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according to the cloud thank you robot lady all right so share screen portion of the screen welcome to tool for Thought rocks if you're not here between rocks if you're here for something else uh it feels free to show
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yourself to the door that is why we are here um social start rocks is a uh group that meets together to talk about these things that have various names digital Gardens second brains tools for thought that kind of thing
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um it's primarily folks who are working as makers of these tools or creators of these tools but it's also heavy users of these tools who are trying to figure out how to use tools like this to think better to to work better with other
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people and to basically become a part of their workflow in their life so we've been doing this for like a year and a half now there's like a whole bunch of past meeting recordings on YouTube if you wanted to dig in there
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um and check that out there's also a mastodon server tools for thought about rocks so if you're looking for a place to migrate from the sinking ship that is Twitter then feel free to join us on Mastodon until thought there and try out
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your hand at activity Pub the main way that we coordinate is through Luma and I believe all of you got here through that if you didn't that's fine welcome you're welcome but you should go sign up for the group on Luma that's where you'll get
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um notifications about future events and as well as like Recaps of past events notifications when the the YouTube video is available as well as some of the other stuff that happens around the community I just mentioned the YouTube
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is up so uh that a lot of our content's up on YouTube so feel free to go check that out if you like we also have an open Collective so if you're enjoying this and would like to throw some money into making fun stuff happen you can go
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to opencollective.com tools for thought and uh and fund this delightful event um and we do occasionally do use that funding for things like resources like hosting the Mastodon server which
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fission is currently providing for and some of the other resources are kind of donated by the community but but if we have some funding we could do some fun stuff like maybe eventually another in-person meeting or some kind of conference or something but
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that's there for you main thing we do is get together monthly to talk about Tools For Thought rocks or tools for thought and related topics if you have any uh people that you would like to hear from or topics that you'd like to talk about feel free to reach out to me or Michael
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Gartner who's on the call right now is also helping to organize hey Michael and Boris is usually around as well so any of us to like kind of propose a topic um it's we love it when people reach out and say there's something I'm interested
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in I want to talk about it um this is a like friendly group to have those conversations in and then finally as we're going through Jacob I'm going to hand over to Jacob in just a second for like our main or like the first of the two kind of sections of the meeting
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um but the kind of the etiquette or the protocol here is um if you have a question um I'll leave it so that you can unmute yourself I'm gonna let Jacob say whether he wants to like give a you know five or ten minute talk uninterrupted or if he's
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like interrupt me as I go different speakers have different preferences that way but if when you have something to say you're welcome to unmute and try that if you're not comfortable unmuting feel free to type in the chat um I'll be watching that chat and I can then say
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your question out loud for you um as we go along so and feel free to use the raise hand and zoom thing and I can call on you during that piece all right sweet well without further Ado
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um I'm introduce Jacob from logseek uh so Jacob is a product designer at logseek and he has been working on building a uh a canvas I believe based on TL draw if I'm correct um that might
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be why Steve Ruiz has snuck into the back of the room um the TL draw uh canvas into logseek for those of you who are not familiar with logseek Jacob might be giving a demo of that as well but I'll just give
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a like two second version this is another text based graph based um uh uh tool for taking notes kind of the in the tradition of sort of Rome
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obsidian notion it has a lot of things that it also focuses uh heavily on Open Source on um and it's more of an outliner for those folks who have been there um Ramses is also in the chat um who's a
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community organizer at um log seek so if you have questions about logseek that are not not related to this call Ramses might be able to answer those for you in the chat all right without further Ado I'll hand
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it over to Jacob stop my share perfect thanks a lot um and yeah I would prefer uh talking through it first and then having a q a afterwards if that's fine with you
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cool um let's jump right into lock sag can you see my screen yeah all right um well I'm excited to give you a little show and tell of looks like white bars
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um thank you for the intro Jazz um and yeah as you um oh let's let's go first um with like what I'm going to talk about quickly um why does the Luxe whiteboard feature come from what do we set out to build
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what do users really like about this feature and how do they use it and then what's to come in the future um and as Jess said already uh luxury is traditionally known as an outliner based
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tool for Thought uh with the like local first approach based on markdown files and so it kind of begs the question how come we're suddenly in the spatial canvas Arena
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um it's we still love the outliner uh we still think it's great for personal Knowledge Management uh it's especially useful with journals in in the daily usage for example for meetings for work logs for collecting
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ideas and stuff like that but uh we think that a lot of knowledge work situations there's also something missing and I think Maggie Appleton was one of the first she's also pretty famous in the scene I would say and she
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was one of the first to point the issue out that I want to talk about uh she says that one process that she struggles doing in this outliner based softwares
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and she's been big on enrollment research for example uh back then at least um is structuring talks and essays for example uh for her she's a very like visual thinker I would say she requires
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a spatial canvas that handles text well uh kind of like posted notes on the wall situation and um and here as well um she says that yeah a lot of these uh
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typical note-taking Knowledge Management apps are missing that um ability to break out of linearity basically the the linearity of text um and do so
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by ideally by enabling spatial Arrangement drawing visual inputs stuff like that so based on this and also uh our conversations with our users and and our own Vision we had to think very
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strong hunch that there's a need to signify connections of information and I'm talking about information that's already in your knowledge base but also emerging thoughts in the moment and signify those connections through lines
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or proximity for grouping on a canvas um yeah that just allows to place these these information elements together with shape with drawings and stuff like that and
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um so basically uh there's benefits of the the indentation Paradigm of the outliner it's just great great for structuring input in a hierarchical and linear way
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it helps a lot of users to clarify their thoughts uh it's great for for constructing and organizing ideas in a sequence and that helps especially writers but also all types of knowledge
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workers to have a foundation for written artifacts they they need to produce like emails blog posts thesis lecture Grant proposals or whatever and um but on the other hand there's also the benefits of
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the infinite canvas uh things like proximity of elements grouping visual connecting with lines uh size and color they help the brain to understand
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structure and so like paper these canvas tools help the user to break out of the linearity arrange things in a very free way uh kind of feel like a world for their thoughts be it a mind map a mood
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board arranging Post-it notes on the wall like like Maggie does um or would like to do and so that's kind of like the The Memory Palace idea that basically yeah arranging things
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um in space strengthens their Connection in your brain and so what did we set out to build we're going to launch next week actually the the MVP version of whiteboard that means
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our whiteboard feature enters the um the better stage not that great um so basically um
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where we set out to to extend the locksack outliner mode with the canvas that allows users to visually group and Link different elements from their knowledge base as well as external media types and shapes and stuff like that to
