Thursday, November 1, 2012

Scapple, A Writers’ Mind Map App From The Maker Of Scrivener



Scapple — a cross between scabs and Snapple? Thankfully not: Scapple is in fact a brand new (as in beta) mind-map app for writers. What’s that, you say? There are already a ton of mind-map apps out there? That’s true. But none of them comes from the developer of the awesome Scrivener.

Scapple (which I keep mistyping as Snapple or Scrapple) comes from Literature and Latte, the developer behind the ultimate long-form writers’ tool, Scrivener. As I said, it’s a mind-map app, but this one is geared more towards getting ideas out of your head and less about structuring them. To begin with, at least.

The metaphor is a sheet of paper. A big sheet of paper. You can click to start typing anywhere on the page, which expands to fit all of your snippets. You can link ideas and draw lines between them, but crucially this isn’t required, unlike a regular mind map app which requires that you organize yourself in trees.

There are a few neat tricks. The z key will zoom out on a long-press to show the whole canvas, and for a beta version the export options are legion. You can even drag and drop a note over to Scrivener and add it to the latter’s corkboard.

The good news: the app will probably be around $10 when it makes it into the Mac App Store. The bad news: it’s for OS X, not the iPad. This seems a little ass-backward to me as the iPad is the perfect place for this kind of brainstorming and idea generating. I guess I’ll just have to stick to actual paper index cards for a while yet.

Source Literature and Latte | cultofmac.com

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