An IDE for ideas. Intellisense for thoughts. For those of you who develop using powerful IDEs (such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, ...), it's hard to imagine going back to a basic notepad. Most people, most of the time, don't write software. They exchange ideas, express wishes, share their feelings. And to do that, they use tools that are not more powerful than a basic notepad. This forces them to be explicit, to explain…
Why? I think the key is exactly what you've said - to think linearly. Ideas often mushroom to end us up in a place drastically different from where we started, so the end result is not really linear. But we need to think about the next step in an idea linearly if we ever want to get something done. That is where mind maps (non-linear all the way) and traditional task-based tools (too linear) fall short.
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