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compose to remix to annotate and relate contents we also we also were very focused on uh frictionless entering being uh part of this product experience or core of this
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product experience and also fast connection making um not so much focusing on drawing and detail customization at the beginning of all that's also things we aspire to do um
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also very important for us was that yeah like block and Page references basically work on the canvas so you can effortlessly use them how you how you would use them and the rest of lexic and
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also um kind of have a visual way of of block referencing basically live copies um of elements and um
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yeah each each element obviously uh should also follow this Paradigm of being able to reopened as a page or in the right sidebar that's also something we find pretty important users should be
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able to change the background color of cards and all shapes in the canvas um like for example so um and
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um yeah for more complex topics uh we also think nested whiteboards are pretty useful which I'll show an example of later uh all whiteboard elements similar to um
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similar to yeah all the blocks basically should be findable um in in the search interface um so yeah basically these were the main
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things we were setting out to do um and another thing I will show later as well is like every block or element on the candles can be linked to any other block or page in your graph um and so that brings me to what the
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users really like uh about the Whiteboard features as a is in this current stage uh most people that I speak to really appreciate this ability to have a
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yeah have a basically a free from canvas uh that allows them to link elements uh like all elements from their graph in a way um and just drop them on the canvas
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basically and it has a lot of purposes for different types of users diagram and diagramming is an obvious one mood boards uh is also something I've seen a
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few times already visual weakies something that uh yeah we hope we can see more in the future as well with the linking feature and studying making connections between topics sense making
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that's something I've definitely seen a lot um uh also people appreciate the ability to yeah embed YouTube videos and websites and stuff like that
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um so how do people actually use whiteboards um well the Mind mapping use case is I guess the yeah uh like a very obvious one uh
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here's like a user showing me uh how he actually created a whiteboard about whiteboards and really kind of showing off all the uh features like embedding blocks and Pages
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um I'm just going to close this so it's not distracting um yeah embedding blocks and Pages um yeah linking things with arrows uh and and uh yeah then
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just the ability to to arrange blocks uh leads to sense making as I said before uh this user also showed me that he actually annotates screenshots sometimes so this is something that's interesting
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for people in the design and front-end world like you throw in screenshots of something you need to work on at the moment and and you might want to like highlight something um that needs to be improved for example
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I also talked to one person that's working in filmmaking where you maybe throw in a scene or like a still of the scene and uh yeah annotate things like that making flow charts is quite an obvious one as well like understanding
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causes of situations or yeah complex problems um nesting my boards um is I think not a very exciting whiteboard just uh random scribble but
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yeah just to show you like you can Nest whiteboards into each other which can be useful for far more complex topics um and yeah the I think the biggest one at the moment uh that I see
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uh often and that I think also just shows the power of of whiteboards embedded into all the other log Tech features is uh studying actually so using it uh together like in conjunction
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with the PDF reader and The annotation feature and the outliner so it's like a screenshot of the present for example reading scientific um paper or whatever having the right sidebar open and also having the cameras
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open and kind of yeah doing all these things at the same time um one person that I especially was amazed by um uh when they showed me their studying process was Brian Santa who's also
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pretty popular in our community uh with all the plugins and stuff he's providing he he's actually taking uh Stanford computer science course at the moment um and what he uses whiteboards for is
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basically to uh they provide slides um lecture handout notes and also book recommendations uh and stuff like that and he collects all that in the outliner
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view um and then makes sub Pages for for these different um resources okay for example slides and stuff like that and then uh yeah it starts highlighting
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in the PDF reader um and the Y code basically for him is the way to bring all these things together and to find the connections between them and
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um yeah I just think that's a very powerful workflow um and yeah but I also loved hearing from him
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uh was that he actually says that the spatial organized are organizing um of the elements on the canvas is actually for him basically the learning
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process so yeah this again brings brings me back to the Memory Palace uh thing I mentioned earlier um the this is sense making basically the the arranging
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um yeah some other things that people use for example the the YouTube embeds um and another feature that still we're trying to improve but there's an early version of it basically it's like
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embedding websites like that um lastly a feature we added recently and that we think can be very powerful is uh a linking feature so basically any
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whiteboard element uh can be selected and and linked to any block or page you have in your graph already so for example here I just dropped in an image of a real worldwide
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board and um yeah I can just start typing now um for example like so and you see now this element has like a link at the bottom
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and which I can click and it brings me to to that page or that block or whatever I choose to link it to uh and on the page that you're linking it to of course you also then see the
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back link to this this element uh potential use case for that I think there's many use cases for that internally we've been using it a bit already but uh one thing that for
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example also use a recommended or suggested is uh things like software architecture diagrams where uh yeah you're trying to map out uh this complex system basically if you throw in all
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these icons and um it would be great if it kind of would work like a visual Wiki where you could click on on these elements and that's and link to for example documentation or stuff like that so that's possible now
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and what's to come um well first of all uh yeah it's still MEP that we're going to launch next week There's still many things to improve uh we want to especially remove all the UI
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quirks over time make it more frictionless uh more effortless of course um we also want to strongly improve the the mobile backward experience so um
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that's already been put some effort into uh yeah improving the experience on iPad but um yeah that's still a long way to go to make the stylus input nice also handwriting
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um on on touch devices and also in general like the touch experience with whiteboards can still be improved although it's already working uh like you can already try it out uh once it's
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launching next week and uh we're also very excited about is that so now what we're demoing here is like that it's possible to get all the outliner elements into the canvas
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very easily and uh you can drag and drop things into it um copy paste uh but what we still can improve strongly is um displaying whiteboard elements in the
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outliner so this is something we want to improve in the the Futures are yeah basically having a preview of a whiteboard easily embedded in the outline having whiteboard elements
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easily previewed and outline this kind of stuff and then we're also working on publishing on the publication feature and of course publishing whiteboards is also something that's pretty exciting for example Brian who I showed earlier
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would love to probably publish his his lecture uh whiteboards and then lastly one thing that we're also very excited about is
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we see whiteboards as like a a part in the the creation of artifacts and I think that's also kind of like what Maggie was hinting at in the tweet that I started with um
