarchical way) has already been solved efficiently years ago with visual mind maps. They have been used successfully to not only create the hierarchy, but also to realise that sometimes, the tree is more like a graph.<p>As a reader, it's infuriating to have to click all the time (or use keyboard) and have this page scrolling all around. I just want to READ, not being distracted by some kind of useless parallax effect.<p>As a writer, moving ideas around to get them properly organised is really painful. There is no distraction-free interface neither.<p>If you really want to make tool for writers, I would strongly suggest you that you take a look at tools like Ulysses or Scrivener and try to understand the rationale behind the UI choice they made.
Neat. A couple thoughts:
1) it took me some time to figure out that I could scroll a given column when the mouse is over it... Also when the mouse is over a non-column area (background on far right/left) it would be useful if scrolling did a global scroll of all columns at the same time.<p>2) It could be nice if the sections M+1/M-1 (above/below) the selected section in column N were given a subtle distinct color, and then the appropriate sections in column N+1 that are nested in M+1/M-1 were given the same color. Does that make any sense? It would give a visual indication of which sections in column N+1 lie within sections M+1 and M-1, and also help to emphasize the tree nature of the layout. A different color could be chosen for M+/-2, +/-3, etc.<p>Good job! :)
I like it and have worked more or less like this for structuring documents all my life (but manually, in text files, making trees and creating documents from those trees with a small Python script). However, I really would like this to be a desktop application; all that online stuff is not very helpful for productivity software, for me at least. I live in the mountains, I don't have internet in a lot of places. When I travel I don't have (stable) internet either.<p>I like stuff going to the web, but until that works fully offline after installation (so being able to make new projects, save them, change them, do everything except the stuff which really requires internet), I don't really have much use for productivity apps like this.
Nice. The inadvertent jump to another branch can be disorienting though.<p>Suppose my tree structure is as so:<p><pre><code> * a
** b
*** c
* d
** e
*** f
*** g
*** h
</code></pre>
Gingko lays it out like this:<p><pre><code> a b c
d e f
g
h
</code></pre>
If I'm in the far right column, let's say I've highlighted item g and go up to item f. However, I hold the arrow key down a little too long and overshoot to item c. This causes everything to the left to suddenly jump around and disorient me.<p>A related issue, the layout suggests that c-f-g-h is an intended list when it isn't. It can cause readers to become confused if they're reading normally in one column and don't fully realize they've jumped to a different branch in between c and f.
I'm a bit confused by the keyboard navigation. I open the sample document and hit the down arrow. It scrolls. I hit the down arrow again and the background color changes and it scrolls in the opposite direction. If I keep hitting the down arrow it scrolls up and down and up and down with a color change each time. And of course if I hold down the down arrow it starts flickering as it jumps back and forth between the two directions and colors.<p>Is that a bug or is that how it's supposed to work? I often scroll to the end of a short document by holding down the down arrow until things stop moving.
I like how it organizes information spatially, like WorkFlowy. I much prefer this visual organization to tags, for example. That said, I found it hard to understand what it was, even though I'm a long-time WorkFlowy user and am very interested in this kind of thing. I wrote a post where I talked about organizing information visually in more depth here: <a href="http://colemanfoley.quora.com/Mind-Mapping-with-WorkFlowy" rel="nofollow">http://colemanfoley.quora.com/Mind-Mapping-with-WorkFlowy</a> (Registration NOT required to read).
I have always felt PDF is outdated for research papers. We need some kind of interactive paper format; yet universal, open specs, look the same and usable across platforms.
Have you thought about allowing for the creation of arbitrarily deep trees? That's one of the features I like most about workflowy. This looks really cool, though!
Ontology/taxonomy/classification are seriously difficult things. If not semantic web would have ruled the world by now.<p>Structural hierarchies (chapter/section etc) may be easy to get for everyone but a navigation side panel would work too. If you build a semantic hierarchy, new users may not know how to find things; yet repeat users may be frustrated by having to go through the layers to access the items they are looking for.
I don't want to have to think when I read a book. The author has to lead me through and follow a path. The auther has to make sure I get a decent introduction and he should make every sentence count.<p>This is nice to play. And maybe even has it's applications such as documentation where quick browsing helps. But if I had to read a thesis/book like this I'd be a very unhappy person.
This looks awesome, but the elephant in the room is how does the document look offline?<p>Can it be exported to PDF or be printed or something?<p>When you print it, how does it look?
I think this is quite a nice experiment in UI. However too small and simple to start charging for (but please proof me wrong!).<p>1) What I miss is the possibility to attach files. This would be essential in typical collaborative environments.
2) I don't want to give you my data. So localstorage or export/import is essential.
I really like this. My nested lists in Evernote always get out of hand as soon as a node needs more than one line.<p>I've tried WorkFlowy but I didn't like the presentation. I prefer cards and in Gingko's case you get the added benefit of having a great overview.
What happened to the app shown in the linked Science without borders talk? That looks more useful to me, if only because it fits with the typical science paper writing workflow. How did the document editor migrate to this 2D editor?
Interesting. This is actually close to the original idea of hypertext (Ted Nelson's vision: "documents - side by side"). I would really turn down the tone. Let the reader decide how important he thinks the idea is.
What a great tool! I will definitly use this to structure my lecture notes! (Topic > Sub-Topic > Definition/List)<p>Improvement: Allow to filter and color cards. So you can walk through all cards of a given type.
Is anyone else seeing "undefined is editing" and subsequently a bunch of text you didn't write appears?<p>I'm worried that what I am typing into this might show up in someone else's tree.
Interesting idea. Can you make it so that when I click in the card it automatically goes into edit mode? Having to click an "edit" button really slows things down.
For what platforms is it available? (There's no way I'm going to the trouble of signing up, only to be told "uh oh, not on your platform".)
If anyone thinks serious academics will adopt something stupid and flashy like this in place of "old-fashioned, dry PDFs" when it isn't even free or publicly specified, they're seriously deluded.<p>Fuck start-ups and capitalism.