RG/DN Experiment

Gerritsen / Ness Experiment

Here we could define a number of `areas' for things like `Newly arrived cards', `I agree', `Yuck' etc.

2002©David Ness / Rob Gerritsen

The Cards and The View

Design

There is something particularly useful in separating the content of the `cards' (which probably should accumulate over time, and view which is almost certainly situational---and imposed either as a transient or as a part of a standard look that one takes, from time to time, for some particular perspective.

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DNess

20020815 180000

Browser Woes

Problems

At the moment, my HTML only works in IE5.5+ (I think). I would like to have it work in Mozilla and Opera, but all-in-all that seems low priority (and quite straighforwardsly doable).

The thought here is to develop in one principal implementation and then blow that out to several other environments once we have some clue about what we are doing.

DNess

20020815 180000

Passing Views

Design

The idea of passing a view to someone else is tantalizing. Indeed one can actually envision an automated sequence that shows `your view' being imposed on someone by moving the cards at some viewable speed.

Comment:

DNess

20020815 180000

Local vs. Central Service Model

Design

There would be considerable wisdom, IMO, in supporting the notion that one could work on data both locally and centrally. At the moment I am handling my `Movable Type' experiment in just this way.

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DNess

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20020815 184100

Saving Client-Side State

Design

Ideally it should be possible to let the client-side move the cards around, and somehow save the state of the client (pixel locations of the cards, principally) so that they can be restored or delivered to someone else. I am not sure if this is practical or not. Since, at the moment, the only code running client side is code (JavaScript) that was delivered in the HTML, whatever is going on needs to be pretty simple, and need to operate within the permission limits imposed by the Java Sandbox.

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DNess

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20020815 190900

Passing Cards

Design

Passing cards to someone else seems, on the surface, to be a pretty straightforward process. With appropriate checksums etc. it should be possible to both pass new cards and changes to old cards.

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DNess

20020815 180000

Automation

Design

There have been lots of elaborate attempts at automation, but no one seems to have made much of some very simple things that could be done to use it to indicate how data is being `moved around' and formed into ideas.

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DNess

20020815 200000

Sharing a Workspace

Design

It would seem that the technology we are discussing here would be a natural for sharing information between anywhere from two up to a few people who are in the process of organizing their thoughts about something. Little stack of cards representing conceptual domains like

I don't understand
I agree
give to X to research it

might prove to be useful, and quite natural in the paradigm that we are working with here.

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DNess

20020815 200000

Hypercards

Mac Parallels

By just the oddest of coincidences, the first dicussion of Hypercards in a long time has just bubbled up on the net. I have heard about Hypercards forever, but don't really have much of a clue about

what they bring to the table; or
why they died.

Background information would be useful, and---I'd guess---enlightening.

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DNess

20020815 191900

StickyBrain

Mac Parallels

This is a current Mac product that has won some personal testimonials (to me) by some users. I'd like to know what it does to a little greater extent.

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DNess

20020815 191900

`ActiveCards': Cards that DO

Design

I'm beginning to see more and more of the cards as little drupelets of information that actually DO something (like announce that you're supposed to work on me or remember to discuss me or the like).

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DNess

20020815 200800

Meta-Objects

Design

Meta objects that may be of importance:

Information
- Folders
- Open Folders
- Drawers
- Cabinets
Display
- Background text
- Areas on Screen.

Folders differ from Open Folders in that the latter have some notion of display associated with them as well as their objective content.

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DNess

20020815 200800

Physical Location

Design

It is pretty easy to `locate' cards with some notion of their physical location as long as we have a data base of latitude and longitude information available. This is actually something that is pretty easy to do, particularly within the US, where very cheap maps are available. There are (or at least `were', I haven't checked recently) even services available that will convert addresses into locations at a cost of about $0.05/location.

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DNess

20020815 201800

Diary Entries

Card Structures

Diary entries contain Date and Time, possibly a Duration, possibly using a special case (a 0m event at 00:00) to `title' the day, an event, and other data that will probably depend on the type of the event.

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DNess

20020815 200800

Restaurants

Card Structures

Restaurants have a location, a schedule of operation, an owner/chef, perhaps some ratings, and certain style characteristics (fireplaces, no credit cards, ...)

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DNess

20020815 200800

People Records

Card Structures

People have a home location, work location, other location and lots of other characteristics. Some people will tend to be described in considerable depth, others will have only the basic facts.

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DNess

20020815 200800

Movies and Books

Card Structures

Movies and books have titles, perhaps `recommended by's Authors/Directors, Stars (for movies), costs, ratings, seen/read flags.

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DNess

20020815 200800

Updates to Stack

Processes

In the short run, updates to the stack are processed by sending them to DN. An important next step is to figure out how to add new cards from any participating source. Ideas would be cheerfully received.

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DNess

20020816 022700

Conversion of Stack to Document

Processes

One way to use these cards is in the way we used to use index cards, to organize ideas prior to writing a paper. So, I'd like a way to convert a stack of cards, once I've got it in the right order, into a document.

Not only fully within the intention, but actually already pretty much trivial. The innards of the processes involve a simple object data structure that should make this convenient.