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the taking myself for example as an example like I'm trying to write a blog post uh and I might collect in an outline first like all the ideas I already have in my
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in my graph um in different places and uh I've created a first outline of like what I think I could write about uh and then I throw that into a whiteboard and try to like see new connections maybe
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um yeah rearrange things um or you start writing in the Whiteboard for example and what we would love to be able to do eventually also let users move from the Whiteboard
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back to the outline or to a document mode so yeah you can basically have the full artifact creation pipeline uh in in luxec and
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lastly I want to end with just like regarding the future of these canvas based tools I think um yeah there's been many many great Tools in this space already also in in
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this series and we've seen quite a few interesting ones and I think in general uh uh my interpretation of the market or the development is that we see like a
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convergence of interface paradigms so um there's been yeah many great uh spatial like canvas based tools uh there's been many personal Knowledge Management note taking outliner tools
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and um yeah 2023 might be the year where the affordance of canvases becomes uh more of a standard and in all types of note-taking tools and uh I think yeah
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some some spatial tools uh are experimenting with building node views or outliner views for example and on the other hand we see for example tools like obsidian but also ourselves
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working on on canvas views and so I'm very excited for what the what the future holds there that's it thank you great job Jacob that was awesome lots to uh dig into there feel free to like
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um raise your hand folks and I'll call on you as you go or just on you to give a question no one else is talking um I have a few thoughts but oh I haven't seen any questions in the chat so I'm not if I missed something feel
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free to like call it out to me well you had a question uh Jess about um like how how can you for example hide the detail view of a of a Blog maybe uh
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yeah I hope you can show collapsing and expanding a block uh on the canvas because basically how it works is when you drag a block onto the canvas
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um it you can show either its entire Branch or just the parent block so the the block you actually dragged onto the canvas so
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and you can yeah you can basically still use the outliner on the canvas as well or you can choose to work in a more uh simple mode by collapsing it and we
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think both modes are are useful okay so for example collapse collapses show the top block and then expand to show the whole thing exactly if I want to grab something from
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in the middle of a an article like grab out an excerpt what exactly do you mean like you're in the middle of a note like it or is it just like
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oh I can I mean I can always grab something out of out of the outline got it uh and see where it came from okay exactly got it the smallest unit in in lexic is
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the block so if you're referring to Baby a few words in a sentence of a block uh that that's currently well that there's some workarounds you know some manual workarounds But ultimately the block is
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the smallest unit so uh yeah yeah yeah that's the huge advantage of being block based slash outliner based I'll be really curious to see how obsidian handles this same problem um because it is not block based um or
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at least not strictly the way that uh log seek is um and I guess we'll get to see that soon since they're working on a um a canvas feature as well it's in beta um uh sorry I think Michael had a question
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um Alan you had a question before but you just put your hand down um so I'm gonna go with Michael this was interested in going from like query to uh whiteboard in the canvas if you were to say like querying all notes
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that are linked to note a or all notes linking from note a and then importing note a into the canvas and all the notes that link to node a and then adding those Arrow relations as well
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have you thought about like kind of some advanced stuff like that or or is that a direction you're planning on going or thinking about going or anything like that yeah I mean we're we're definitely curious about this direction and
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um especially the folks that are uh in the discourse graph field um I have talked with us about these ideas as well um yeah they would love to have like a visual representation of the discourse
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graph would also be able to yeah query the the relations um currently the arrow uh yeah it doesn't create like a property or like some connection beside the the visual one
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um but yeah we're definitely curious about that yeah that's super interesting Alan I think you had a question your hands back yeah uh this is less about the actual interface trip I love
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what I'm seeing um and it's a little more about the uh nature of uh the collaboration actually uh I know we've probably all
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seen obsidian and uh Excalibur uh the developer there working with obsidian or building out his tool as a plug-in to
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obsidian uh this seems more like a native uh faculty uh facility um I'd just like to know more about it is
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it a plug-in or is it like a native and if so if it if it is a deeper integration how has that been um like working together is that a kind
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of uh pattern that you see more uh possibilities with and tools that aren't dominating the space um and by dominating I mean just like Apple Apple notes that that kind of
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level where you know if you're trying to get to a general audience all right that's it yeah interesting question I'm I have to say I'm not uh the technical person and the team um product designer so I can't
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fully go into the detail there but I mean the the basically it is is you can turn it off and on as a feature um so that's kind of plug in like but it
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is a much deeper integration than uh typical plugins and also much much more effort of course uh and it was very interesting how this came about as well um yeah it's been built uh technically
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built in the beginning by paying uh who couldn't come today but um he's not part of the the Luxe team at the moment he's a collaborator who's been building plugins before as well but
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we just suddenly uh developed this like very close uh collaboration as well and now also team members are working on it uh including me and and our friend and engineer and yeah we definitely see this
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as something um more than the plugin um but yeah I can still toggle it as a feature basically that's great thank you
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I think one of the things that and I mentioned this at the beginning but I'll highlight it one more time to mention um that this is actually built on top of TL draw so TL draws a sort of general purpose uh
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tool kit for building your own spatial canvas TL draw has its own website too where you can go and play around with their spatial canvas set but it's designed to be able to be embedded in other tools and then customize like heavily customized which I'm uh just
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looking at the interface Jacob y'all have obviously done pretty heavy customization um of that and yeah at some point obviously the person to speak to that process would be more ping but relevant
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to mention the this is uh was not started from scratch inside logseek that they were kind of starting from a component that allowed them to take advantage of some of the common interface paradigms that Jacob talked about some things are already done for
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them so to speak foreign other questions or Jacob and or Ramsay and I could go on well feel free if you have another question go for it
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um all right so is anyone familiar with canopio yep that was on a previous session two months ago yeah yeah uh there are some interesting takes there that I think are really useful
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models uh and I'd be curious as to and I can explain a couple of them but um have you looked at uh other uh experiments that are going on are there
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other kinds of uh micro interfaces or interactions that you're you're looking at accomplishing uh one in particular with with the canopio you could sort of lasso around
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uh some objects and perform uh attributes or mutations on them or move them around um there's uh there's in scalpel there's a kind of a way where you can just hit
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command enter and create a new block um curious if you're if you're looking around to those kinds of uh additions yeah for sure um I think what's what's uh very
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interesting I mean you know if you are really um Innovative also with the draw to to select right like I think that's that's uh very interesting there you can
