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Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

gingkoapp.com

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Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#81

Post by andrewfong »

Nice. The inadvertent jump to another branch can be disorienting though.

Suppose my tree structure is as so:

  * a
  ** b
  *** c
  * d
  ** e
  *** f
  *** g
  *** h
Gingko lays it out like this:

  a b c
  d e f
      g
      h
If I'm in the far right column, let's say I've highlighted item g and go up to item f. However, I hold the arrow key down a little too long and overshoot to item c. This causes everything to the left to suddenly jump around and disorient me.

A related issue, the layout suggests that c-f-g-h is an intended list when it isn't. It can cause readers to become confused if they're reading normally in one column and don't fully realize they've jumped to a different branch in between c and f.

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#83

Post by defilade »

adriano_f wrote: post #46
defilade wrote: post #44

Interesting idea. Can you make it so that when I click in the card it automatically goes into edit mode? Having to click an "edit" button really slows things down.

You can double-click the card to go into edit mode. Single click would be easier, but since we have drag-and-drop, and sometimes use clicking just for navigation, we have to use double-click to edit. (unless you have a better approach in mind?) PS: Also, once you get used to them, the keyboard shortcuts lets you navigate & edit pretty quickly.

The shortcuts help a lot. Thanks! Now I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#84

Post by gizmogwai »

I'm sorry if I'm rude, but the more I think of if it, the less I see the point.

The initial described problem (organising ideas in a hierarchical way) has already been solved efficiently years ago with visual mind maps. They have been used successfully to not only create the hierarchy, but also to realise that sometimes, the tree is more like a graph.

As a reader, it's infuriating to have to click all the time (or use keyboard) and have this page scrolling all around. I just want to READ, not being distracted by some kind of useless parallax effect.

As a writer, moving ideas around to get them properly organised is really painful. There is no distraction-free interface neither.

If you really want to make tool for writers, I would strongly suggest you that you take a look at tools like Ulysses or Scrivener and try to understand the rationale behind the UI choice they made.

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#85

Post by adriano_f »

IanCal wrote: post #73
adriano_f wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hubris of the statement is not lost on me, but what should a founder be but delusional and optimistic :) 1. It's both a viewer and a word processor. It relies on Markdown (and LaTeX through extensions). We export to Md, but will be adding more import/export options in the future. We hope to create a publication standard for it. 2. The structure of the document is an "outline of index cards". Each card can have on…

> It relies on Markdown (and LaTeX through extensions). We export to Md, but will be adding more import/export options in the future. We hope to create a publication standard for it. Do we need a new standard for structured documents? Would a not be sufficient?

For three levels deep, no we don't need a new standard. Larger trees, linked together will probably need something new.

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#86

Post by Roritharr »

Does this really need to be a web-app? Storing my Documents in the Cloud is not possible and not even desireable in most of my work environments. Even in my private life i like to be offline to work on the kind of tasks that Gingko would help me with. Just charge me a one-time fee for an Windows App (Win8 Guy here, Mac Apps would be reasonable aswell) and let me handle my data my way.

I've thought about building something like Gingko for a long time, so thanks for providing an alternative option!

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#87

Post by mbreese »

What happened to the app shown in the linked Science without borders talk? That looks more useful to me, if only because it fits with the typical science paper writing workflow. How did the document editor migrate to this 2D editor?

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#88

Post by susi22 »

I don't want to have to think when I read a book. The author has to lead me through and follow a path. The auther has to make sure I get a decent introduction and he should make every sentence count.

This is nice to play. And maybe even has it's applications such as documentation where quick browsing helps. But if I had to read a thesis/book like this I'd be a very unhappy person.

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#89

Post by 6d0debc071 »

adriano_f wrote: post #58
marcamillion wrote: post #57

This looks awesome, but the elephant in the room is how does the document look offline? Can it be exported to PDF or be printed or something? When you print it, how does it look?

With better support mobile devices (including eReaders and whatever comes after them), we hope it'll be less of an issue as time goes on. Right now, we simply export the Markdown to flat text (breadth-first). But we will be adding PDF export options, for exporting the whole document, or one column. That way, you can still end up with a traditional document at the end, if you want. Any other ideas?

Have the breadth as a summary page perhaps? Like when you open a book and it's effectively the list of chapters. Then have the 2l tiers as your chapters and the 3l tiers as the subheadings in those chapters?

Don't know whether that's what you're doing at the moment :)

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#90

Post by defilade »

colemanfoley wrote: post #19

I like how it organizes information spatially, like WorkFlowy. I much prefer this visual organization to tags, for example. That said, I found it hard to understand what it was, even though I'm a long-time WorkFlowy user and am very interested in this kind of thing. I wrote a post where I talked about organizing information visually in more depth here: http://colemanfoley.quora.com/Mind-Mapping-with-WorkFlowy (Regist…

I'm a big user of Workflowy and I felt the same about Gingko at first. The keyboard shortcuts help a lot though because I can get my thoughts down on paper much more quickly.
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