Conversation

One process I still can’t do well in available software is structuring talks & essays. Requires a spatial canvas that handles text well. Always still happens in a notebook, or a giant sheet of paper. Miro is decent, but unconnected to existing notes in Roam, links to refs, etc.

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The software adds some affordances over paper; I can rearrange, edit, expand in any direction. But it’s not emerging from existing notes, helping me spot logical flaws, enrich arguments. (And yeah there’s a “diagramming” feature in Roam, but lets be honest; it’s hot trash)

Maggie

visting SFO

@Mappletons

Final complaint; I can’t export this spatial map into anything other than a PDF or PNG. If directional arrows = logical flow I should be able to export as an ordered list of text, images, and links. An outline of the essay to fill out back in a text-focused app.

8:37 AM · Apr 24, 2022Twitter for iPhone

Replying to

Had a bunch of good ideas sent my way. Hacky solution for the moment is embedding Miro and

@tldraw

boards into Roam. Not really “integrated” but at least the content is side-by-side and gives you the ability to map and draw

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Working in that. It gets even worst if you include other parts but you want to alter them before inclusion. Like adding a segue, an outro, or takeaways in the middle. In this case, it's no more a tree but a conversation between fragments. Sketches coming ...

Replying to

In a slack convo, am hearing a very similar want…

@jimmyhmiller

extracted & programmed something like this using

@MuseAppHQ

, he might have evolved this since that tweet Doubt Muse goes fully collab, but it’s bones point to a possibility

Quote Tweet

Jimmy Miller

@jimmyhmiller

· Oct 17, 2021

Love that @MuseAppHQ has a very simple export format. Muse bundles are just a zip file with JSON and ordinary files. I was able to make a quick and hacky viewer for my programming readings. Not the polish of actual muse, but happy it was so easy to make. jimmyhmiller.github.io/muse

Replying to

Hi Maggie. One thing we did recently was tag sticky notes and export them to csv. You then have stickies as cells and can filter through the tags. You can then start to use this as a database. Unsure if it is useful in this case, but it is an alternative to PNG and PDF 👍

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I use Miro, Figjam, or Scapple to create visual outlines. And I add links to Roam blocks. Would be great if Roam did something like this natively. For now, I don’t mind re-creating it in another tool. But I do wish I could export as text like you said. Would save a lot of time.

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Do you have an example of the canvas content and the export you'd like to have? Very interested in this usecase.

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Looked through all these replies, and surprised that no one suggested a mind mapping tool (Freemind, or SimpleMind) which all allow move, rearrange etc and will export your final map as an ordered outline to text, html or word.