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uh I guess that's what you meant with what the last saying as well but um yeah we're we're definitely very fascinated by other other interface approaches um and also would love to
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add some ideas that we find particularly interesting in the future uh in the beginning we wanted to focus on for the MVP like on a quick enter enter uh mode um so yeah making it very frictionless
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to like create a note or assert your graph um so I think that's the main thing we focused on um how does that work because we can't see exactly what you're doing are you double clicking I'm double double
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clicking exactly and I guess that's that's kept sorry I I wanted to slow that that interaction down just so I could understand the three options there I can create something new uh yeah like a new block if I'm creating
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a new block I assume that that is also creating a new file right because logseek is file based at the end of the day too right it's it's saved somewhere where all like all the outliner uh or
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the search or all interface elements can uh resurface it so you can reference this block that I create now um yeah I can reference it in um in the outline app that I would want to
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and it's like but it you can almost think of it like a new note like if I oh if I double click on that thing to open it in the right panel then I've created a new sort of top level thing yeah yeah so for example here like I'm I'm just referencing
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this element now um and yeah the two options so there was create a new one you can you can also you can also yeah
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search and you can filter like search only by pages and search only by blocks you can also create a new page or a new whiteboard once you start typing nice yeah you can basically double click and
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start typing right away and exactly everything exists so you can find it right away because it's going to be searched and if you're trying to create a new thing you can just start typing all the stuff you want to type and hit enter and you'll have a new block exactly and we're definitely still
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trying to improve that that experience as well I think right now it's very similar to the command K interface where you might also work with like uh like searching and creating these two functionalities are very connected but
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um yeah to get to your question and also one thing that I'm very excited about is uh it's like visual like drag and drop and like copy pasting
00:33:21
um this kind of stuff like having like improving a bit the the interface in that direction um yeah so uh just showing you like what you have maybe in your clipboard making it easy to paste I think a lot of like
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um tools like figma and stuff like that also because I'm gonna give you I think teal drop might also do that at this point I don't know Steve uh that's true but uh right now you don't see like a preview of the rectangle that you're
00:33:47
going to create for example so yeah just like um little UI touches like that are definitely on our roadmap as well yeah fantastic
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Gary had a question and I wanted to jump in there for he said um do you ever do you have or consider an export format for the canvas so that people can import it at least as an
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outline into theirs so basically how do you think about interop of like you've been making this a lot you've been making this whiteboard um and I'd like to take yours and start
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from there or you'd like to hand off um how do we collaborate on this whiteboard and Gary yeah things to add to that feel free yeah yeah okay listening
00:34:38
yeah I think that's a a great question um at the moment um yeah as I said the the there's not a easy way to move from the Whiteboard back to the outline um we eventually want to basically treat
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the treated whiteboard as a view that can also be transformed into the outline but it yeah we'll take a bit more time to to reach that um and yeah I agree that a
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um interoperability is very important uh the struggle is kind of yeah the that yeah at the moment that's like not like a clear shared file format that's that's best
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for for canvases um so yeah that's that's definitely something at the moment it's it's a yeah what what about the uh because basically every
00:35:30
white board is the edn file right so um I think that the question also from Jess was can you collaborate so can you basically send a whiteboard as is to another block seek user so for example
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would you be able to just send the edn file or show the EDM file and then the other person could has the exact same whiteboard yeah you can for sure do that what I'm not so sure about though is um how that that might break some some
00:35:58
references if the person references things that they have on their graph um it might be broken but it could also be that the implementation implementation still saves that and that you didn't file I haven't tried that actually after that
00:36:14
interesting are you guys planning to leverage TL draws like real-time collaborative functionality when you get to the new version as well [Laughter] um well yeah I think we're still there's
00:36:31
still some time for us to have real-time collaboration for full locks itself uh yeah there's so many things we have to focus on at the same time so um realistic I would say that's like still
00:36:44
a bit of time till we touch that topic and um yeah hence I would say with whiteboards that's it's still too far to be found out gotcha so in many ways you're you're really focusing on optimizing for the
00:36:58
single player experience right now like make this as powerful integrate deeply integrating into my own graph and that kind of stuff um in this very moment for the for the MVP that's the goal yeah um I mean it makes sense
00:37:10
if I'm joining your whiteboard I do have my own graph and what does that mean of like now now when you're searching you're searching Across My Graph and your graph at the
00:37:22
same time so like that that is like a whole other level of collaboration that like TL draw while supporting uh broadcasting sort of the contents of a whiteboard simultaneously it doesn't support broadcasting the contents of our
00:37:35
graphs so that like we would need to you would need like an additional facility for that and I'm it's not even clear what that would like look like um you end up with like the notion problem of like the feeling that uh when we're
00:37:48
all collaborating in notion this isn't my stuff it's our stuff right and so it becomes like the team's resources as opposed to my resources so how do you bring your personal graph into a space is a like I feel like an
00:38:00
unsolved interface problem for sure yeah and I think we're very excited to touch like to to dive into that but yeah as I said um just so many things where
00:38:13
working on at the same time that um yeah it still needs some some time to figure out that out yeah great question from Steve actually which is somewhat related uh any plans for team graphs
00:38:26
like so I assume that's setting aside white the Whiteboard but like actually how can we have a graph shared amongst a small group of people uh and by graph I assume you mean like pages and blocks
00:38:37
yeah I mean um there's ways of doing that already um mainly through GitHub and that's what we do as a team actually so we we have a shared team we have this presentation right now is in our shared team graph
00:38:51
which I I also couldn't show everything uh uh but yeah the that already works but it doesn't work in in a real-time collaboration but um
00:39:03
as I said that that's that's the goal with with RDC so um yeah but we there's still so much for us to figure out um yeah we're building for uh what exactly we should focus on
00:39:17
um the interface details as you mentioned just so yeah got it last call for questions Gary go ahead yeah I just uh just an experiment I just
00:39:35
posted a link hopefully it will work I've been taking notes in uh something called Bergos it's just a just a one year HTML editor I just want to see whether it works
00:39:48
and you may find it interesting did that is the link there because I can't see it can everybody see a link I see the link for sure I don't know I
00:40:00
don't see it in the chat any is it working for anybody I want to want to know how you know how the performance of it and everything this is by the way also the ipfs there's
00:40:12
loading secret link yep yes I I got in yeah it's I'd see a couple of uh of screenshots right now oh great thank you very much you're welcome yeah I I I I I I I I'm I really really
00:40:26
want to attach this field because he's an amazing stuff so it's not me I just want to use you know I'm integrating into my work but yeah this is this is uh
00:40:38
this is amazing and just one other thing if you if you ever need to really work on the on the multiplayer and the and the exchange issue I really would like
00:40:51
to talk to you because I've been following logs like from the woman at Google and the and I'm ready to to to have that so if you in the in the New Year sometimes you should connect because I think this is this is really
00:41:04
nice and I think I really like lockset is is local first okay I mean that's that that's very important so yeah and of course so what's your local first you
00:41:17
can be you can go Global you know you you know it's really you can go from zero to one and actually fishing and others of itfs magic you can be
00:41:31
scale infinitely so I think yeah I would like to like to like to see that happening yeah yeah I'm always down to chat so you can reach out to me on on yeah it's amazing
00:41:50
this this draw thing doesn't it have a a sort of what kind of form is it some Json or something or what's what's that EDM file yeah that's a that's a closure
00:42:05
uh from it as far as I know it's basically a closure done okay okay yeah yeah yeah okay well thank you very much I really enjoyed it thank you very much I hope you find you you know what's
00:42:17
