Are you getting inspiration from these projects?

[Adrian Sampaleanu]

Hi Jeremy,

I'm curious if you're getting any inspiration from these two projects:

Ward Cunningham's new take on wikis, Smallest Federated Wiki and
http://wardcunningham.github.com
http://fed.wiki.org

Xiki
http://xiki.org

They both look to have some pretty neat ideas that might be worth emulating.

Cheers,
Adrian

[PMario]

On Jan 15, 8:52 pm, Adrian Sampaleanu <nman...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Xiki http://xiki.org
The xiki stuff has blown me away.
-m

[David Doolin]

Craig, you're making more waves beyond the
Ruby community again! TW is a very cool piece of
technology as well.

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[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Adrian

I'm curious if you're getting any inspiration from these two projects:

Ward Cunningham's new take on wikis, Smallest Federated Wiki and
http://wardcunningham.github.com

http://fed.wiki.org

Yes, I've been tracking Ward's work quite closely. There's some unification of nomenclature already (eg, "story" for a sequence of paragraphs/tiddlers), and some differences (eg SFW's paragraph = TW's tiddler). The centre of gravity of the two projects is different: SFW is focussed on the mechanics of federation, and the UI for understanding federated history. In TW5 I'm exploring the idea of a wiki as a representation transformation engine, and evolving wikitext into an algebra for tiddlers. SFW has a fascinating integration with D3.js which I'm watching with interest. I hope to see some interoperability between the projects over time.

 

Xiki
http://xiki.org

I did see this when it first did the rounds, but it had fallen off my radar. Also somewhat related is this:

http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/

I'd see both as experiments into the same idea of harnessing the power of a command line interface, and updating it to the GUI and/or web eras. Definitely of great interest to me.

For lots of reasons, most of the discussion around UI design is rather oriented towards users who are assumed to be too busy to learn new things, unwilling to invest anything more than cursory attention in the interface that we craft. In ecommerce we visualise prospective buyers falling away at the first sign of anything that they don't understand. So, we design checkout flows to be familiar above all else, to reduce the cognitive load on our users. That's all fair enough, but I'm fascinated by user interfaces that trade a steeper learning curve in return for ultimately being more useful. I believe we can craft user experiences that combine a visceral initial appeal with the progressive disclosure of a small number of concepts that combine in powerful ways. Such interfaces aren't appropriate in all circumstances, but they're much more thrilling to work on.

Best wishes

Jeremy

 

They both look to have some pretty neat ideas that might be worth emulating.

Cheers,
Adrian

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[Adrian Sampaleanu]

On Wednesday, January 16, 2013 4:51:20 PM UTC-5, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

I'd see both as experiments into the same idea of harnessing the power of a command line interface, and updating it to the GUI and/or web eras. Definitely of great interest to me.

For lots of reasons, most of the discussion around UI design is rather oriented towards users who are assumed to be too busy to learn new things, unwilling to invest anything more than cursory attention in the interface that we craft. In ecommerce we visualise prospective buyers falling away at the first sign of anything that they don't understand. So, we design checkout flows to be familiar above all else, to reduce the cognitive load on our users. That's all fair enough, but I'm fascinated by user interfaces that trade a steeper learning curve in return for ultimately being more useful. I believe we can craft user experiences that combine a visceral initial appeal with the progressive disclosure of a small number of concepts that combine in powerful ways. Such interfaces aren't appropriate in all circumstances, but they're much more thrilling to work on.

 
I also think that UI's can be unduly limited (e.g. Netflix) to suit the masses and so significantly lower the experience for those who want to achieve more than the basics. For me, the ideal knowledge management tool, has to permit effortless capture and curation. For the capture part, I could envision some kind of HUD where you'd work as usual with the tools you normally use, but at the touch of a key or as a result of a gesture, you could bring focus to the knowledge capture mode of the knowledge management system and indicate by way of selection, lasso, etc. what part of the screen/document you wanted to capture/link to. The capture tool could introspect the underlying app(s) and, through OCR, inspection of its temp/working files, automation API, etc., grab what needs to be grabbed with a minimum of hassle for the user. Some of this is what I had in mind when I asked you about node-webkit, earlier.

With current tools such as Evernote or OneNote you can capture with relative ease if the source is a web browser, but for many other sources the user has to go through a few too many steps to export data into the knowledge system. The ideal, again IMO, is a way of capturing that allows you to immediately "position" the new data in the context of existing stuff in order to minimize the curation needed later and to maximize returns when searching/visualizing right from the start. A sort of an intelligent "auto-completion" for insertion would be great, where you could be presented with different ways of integrating new data into the old.

The other place where existing tools suffer is in the ease with which you can curate a growing knowledge DB. When I think of how I'd ideally like to deal with information overload, I can imagine ways to easily create and re-arrange links between info atoms. For some things a spatial (2D/3D depending on the data in question) layout is what's best with links being visible, color coded, labeled, etc. Things that are not so important could be dimmed out or sent to the periphery. VUE (http://vue.tufts.edu), allows for some of the kind of layouts I'm talking about, but, IMO, something like that could be just a particular view onto your data and not the only way to manage it. As an aside, the lack of spatial "stability" of tiddlers is one of the things that, depending on what kind of visualization I'm after, kind of bothers me about the original TiddlyWiki. I'm kind of OCD about some things and I want them to stay where I put them! :-) Of course I also appreciate locality of reference at other times.

Anyhow, I'm blabbering on here and I'm sure you've got your own vision for this stuff, but I'm hoping what you'll end up with will be flexible enough for others to build some non-wiki-like visualization and management of linked data. I'm also glad you mentioned interoperability with SFW as I'd hope that if the ideal PIM can't be had with any one tool, maybe it could be possible with the right amount of deeper integration among disparate tools.

Regards,
Adrian