Kinopio

Oh Hi, I&#x27;m the solo creator of Kinopio. Before this, I was the designer and co-creator of Glitch. I&#x27;ll go through and answer things, feel free to AMA.<p>If you&#x27;re curious about me or about the process of designing&#x2F;creating, these blog posts might be helpful:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pketh.org&#x2F;how-kinopio-is-made.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pketh.org&#x2F;how-kinopio-is-made.html</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pketh.org&#x2F;designing-for-thinking.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pketh.org&#x2F;designing-for-thinking.html</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pketh.org&#x2F;the-first-four-years-of-glitch.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pketh.org&#x2F;the-first-four-years-of-glitch.html</a>

This is so cool. I love the aesthetic and UX. The only thing is, I really wish I could self-host this. This seems like just the kind of thing I&#x27;d use for personal journaling brainstorms, and I&#x27;d really love to be able to just have that kind of data locally or self-hosted in my own location of choice.

Infinite canvas apps are such a great way to brainstorm.<p>Kinopio has a little more... personality, but I use an infinite canvas app called Concepts when brainstorming for work or play.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;concepts.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;concepts.app&#x2F;</a>

The design is really cool, but the tool is useless (to me) if I can&#x27;t use it offline and store the data on my own hardware. For some reason everyone in this space is building cloud tools!

I created one note, deleted it, scrolled to the bottom, and tried to create another.<p>From then on, everything was broken. Taps didn&#x27;t create cards, scrolling became janky, sometimes I&#x27;d see the pink circle of a tap from something I did 10 seconds previous, and in the wrong place.<p>The was repeatable when I exited the site and came back in.<p>Android Pixel 6 Firefox 100.2.0

One of my favorite people and websites out there :)

When I saw &quot;Kinopio&quot;, I thought it&#x27;s about Toad character (my favorite) in Super Mario universe. :) But I&#x27;m still pleasantly surprised to see a site that looks very unique.<p>I wonder if the word &quot;Kinopio&quot; means something other than Toad in Japanese (maybe someone here who knows Japanese can answer?)

So far from this thread, in terms of &quot;spatial knowledge gardening&quot; tools I have to try out:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stemic.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stemic.app&#x2F;</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roamresearch.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roamresearch.com&#x2F;</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinopio.club&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinopio.club&#x2F;</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mmm.page&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mmm.page&#x2F;</a><p>- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;concepts.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;concepts.app&#x2F;</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vienna.earth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vienna.earth&#x2F;</a>

I used this and it&#x27;s really cool, but like others the fact I didn&#x27;t have my files on disk made it way less useful

What is your process for designing a vector-laden ui like this? Are you coding and drawing? How did you get to this?

2D canvas is by far the most natural way to brainstorm.<p>I&#x27;ve been using the Vienna beta (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vienna.earth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vienna.earth</a>) but am interested to see how this compares. So far I like Vienna for visual stuff - but going to try this for mind mapping.

Anyone has some kinopio notes that he would like to share?

Congrats on the launch but personally can&#x27;t see myself using a tool like this. What problem does it solve? Mind maps have been around for years and remain niche for a reason reminiscent of Lamport&#x27;s take on UML: <i>fuzzy pictures of boxes and arrows.</i><p><i>There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.</i> - Ansel Adams<p>IMHO the best value tools in our company are clipboards with blank pages and three colors of pens on every desk, and an auto sheet-feed scanner to get the results in to git without fiddly photography. I love graphviz&#x2F;mscgen as much as the next unixer, but for ideation paper wins hands down.<p><i>Don&#x27;t use the computer to do things that can be done efficiently by hand.</i> - Richard Hill, Hewlett-Packard

Amazing work @pketh, been following your blog and work for a while. Really inspiring, not a lot of work out there that reaches this level of quality in all aspects. Are you doing all the work on this or do you have a team with you?

This is a very promising tool - I can see many uses for it. My one fear nowadays is that this data could be valuable to the likes of Google etc for training ML models. Hope you can keep this away from the crawlers.

Woah. I love Kinopio! I&#x27;ve used a lot of different tools that are similar but something about the artstyle and the way it works is just so fun. Huge thumbs up.<p>Is there a way to select multiple cards at once?

Nice examples! I miss a tooltip with text though, when I hover an icon.

Really glad to see apps that help you explore your thoughts without feeling like productivity. This is a trend that will continue growing.<p>Shameless plug on an app I’m working on: Bleep (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bleep.is" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bleep.is</a>)<p>Similar concept though different execution - customization + organization in a way that doesn’t feel like a productivity tool which is what I think Kinopio is aiming towards. Definitely an inspiration for me!

Looks very compelling, I&#x27;m curious as to whether it covers all the bases.<p>At my day job the sales-side folks Zoom with customers all day to discuss financial API integrations. Every potential customer is different. They draw out everything in Whimsical, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whimsical.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whimsical.com&#x2F;</a>, which has a very bare-bones aesthetic. It seems to work, they got to US$10M ARR in short order.

Looks cool. Would have been great back when I was creative.

Cool! I got a little lost because the usual browser navigations, forward and back, don’t work (you “broke the back button”).

It looks good but I&#x27;m probably not going to pay $8 a month to use it. Seeing that price puts me off of it immediately.

I love these sorts of apps, but why are they always so slow? Even One Notes canvas mode was super slow.

Are these graph UI elements reusable libraries, or do sites tend to roll their own?

It’s like a 90’s fever dream.

this is like web 1.0 Miro and I love every second of it

The graphical style is very cute :) I wish the internet was more like this (geocities like) BTW more websites should propose embedded music...<p>edit DAMN THIS WEBSITE IT GETTING IT RIGHT!! we live in an absurd world where we have so many websites where people create or categorize content, and yet we can&#x27;t live what other people live.. Most social networks are now tragically private by default (youtube playlists, etc) and we can&#x27;t observe the feed of other users, not even super-users, only our shitty algo biased one. Yet here I can easily browse user contents and this is just much more useful than anything I could have came up myself, we users of the interweb are so deprived of authentic user content, I discovered in a few minutes of user&#x27;s content browsing unique concepts, such as a mapping of the musical taste of someone, and so many other relatable, under-represented and heartwarming content!<p>The world might not realize it, but this is what everyone needs.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinopio.club&#x2F;my-music-taste-4Z-ImVfoQ46poNtyLJSrQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinopio.club&#x2F;my-music-taste-4Z-ImVfoQ46poNtyLJSrQ</a>

Nothing beats Miro. Very sweet version though