useful you can publish it on the on on the the videos if you if you want so yes uh you don't need to oh okay so before we wrap up
00:42:29
um and kind of transition over Steve did you want to make any comments on I mean you've been working on TL draw they've been integrating TL drop in and I know that there's an older version and you're working towards a newer version and there's some you know stickiness around
00:42:42
that you want to comment any on your experience or like how this has been for you what you've learned through it so um I was I was picking up my daughter uh for most of this this conversation so I've only been able to kind of like come
00:42:54
in and out um apologies if you can hear Peppa Pig in the background uh first off I think this is awesome I mean there's just There's No Greater Joy for a open source author than to see their
00:43:07
the stuff that they made being being uh used in such an ambitious way um I have a ton of questions about you know like different design decisions that were
00:43:20
made uh user feedback things that I kind of drove them with these changes um the places that this has been pushing and all that um but I guess it's like uh
00:43:34
I don't know I um I'm just I'm just happy to see it I I do have a question which is uh maybe that this was covered already on the toolbar there's a pen and then there's something
00:43:47
right underneath the pen kind of between the pen and the eraser and my question is what is that thing between the pen and the Eraser do on the uh right side of the screen the third one down
00:44:00
this one what is that it's actually the highlighter ah right right oh yeah I built that that was in there yeah yeah it's the highlighter I think
00:44:13
um but it's interesting that you're pointing that out it's been some some something to make as well like where what's the figuring out how this toolbar should look and it might be that the the line icons we use and the rest of the
00:44:25
the app uh might need some more detail on the toolbar actually so I have like yeah I don't know you know how like an apple like uh canvas tools like there there's like these nice uh pencils for example that you can see you're in figma
00:44:38
um or big Jam um so yeah this little exploring there as well like how to how to present the tools best it seems like these these two icons are very very close to each other which countries in here
00:44:50
yeah yeah yeah the uh well I mean that's the the tillage kind of like leans towards uh something more generic or but of
00:45:03
course um you're building a product that that doesn't have to be generic and Anonymous so I'm interested to see where it goes uh no this is a pleasure I'm looking forward to watching the video to catch
00:45:14
what I missed good job thank you guys cool well um as we transition this is actually a really interesting segue um from what I want to spend the rest of our time talking about which is
00:45:29
um we're four sessions in to uh hearing from people who are working on spatial campuses um so we've heard from at this point seven different teams that are using spatial canvases in a variety of different ways
00:45:41
um and what I'm really interested in is the spatial canvas as a is thinking about a spatial canvas as a medium or a uh a set of interface patterns and
00:45:54
expectations that has certain workflows that work really well in it and other workflows that maybe not so well I think everybody is at this point pretty familiar with the wide range of the ways that people use Excel spreadsheets or
00:46:07
spreadsheets in general um there's you know very structured ways to use it and sort of expectations especially if you're in fields that use lean on spreadsheets heavily you might be taught in finance for example example
00:46:19
exactly how to build a spreadsheet for a specific kind of situation to model something in a company or that kind of stuff but people do wild things with spreadsheets and do and use them for all kinds of things some of those things
00:46:31
work really well other times they don't work so well you kind of come up against the limits of the medium of the spreadsheet and you realize oh I need a database or oh I need you know some other medium to kind of capture things
00:46:43
in there and I'm kind of curious about uh those the edges of the medium when it comes to spatial canvases when are we actually like running up against uh like this is sort of a fundamental limit
00:46:56
um to what you should try to do in a two-dimensional spatial canvas or are we uh kind of coming up against something where we'll come up with a user interface Paradigm or a uh or some other technological breakthrough that'll kind
00:47:09
of allow us to extend the medium to handle that workflow um so this is my very abstract welcome to my brain way of thinking about sort of spatial canvases and and and then as we um as all of us are developing spatial
00:47:22
canvases in my mind we're kind of there's sort of a simultaneous search going on of like what is a medium what is this medium good for and all of us have different different like parts of the the uh data about that search in our
00:47:35
brains how do we bring that cert that data together so what I've been every every week or sorry every month for the last few months that we've had these I've been asking the same questions of all the creators what it what have you found spatial canvases to be good for
00:47:48
what are they not good for like what's hard to do what's easy to do and so I've captured that in a spatial canvas uh TL draw um and I want to talk about basically the takeaways from
00:48:02
um my the last like four months so far um of what I think is good in the medium and what I think is maybe needs some work or like some of the challenges and I'm going to spend about 10-15 minutes on this and then I want to open it up
00:48:14
and have a collaborative TL draw set up so that you can kind of post your thoughts and that kind of stuff there's a lot of folks in here who are working with spatial canvases and or have been hanging out and thinking about that kind of stuff as well
00:48:25
um so let me share my screen real quick basic here we are all right so I'll share a link to this uh TL draw in just a second but the
00:48:39
um what I want to talk about is what I see of some main attributes of this spatial medium um so one of the ones that I think is really powerful about spatial canvases
00:48:51
is that you it's a you have a flexible meaning inside of a spatial canvas in other words you can use a spatial canvas to represent all kinds of things um I know I thought it was interesting that Jacob actually mentioned this in
00:49:03
his talk of people are using them for mind maps people are using them for um uh there was another example of specifically I can't remember now what it was but um people are are kind of using the malleability of the spatial
00:49:16
canvas to represent a variety of different things you can you know do a timeline from left to right you can do all this kind of stuff allows you to kind of create your own structure as you come into the space the downside of this I hadn't really internalized until I was
00:49:28
talking to Rodrigo um last last week in New York um is that you not not only do you can you create your own structure you have to create your own structure when you
00:49:40
come in into a space you have to decide how you're going to use the space which is actually a decision that I was faced with this morning when I was setting up this whiteboard so I jumped into a TL draw and it was completely blank I was looking at something like this and I was
00:49:53
like okay I want to capture my thoughts about the different attributes of the medium how am I going to put those on there I I kind of have like a positive and a negative for each one so I kind of came up with this like all right I'll put a
00:50:05
thing here and it's like the the attribute and then I'll like Point down at a green thing and a green thing is a good thing and a red thing is a bad thing but I had to make this up on the Fly um there was no sort of notation for
00:50:17
representing these thoughts I was able to Able but also required to uh to think of one as I was jumping into this um so uh one of the reasons the way Rodrigo talked about this is in a lot of
00:50:31
professional contexts you have uh well-developed shared notation and when you have a like well understood notation he mentioned specifically Architects no blueprints very well so they can unroll a blueprint which is
00:50:44
effectively like a 2d spatial canvas if you think about it um and they can sort of very quickly look at that blueprint of a building and build a 3D model in their head that allows them to reason about that thing and so that's the sort of opposite end
00:50:57
of the spectrum when you have a well you know 200 years of people across all countries Architects use kind of the same notation for representing blueprints which is this well embedded notation so flexible meaning is both a
00:51:09
strength and a weakness of our current set of spatial canvases um another thing about spatial canvases that's kind of uh that has been surfacing is that they're uh they're
00:51:22
really great for collaboration but only certain types of collaboration um what makes them awesome for collaboration is sort of this real-time collaboration of you have what I call like ambient awareness of what's
00:51:34
Happening like you can uh you can kind of each of us can kind of carve out our little section in the canvas which we're about to do in just a minute and we can work within that section and then I can kind of go over and look at what you're doing you can come over and look at what
00:51:46
I'm doing but we have our own spaces and so the fact that we're able to work in the same document or work in the same space is really excellent for sort of real-time collaboration people use them for brainstorming and a lot of other things where you would use a physical
00:51:58
space to allow the group to think together but on the other side asynchronous collaboration can be a little frustrating and there's two specific ways that have come up and when we've
00:52:11
been talking with people over the last several months one is that the previous thing we were talking about about you can make your own meaning when you come into someone else's space it may make
00:52:22
absolutely no sense to you they put everything somewhere for a reason but they're not there to explain it to you if this is an async collaboration they may say hey here's a link to this like real-time you know or sorry to this uh spatial canvas uh and you come in and
00:52:36
you're like what the heck what is where um why did they put this over here what do these boxes mean what do the arrows mean um and so uh that that async collaboration can be a little challenging the other the other piece around async is that when you come into
00:52:49