20020816 021800

Tabs on Cards

Structure Extensions

When cards are in a stack, it would be nice to sort of be able to see into the stack. One method could be by adding colored tabs that stick out of cards at different positions. Now, even when the cards are in a stack, the tabs will be visible at various spots giving some clue at least as to various categories present in the stack. These tabs could have other functionality - grab a tab to grab all cards with a tab in the same position and move the subset so selected as a group.

This is harder. At the moment, the whole systems runs off of a simple HTML file, and the `key' element is a `TABLE'. Two approaches are suggested by this: (1) figure out how to do it with tables; (2) abandon tables. In the long run the 2nd is probably necessary, but I'd hate to do it in the short run.

20020816 021800

The Dealing `Shoe'

Processes

I picture a `process' that you can drop a stack on that will then `spit it out' into piles not unlike the way an old-time card sorter did. The inputs to the `Shoe' are a deck of cards and a set of rules, and the outputs are stacks that were created from the deck according to the rules. I picture these processes as `chainable' so the output of one `deal' may well serve as the input to a second stage etc. This kind of process can have many uses: categorizing cards by content, making up hyperlinks, making up time-sequenced or priority sequenced lists, etc.

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DNess

20020816 064200

Documents as Super-Card Stuctures

Documents

RG has raised the question of structuring documents out of cards. The reverse transformation is also very important. Incoming documents can be parsed into cards and then have the parts spread around as is appropriate. A good prototype might be to think about breaking up an E-Mail message.

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DNess

20020816 064200

REBOL Editor

Tools

It would probably be easy to write a REBOL editor to manage object lists.

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DNess

20020816 064200

Relation to Drupelets

Definitions

At the moment there seems to be emerging a one-to-one relationship between index cards and drupelets. Are index cards simply a physical embodiment of drupelets?

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DNess

20020816 064200

Universal Drupelet IDs (Supersession)

Drupelet Theory

At the moment the most natural PDId (Permanent Drupelet Id) seems to be YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS-TIEBRK-PERSON, where PERSON is a conventional name, and TIEBRK is a sequence number of m digits. m is currently 6, but this should be discussed, as---indeed---should be true for this whole topic.

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DNess

20020816 064200

White Papers

Documents

It's getting to be time to write some White Papers but at the moment we really haven't given much thought about how they should be incorporated into this picture. A major question, however, is whether a paper is really just a special kind of stack of drupelet cards. Perhaps it is a bunch of cards (loosely) stapled together.

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DNess

20020816 064200

Pop-Ups

Tools

Should Pop-Ups be used, and if so for what?

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DNess

20020816 064200

Prioritized Task List (DN)

Tasks

Here is my prioritized task list (early draft)

Save index card state;
Allow state to be restored;
Allow state to be passed around;
Work out m x n Cards;
Allow other people to create cards;

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DNess

20020816 064200

Composing Cards, Decks, Displays

Process

It looks like there is a three-stage process at the moment. Data and Card Format is brought together to compose a card. Cards are then assembled into decks. Then the decks are displayed. How adequate is this model?

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DNess

20020816 064200

Personal (History) State

Process

Part of the tast of saving state relates to developing a personal history that might record things like `card has been visited / seen before'.

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DNess

20020816 173900

Superseeding a Drupelet

Process

It is not at all clear how we should handle the problem of superseeding drupelets. There are probably problems with all of the solutions that might be chosen to handle this problem. One possible solution: once an ID is assigned it is `permanent' but there's also a `version addendum' to the ID that `doesn't count' that can be used to differentiate them. Perhaps this suggests a 2-dimensional ID with a permanent part and a variable part, where each part is itself an ID.

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DNess

20020816 173900

Private Cards

Card Structures

It would be nice to have the capability to produce PGP encoded `cards' that could only be read by particular individuals who have the key.

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DNess

20020816 211000

Outline Cards

Card Structures

It would be possible to support outline structures as an auxillary alternative. There are several alternatives for how lower levels of the outlines might be handled.

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DNess

20020817 043100

Select Area on Cards

Problem

At the moment I don't know how to select the text in the area pointed at by the cursor.

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DNess

20020817 065900

Private Message Experiment in Process

Experiment

It would seem that the left button can be used to select an area, at least under IE5.0 under Win2K. This can be used in conjunction with PGP to manage an encryption/decryption via standard software.

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DNess

20020819 024700

Multi-Destination Private Messages

Experiment

It is unclear at the moment whether private messages destined for several individuals require separate `cards' for each individual or not. It would be nice if one card could be read by different users each of whom have different PGP keys.

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DNess

20020819 181900

Mapping from VAULT to Index Cards

Experiment

It looks like there might be a very nice straightforward mapping between the data structure used to manipulate text in Vault and the data structures that support index cards. This might allow Vault to be a very convenient front end for index cards, at least in one incarnation.

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DNess

20020819 181900

Vault as an Interface

Design

Vault is a nice program for manipulating indented outline formats. Each line in the outline is assumed to have a paragraph / page of text associated with it, and it is easy to move items around in the hierarchy. The header / body form of the data is quite parallel to that which is used in this project, so this program may prove to be a convenient way to manipulate text in this project.

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DNess

20020820 141000

Text Storage Issues

Design

Storing Drupelet text raises several interesting questions. Among them are considerations of the role of white space, existence of a PRE-type mode, markup format, allowed transformations.

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DNess

20020820 141200

A Private Message Experiment

Private for DN Only

Unknown

DNess

20020819 013800