Dear Thortspace … I have a bunch of questions …
Scenario: One user new to Thortspace sent us a whole list of questions and rather than separate the answers into individual articles, I thought it might be useful to keep the whole bunch of them together:
Can I express relative importance by resizing thorts?
No. :-(
But you can make your Thortgroups bigger or smaller by adding Thorts to them.
You can also use category colours and graphics to iconize your Thorts, and in that way express things about the importance and significance of those thorts. And you can do that in multiple different ways on a single sphere and switch between those ways. See:
and:
Can I choose different thort shapes besides circular (really spherical) ?
No. :-(
Can I build connections as bridges that render as arcs through space instead of being constrained to the sphere surface?
Well paths go directly from the centre of a thort or group to the centre of another thort or group, so they do sort-of go through space — eg. they could go straight through the centre of a sphere, but they don’t arc above the surface of the sphere which I’m thinking is what you’re wanting? :-(
How do you lock the position and orientation of a group from casual “optimization” by the rendering engine?
I’m afraid you can’t at the moment. We need to fix this. :-(
Can a sphere have a “projection” mode where it flattens to a surface so you’re not stuck looking at the back side of half of it?
In the Windows version of Thortspace we have an “un-documented feature” that does something close to what you’re describing. Control+L toggles it on and off. How useful it might be probably depends a lot on the sphere. We have some ideas for version 2 that could make this quite a lot more useful. :-) -ish? One way we try to address this in the current product is by being able to toggle the sphere transparency on and off. And again in the Windows version Alt-click on a far-side group brings it to front centre.
See the article below for some further info on this.
How about board game pieces that can track progress down various paths?
We did think about having “map-pins” to mark out places, but this idea got subsumed into “viewpoints” which are the stepping units of Journeys (found in Present mode)… see:
Another thing that I do want us to do for the realtime-collaboration functionality is to show the viewpoints of other realtime users (and possibly also their mouse locations where relevant).
Currently we only indicate on the sharetab whether they are currently connected and doing live editing on the same sphere (and not what in particular they are looking at).
We do, to an extent, indicate which thort or group other realtime collaborators are editing by making those thorts un-editable to other users and dimming those thorts out slightly from the point of view of other users, but that is the extent of it.
Can we animate anything?
Depending on what you mean by animate, there are things we do animate already:
- Transitions between arrangements
- Navigation between linked-spheres
- Navigation to and from embedded spheres and networks
- Transitions between viewpoints on Journeys
- Steps through the Undo and Redo log
There are a ton of other things that we could animate.
I think the priorities are things that improve the visibility and explicitness of realtime-collaboration.
How do you express the passage of time or points in time?
Points in time can be saved as “Arrangements”. See the following article for an introduction to using Arrangements.
Arrangements can be ordered into Jounrneys which include an Arrangement and Viewpoint into each Journey step. (See the article about Present Mode further back up this article.)
What would a calendar look like in this paradigm?
Personally I tend to have a current month’s sphere which I name eg. March 2018. And then I link that to previous months sphere so that one way of navigating through my sphere networks is to go from one month to the next.
Then I link to the current month’s sphere a number of other spheres that I’m working on at the moment.
Some spheres may be linked to the current month’s spheres and also to previous months’ spheres. If this becomes complicated I disconnect spheres from earlier months that they previously were connected to.
Also we have “Do Mode” which provides a Kanban view of sphere content. The point of this is that thinking you do in Think Mode can instantly be reviewed in Do Mode, and so the insights discovered in Think Mode can be used to derive and drive action item lists in Do Mode. Arrangements can be useful again here, because Arrangements allow multiple alternative different grouping configurations in both Think Mode and Do Mode, and this includes not showing particular Thorts or Groups that are not relevant for a particular context (even though they are still stored with the sphere and available to view in other arrangements — such Thorts are called “Un-arranged Thorts”.
And we have export to HTML a.k.a. “Show all thorts to browser” which provides a kind of grouped list view.
Can I pin a picture or movie that would render at a location to a size on a sphere without being stuck in a static, one-sized thort?
No. :-(
Not currently. I think this will be easier to implement in the Web version. But you can link to any URL in a Thort — eg. a YouTube video.
Not as nice as embedding it, true enough.
I can see your sketchy sphere you’ve “shared” here, but I lack editing privileges.
You can share spheres with URLs that include “join codes”.
These enable people to gain editing privileges on a shared sphere when you want to provide that as part of the URL. If you share spheres this way you don’t have to know the email address someone is using on their Thortspace account. When users follow a joining like like this, their accounts will be added to the sharing list and appear on the Sharing Tab inside the Thortspace App.
There are a variety of computer interfaces in various SciFi media with features not too far from Thort. I am sure you’ve considered them all before going with what is?
We spent a few years experimenting, and sharing our experiments with a small group of beta testers. And listening to their feedback.
I think we have come up with something that is both novel and useful.
But I do also think that the insight we have gained in making version 1 could allow version 2 to be four times as good. That’s my hope. We don’t have a timeline for it yet.
Thanks very much for the feedback, and asking the questions. We love feedback! :-)