a space after someone has been working in it and you've been working in it over time really hard to see what changed of like okay I you did some stuff in the spatial canvas between now and yesterday and you're saying to your teammate hey
00:53:00
go look at the new stuff where's the new stuff which what changed and you have to like have have been in there before so um there's some I think that some of these things are solvable problems I'm not sure that this is sort of the edges
00:53:12
of spatial canvas such that we need to like use a different medium certainly is a challenge for collaboration another thing that people have pointed out is that um spatial canvases are really excellent
00:53:25
for early phase or exploratory work because you can create your own meaning because they have this flexibility to embed lots of different multimedia objects and stuff like that um you can you can explore very quickly the downside of that is that you almost
00:53:38
always need to move from inside that spatial canvas into what the Muse team calls a production process of like okay the things in the spatial canvas are part of a blog post or a talk that I'm
00:53:50
going to give or a YouTube video that I'm going to create and moving from a spatial canvas getting that information out that meaning that I made into another Tool uh right now is really challenging we talked already about how
00:54:03
just interop and having a common file format like we don't even have a common file format yet for for these things so being able to sort of import that information um and this is one of the reasons I'm excited about the exploration that log
00:54:16
seek and obsidian are doing because as Jacob mentioned at the end their goal is to allow you to do the whole production process in inside a Blog seek without leaving go from a canvas no
00:54:28
uh blog post there you go I can hit him you there um so yeah you can go from a canvas to a completed blog post all inside the same tool I think that's actually going to turn out to be really hard
00:54:41
um and because you're trying to capture basically this is where the highlighter tool came up at the end of the presentation what does it mean in the document or outliner view that
00:54:52
you highlighted something in the spatial canvas View and this is something we're going to have to decide as you move back and forth between these two mediums of like if you're using uh you have a outliner representation of this medium
00:55:04
and a spatial canvas representation of this medium which things are important to which things have meaning in both directions so if I make a change in the spatial canvas what should correspondingly change in the outline if
00:55:17
anything um and so right now they already they mentioned one of the other elements that has meaning in the spatial canvas and no current meaning but could in the outliner which is arrows relating to
00:55:28
objects in the in the logseek outline currently doesn't mean anything in the outline view but you could see how it probably should um all right last uh two more of these and
00:55:40
then I'll open it up for conversation uh permanence um one of the things that I love about spatial canvases is that I can work in them and then I can come back to them it's kind of like being able to like configure my office and then right on
00:55:53
the Whiteboard and like open a bunch of books um in my physical space leave the office come back the next day and they're all still there the drawing's still on the Whiteboard the books are still open to the pages that I was open to that feeling of permanence
00:56:05
um like the things are where I intended to put them and I can come back to them is very empowering and it it stands opposed to some other mediums that were not that we also use where kind of you
00:56:17
start from a blank slate every day um and I've had the experience of actually working um in the uh yeah Alan I'll drop a link to this uh teal draw you guys can jump into the tail draw if you'd like um
00:56:29
please don't move things around just yet but feel free to explore um if you want to go back to some of these other topics um and hopefully Steve uh teal draw can support 20 simultaneous viewers we'll find out [Laughter]
00:56:42
yes we will cool so I've had this experience where um I was working with a team for six months and they had one spatial canvas that was their meeting room that they
00:56:54
came into every day during stand-up and they would share us they would share screen and embed it in an embedded view inside that and what was cool is like the the space like accrued stuff over time so there was like a birthday week
00:57:07
where a whole bunch of people had birthdays and they like made a space off in the corner of that and they like had little gifs for like people who were having birthdays and it kind of just stayed there the way that sort of detritus accumulates in an office for a
00:57:19
team of like hey what what's that like pile of stuff from oh that would birthdays like two months ago we just haven't cleaned it up yet um that same stuff happens in a in a spatial canvas and this gets to the
00:57:30
downside it does start to feel messy and cleaning the thing up starts to feel like a task all of its own um and we've we've talked to several uh canvas folks who have talked about that challenge of uh keeping it organized
00:57:44
starts to feel like keeping your room clean like a chore as opposed to truly sense making um and I think there's some interesting research directions here around uh basically having more than one view or
00:57:56
representation of a spatial canvas some that could be Auto organized force-directed graphs different things like that where I could basically have the computer try to organize my space clean my room for me without destroying
00:58:08
my my personal Arrangement where I personally put things and people are just starting to kind of play around with some of those ideas um and lastly multimedia one of the things that makes these
00:58:21
things great is that you can put just about anything into them um I'm sure Steve has seen more random stuff dropped into spatial canvases using TL draw than most of us have because he's trying to build this toolkit that works in a lot of different
00:58:35
cases the general purpose case as opposed to there's a very clear workflow here that's awesome and we don't have a lot of other spaces where we can relate different kinds of media PDFs text
00:58:47
images all these kind of things have them all in the same place working together the downside of that is what I call the Swiss army knife problem or the generalists problem of basically a spatial canvas ends up with a mostly
00:59:00
poor tool for everything every other media of like you end up within text editor that's woefully underpowered inside the inside the spatial canvas you end up with images but you can can you
00:59:12
do crops can you change what like you end up with an image editor that's underpowered you end up with like all of these like uh mediums that that are embedded in here have tools that you just want a little bit more from
00:59:25
um especially when you're familiar with power tools single purpose versions of those tools like a text editor or a graphics editor or that kind of stuff I'm not sure what to say here in terms of like if you made power tool versions
00:59:38
of all the different inside the spatial canvas you would end up with an extremely cluttered interface it's been interesting if you don't follow Steve on Twitter and kind of his development TL draw over time he's kind of been thinking out loud about this problem for six months or six or 12 months of like
00:59:52
what exact features do I need to add to these particular things that give them enough to be powerful without them feeling um uh hindered by that tool um yeah and James says he's dealing with
01:00:05
that as well um so anyway those are kind of five characteristics that I've observed of the medium of spatial canvases both the positive and the negative side of each one of these
01:00:17
um and I think some of these bear like could turn into research problems that we could though go start trying to solve um and others of them might be just the edges of the medium of like when you
01:00:30
choose this kind of medium this is the downside that you take on in the same way that if you chose a spreadsheet there are certain things you're not going to be able to do inside that spreadsheet um that you could do with a different representation
01:00:43
um all right I just spoke for a long time without pausing I'm gonna pause for a second anybody questions or comments on this and then I'll sort of welcome you into the the rest of the TL draw space
01:00:54
I think this is a very good summary of the sort of the challenges uh related to the topic like spatial uis and and infinite canvases in general um it's also fun to see how many of
01:01:07
these are so fundamental like uh which makes me excited just knowing that it's so early you know um and that there are such fundamental questions to be worked out um
01:01:21
yeah that's sort of my comment to the moment yeah yeah I agree I'm hopeful that uh yeah I'm hopeful that as we learn about these things we can kind of share the learnings I think that's one of the
01:01:34
things like personally that I'm passionate about and one of the reasons that I run this talk these com these talks is so that folks can come in and say Here's what I'm learning share it with other people who are like running up against the same thing
01:01:45
Alan you had your hand up go ahead man yeah I just wanted to say I thought the last point about the spreadsheets is excellent and perhaps an Avenue forward to
01:01:58
uh do more research right because the the example earlier of the uh um sort of a Sandbox uh the long-term um board where everybody joins in and
01:02:12
just adds things right you can almost put that on a a two by two quadrant right that is a long-term collaborative space uh on the other side uh you have almost
01:02:26
an entirely different set of features when it's uh I'm I open up my notes for the day and I start writing and now I want to make a quick diagram right those
01:02:37
are arguably two different species and uh it'd be good to maybe figure out the species to get a better sense of which features fit them I love that yeah that definition of like
01:02:51
a species of um because even a a spreadsheet is basically a there are different um I I mentioned that there are
01:03:03
different fields in which spreadsheets have sort of like understood notation of like this is the way you will use the spreadsheet and you will get your hands slapped if you do certain things the wrong way in the spreadsheet or change things that kind of stuff so there's
01:03:15
there's sort of uh developed uh species out of spreadsheets as well um but then you also have these like nerfed versions of spreadsheets that get included in other mediums so like notation and sorry notation um Notions
01:03:29
uh tables are this really weird not quite powerful spreadsheet thing right um and so that you can like even think about like shrinking down the the the capabilities of the medium and saying
01:03:43
well this this one just does these three things I'm very curious to play with freeform because I I will bet a lot of money that they don't have all the features in free form right because apple is known for saying these are the
01:03:55
only things you actually need see Apple notes right and so it'll be interesting to see what choices they made of like these are the things you actually need in a spatial canvas these are the things you don't um but um yeah
01:04:06
it's interesting to I think maybe at some point we could make like a categorization of like absolutely here are the different ways that spatial canvases are used and generally when they're used in this way these are the most important features the other ones don't matter
01:04:19
um but like Steve said we're really early that I I've actually done that for the for a general more General tools for thought and it gets I mean it does get very complicated but it's it's nice to say like oh yeah this is better for this
01:04:30
thing and and this one tries to be everything right and the the spreadsheet inside of the embed is a whole other kind of species anyway My Hope here and I guess uh
01:04:43
one of the reasons why teal draw is I mean the teal draw it's an app we're using it right but um The Hope is that they're uh are a lot of cousins close
01:04:56
cousins potentially um where if it is a domain that really needs um super height like we're doing a lot of work with PDFs we need to have
01:05:08
um a full PDF editor in the app like not everyone needs that but some some people do and uh the idea of having um being able to build that into teal
01:05:21
draw uh and have it just be like that's the part that you build rather than starting over from scratch and building the whole thing from the bottom grounding up um I think we're going to see just more like yeah like variants on the theme
01:05:35
it's like you're never going to get it right for all the users but you can maybe create more apps for different users and different verticals um I'll I'll happy to give you the canvas to do it with
01:05:48
um but yeah I mean that's worked for other domains I think it'll work here as well yeah I think Steve one of the powerful things about TL draw is that it should be an accelerant for exploration TL draw itself of right like I can grab
01:06:01
there's a lot of really finicky annoying stuff about uh integrated implementing a canvas in the browser um and that if everyone is sort of re-implement re encountering those
01:06:13
problems it seems like a waste of time um and so yeah hopefully people can kind of like take TL draw and take it in a lot of different directions TL draw may not actually be the right foundation for certain kinds of like narrow problems um but it seems like a place where
01:06:27
people could pick it up and start playing very quickly and discover whether this is a thing that they can actually the thing that they can actually build out their idea on um yeah
01:06:39
Gary sorry um oh I I said this in the chat before before I ask your question Jerry um folks if you want to jump into the the teal draw and like try the sort of collaborative brainstorming activity there there's three sections what's good
01:06:51
about a spatial canvas what's not so good and then just general ideas so just sort of a catch-all category feel free to jump into the teal draw and like take over any one of those uh spaces and then also feel free to add stuff like add
01:07:03
other shapes resize things move stuff around um this is now your space it's not my board anymore um and so I give you permission um to make your own meaning in it um and I will I'll I may talk about some
01:07:15
of those points as we go and continue to ask questions as we continue to like talk out loud Gary go ahead yeah I I I love the issue that you brought up you know it's the whole locks technician is that the goal is to be able to do the
01:07:28
whole production from from the drawing to the actual publication if you like or in the finished product everything and I think uh that's that that's been my goal too
01:07:42
but the there is a real approach is is that instead of uh instead of doing it in one one one system if every component is interoperable and exchangeable then you end up with DC and local first
01:07:55
that's the key then you know like like with fishing doing the same Aspergers the application should come to you not you going somewhere where all these capabilities are packaged so if logsack
01:08:09
would would go into that model then and and make things make make the rule such that any other drawing app could could work with or any other app which is
01:08:21
their own ideas of of the components then they could actually have that but I think that's the key that you can't as you just said rightly that it may be a low powered
01:08:34
editor but if it serves my real product person in sales making and especially if it allows me to do multiplayer especially if it allows you to do collaboration
01:08:45
then then you know it makes sense to to you know not to you know you use the chitty bitty thing for not this this is all about it it's okay if it's low part because as long as it is really end to
01:08:59
end so that's uh I really like that idea I think that's that's what that's the way we should be going yeah I agree thank you very much yeah thanks Curie um James you commented in this chat a little bit earlier apparently James is
01:09:12
working on something called moot which is a contextless whiteboard built with TL draw within a context driven dashboard I'm not actually sure I understand that sentence but the next sentence he said is that he's dealing with the generalist problems that we
01:09:24
were just that I was describing earlier um James do you want to unmute or share about that more in chat or maybe you put something on the board that we could highlight um yeah sure um well I mean I can let me just share
01:09:36
my screen if that's possible no I can't I mean can I put something I'll put a screenshot on the Whiteboard sure no you can you can do either one you can I can I I just unshared mine which means you can share yours or if you want to drop it on the Whiteboard and I'll zoom in
01:09:48
over there either one yeah sure um I will share go for it yeah so it just it resonated a lot with the points you were saying about the generous problem because basically our
01:10:01
vision for the product we're building is to have all of your tools that you need to do collaboratively in One dashboard or one interface and obviously part of that is that you have to kind of either build everything again or you
01:10:14
need to find a way of incorporating all of your existing tools so and I think this is becoming more possible because of people like Steve who are actually making open source packages or infrastructure that makes
01:10:26
this stuff a lot easier whether through the open source model or by building a comp like an infrastructure company like daily or any other like super base even is I think contributes to that a lot um but we're finding we got we're
01:10:40
getting a lot of inbound from every type of customer people here researchers universities scale UPS startups people who just want a personal space where they can put all their stuff but the tool doesn't quite
01:10:52
fit anybody's needs to the point where they feel like they want to keep coming back um and we're in like two camps where like figuring out one how do we narrow down and focus on one use case or we just keep building stuff until it does
01:11:05
become a really amazing tool that everyone wants to use because the Swiss army knife is still an amazing tool but it's like for a specific type of person who needs a Swiss army knife right um so yeah we've got like this and just
01:11:17
on the points around the the Whiteboard becoming very messy and not feeling like a persistent space or a big part of what we're building with mood is trying to create a versatile tool that has like no
01:11:29
context and that's like the the TL draw whiteboard um and kind of building on that but then having that contained within a context based which is based on how people work and workflows um meaning that if you're a Dev team you
01:11:42
can have a whiteboard a whiteboard in there for whiteboarding technically but then also have your GitHub in there so you can like actually put the creative stuff into a more rigorous tool
01:11:56
um for that type of thing um but it just resonated a lot of what you guys were saying about how um being a journalist is a very difficult thing in this space because you have to do a lot um which is kind of what we're working
01:12:08
towards but it's still like a work in progress that's yeah that's great yeah James thanks for sharing what you've got got working on that um looks really nice by the way like that that just so thank you very much
01:12:21
um I mean just the the quick Glimpse yeah I have a cup this brings up two thoughts in mind um one is um the idea of embedding other like full applications into a uh spatial canvas I
01:12:33
think is really interesting um with the main thing I think that's blocking us from that is iframes basically are underpowered um of because most of the things we do have like a web app view
01:12:46
um and if you could if iframes had like full support you could embed full applications inside in fact the one the tool that I've used in the past is called Green Light by croquet um you can go look it up it's not very ergonomic
01:12:58
um but it has the uh ability to embed full iframes and uh full other applications and I've spent a lot of time working in that tool um it's more of a research project so that's probably why you've never heard of it they have no intention to make a
01:13:10
product out of it or anything like that um but it's very powerful to be able to say like the entire application is inside here it starts to feel like a zoomable desktop and you start to look at your own
01:13:23
desktop in a weird way of like why the heck can't I zoom my Mac OS desktop like why can't I zoom out um why am I restricted to this like fixed aspect ratio and fixed size um once you've kind of experienced the
01:13:36
the alternative um the other thought though was around uh I would I I plug this all the time but the cephist has a Linus Lee has a post called build Tools around workflows not
01:13:49
workflows around tools um and the Genesis like the the summary of that post which is worth reading in full and I uh and I reference it I've been referencing it constantly for two years now is that you should understand
01:14:02
the workflow that people need or that you yourself need um and then put together a tool chain around that as opposed to what we normally do which we look at a set of features that a tool has and then we're
01:14:16
like comparing features of like well this one has this ability and this one has this ability features are not what you want what you're trying to accomplish is a workflow um features can support that workflow but you should start with the workflow
01:14:29
and this has particular relevance for startups I was actually meeting with Paul from Firma um last week and polls Firma is a really cool general purpose tool like it I mean
01:14:42
they built a freaking programming language into a canvas I mean it's it is really really fun to play with um but they're starting to get and thanks to the link Darlene um There's the link to that post I was just describing um they're starting to get to the point
01:14:54
where they're talking to users about specific workflows and that is where the money is like that is where the real user value is that is where you're going to be able to say like nope our spatial canvas is not going to embed a fully
01:15:05
featured PDF editor because we don't have any users who want that it's you'll be able to narrow scope in and like actually build something that people want so this is like the uh the startup entrepreneur in me of like no don't try
01:15:17
to build the general purpose tool you will die like you don't have enough Engineers um like find something that people really want and then like work out from there but that's my opinion other I'm sure other people have different
01:15:28
approaches so um I'm gonna jump into I'm gonna share my screen again feel free to like raise raise your hand or ask questions if you have any yeah it is my hand can I just jump okay quickly yeah I mean that's uh
01:15:43
that is really you just described what Josephus was talking about the decade ago which is the long tail of software oh is the the idea that that's the flaws
01:15:55
you want and uh a fairly mention and do check out deal goes because that's exactly what pilgrims doesn't only give you encrypty private uh uh privately shareable social network but at the same
01:16:07
time you can actually embed real applications and you have your own own suit you know any any any app that plays this game of work with the local local
01:16:20
first approach hi this is you working with the user's own own privates with private space then you could actually build these workflows that's what bill goes was designed for if you like but
01:16:34
you can have all these applications just like the same thing with fishing can do that is that since every application is working with the same fast or now as long as you figure out how these are
01:16:46
actually communicating which can be done I mean how are the meaning can be transferred from one to the other which is what we really after then that you can actually have these things and that
01:16:58
I I really love what you just said about this yeah I fully fully endorse what you just said thank you very much yeah yeah no thanks Gary some great comments in here around like what's good
01:17:11
um yes uh I the it's fun thing I can't overstate that I've had so much fun working with spatial canvases I think that's one of the reasons that I've spent so much time
01:17:23
um there feel free to like yeah start things or whatever the um yeah I have have played with a lot of these things and have found myself more joyful at the end of the day when having used
01:17:36
these as opposed to sort of sitting within the linearity of text um for the whole day um and so I'd love to find ways to bring these more into my workflow um for those of you who have like um have like been around me at all you
01:17:49
know that I have like a second camera in here that points at my whiteboard so that I can just stand up and write on the Whiteboard and share what I'm doing on the Whiteboard um so that spatial thing is like very much like Maggie was saying spatial is very near and dear to my heart and so like having an
01:18:02
opportunity to break out of text for a little bit and like lay things out spatially um it it feels like a release and it's hard to it's hard to describe unless you're one of the people like me that needs that um and have experienced that
01:18:15
um but yeah there's a lot of a lot of good stuff in here visualizing connections um is an is an interesting uh plus that you get from this the uh let's talk about what's not so good there's lots of stuff
01:18:27
over here oh wow um uh somebody says you can't resize stickies and it looks like Steve has already responded he's already on the fix um for that the let's see what else is in here it's
01:18:41
worth calling out Zoom uh smart layouts yes smart layouts is one of the areas where I'm really curious to for people to explore of like um yeah I just to restate this because I
01:18:56
want somebody to do it is uh the ability to take a canvas that's laid out and have another view on the same canvas has the same elements on it but the view is constrained by or like Auto laid out
01:19:10
by the computer and then be able to switch back to my view like I can like toggle between or have everything get stacked up and I can redistribute the things right so imagine think like a deck of cards where you like spread a
01:19:23
bunch of cards out on the table and then you like want to take them back up into a stack that's currently I do that manually that's silly the computer should be able to take all those things and stack them for you um and then maybe even Auto lay them out in some way so I think there's some
01:19:36
really interesting possibilities around smart layouts that people haven't really explored probably comes down to use case specific stuff but Steve I'm I don't know have you done any experiments in this space around multiple views um
01:19:47
I think it it sort of I mean we have done a little bit of experimentation around like um packing and layout algorithms but the thing is that like you're not gonna like the answer but the
01:20:03
the fact that um well one of the benefits of the canvas is that it because it has no hard structure and no semantic structure that is like codified
01:20:15
um you can break the structure at any time you know like like just adding little arrows or annotations next to these things or adding Stars right like like you're able to really make meaning in a very Dynamic way
01:20:28
because there's there's no structure to fight against um the downside of that is that there's no structure to fight against there's no structure and while I think it's possible so for
01:20:39
example train a model to to derive meaning and content from uh from reading a board like this and to draw to train a model in expressing ideas uh in a board like this
01:20:53
so so both reading and writing um I I think I think it's going to be a while um or I should say this another way if you're interested in working on this
01:21:06
then please reach out because I'm interested in having you work on this um one of the maybe it's on the board maybe it's not but like putting computers aside putting kind of
01:21:18
like doing this automatically aside it's it's even hard for normal humans to like derive meaning from like the end state of a whiteboard um in part because a lot of that meaning happened along the way and it's not
01:21:30
captured in the end state right and we've thought a lot about this problem um this is also very common in like digital classrooms where you might have like a a board and and like a lecture but like
01:21:44
you know the teacher is going to be pointing towards things that a race you know got erased by the end of the thing or you have to see the board in the same moment as as that stuff happened um because a lot of like meaningful
01:21:54
stuff is lost before you get to the end um so I think even if you did have the ability for a computer to sort of derive meaning from a board it would have to see the whole history of it and be able to drive that meaning over time so it's
01:22:08
a really hard problem um but yeah it's it continues to be a challenge both for humans and and computers to sort of make meaning out of this and represent that yeah I think one of the size small thing that I would
01:22:21
start with um Steve is just the ability to like actually have several different manual views of the same board like I just want to manually relay out this one without destroying the one that
01:22:32
I already have like and so it's almost like a branching Universe right of like I can do this and get with a code file I can like you know go off on a branch do some stuff um and it may not I don't even need
01:22:45
merge I just need the ability to like look between different branches of a of a space um I don't know I don't know if that would be useful or not but I I definitely get what you're saying of um I think the way that some
01:22:58
sociologists are like uh folks say is that the meaning actually exists between us like we're making meaning right now but the knowledge isn't in any one of our heads the knowledge actually is in
01:23:10
the relation it's in these relationships between us um and when you remove us from the artifact you've actually lost knowledge um and so you have to like bring the same people into the same space in order
01:23:23
to have the same set of knowledge be there and if any one person is missing you're missing some something fun mental about the knowledge of the group has been lost which is really interesting um well we're right at 1 30 and I want to
01:23:36
respect people's time this has been really really helpful so I'm just going to go look glance at the ideas page real quick and then like wrap us up put a bow on all this um yeah some ideas around PDF yeah PDF editing certainly
01:23:48
um Community templates is an interesting um actually an interesting to one to look at there is Vermont they do a lot with a toolbox uh metaphor for this um but yeah getting spatial tools into
01:24:02
the hands is domain specific experts yes that is what I was talking about about like really working with people around a workflow to make their workflow fantastic and customizing the tool for them I'm hoping more people will try to
01:24:16
explore that space okay um thank everyone for being here especially thank you to Jacob and Ramses for the demo of logseek and uh the integration of of um TL draw and the
01:24:29
exploration that y'all are doing I think it's really valuable hope to have obsidian come and talk about their tool at some point and it would be really interesting to compare and contrast some of those design decisions Steve is probably going to come and talk at some
01:24:41
point we'll have you around to talk more about what you're learning um in January or February so we'll we'll do another one of the spatial ones in January uh until we're the spatial canvas sessions will continue until all
01:24:52
the problems are solved I'm just kidding um but um yeah thank you all for being here the check out the recordings from the past sessions this recording will be posted within a week or so and everyone enjoy your day
01:25:04
all right thank you thanks for organizing thank you
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