v0.4.1

Changelog

• fixed bug where if you removed a post from a subgraph, any links that were to or from the post would be left still in the subgraph, so the graph viewer would crash

v0.4

Changelog

• manual layout
• subgraphs - you must convert your data to the new format to be able to use v0.4 and up, use php artisan convert_data_to_v0.4_format to convert a data.json file in the app/Console/Commands folder
• the action button menu is much smaller on phones
• the action button menu is replaced when you click an option, so it'll have a lot more vertical space, especially on phones
• the jumpy arrow button at the top doesn't grab focus from anywhere to the right of it anymore (I couldn't figure out why that happened, I was just able to make it stop)
• there are buttons in the the post bar to help you scroll left-to-right
• posts on Android won't scroll anymore (and shouldn't on iOS either, but I don't have an iPhone, I can't test that) - I had to force URLs to break with this
• you can zoom out twice as far as before
• link widths scale with zoom too - this works well enough that when I implemented it, I thought they weren't getting any wider when you zoom out, but they do, they just seem to be the same size because you've zoomed out
• added little spinners that show when the graph is rendering or you're searching for posts - they can take a while when you have 180kb of posts, like I do
• added a little warning when you're storing over 2mb of data, since you can only store around 5mb with local storage
• improved the performance of editing posts' titles and bodies, so that it doesn't lag when you type a single character anymore
• highlights a post when you hover over its zoom icon
• zooming to a post shows the post title in full now - it zooms to a different position on phones (screen width <576px) and on desktops
• doesn't save to firebase as often - I've debounced it so it will only save at most once every 250ms

v0.3.3

Changelog

• title previews are full-length (they were limited to 30 characters before)
• text for posts without titles flows with the zoom icon, rather than being on the next line
• you can search for posts in the menu
• post search results look nicer and you can see more of the body
• you can also see more of the body in "linked posts" - stolen from Andy Matushchak and Azlen Elza
• removed graph orientation setting, I never used it, it didn't work, and it didn't look good when it did work
• can search for posts when adding a link to one

v0.3.2

Changelog

• Markdown rendering
• your zoom position is saved
• the viewer isn't re-rendered every time you go to its tab; hopefully that doesn't leak memory
• made it easier to edit or delete posts, or to make new posts that are linked to them
• you don't need to drag and drop posts to re-order them, now you just press "left" or "right" - drag and drop was awkward if the post bar was wider than your screen, and pretty hard to use at all on a phone
• long post titles don't overlap with the close buttons (or the new edit button)
• post editing is inline, not underneath the body
• fixed bug attaching a post to the default graph
• removed moment JS library, making the vendors file 50kb smaller that it would've been otherwise
• different types of links are shown with different (dashed) lines now
• whitespace in the preview of posts (their title or the first 30 characters of their body) is ignored
• you can resize the post editor's textarea
• the minimum post width in the post bar has been changed, to be max(post min-width setting, 92 / number of posts currently open), because I think it looks better
• if you accidentally move the mouse (or finger!) a tiny bit while clicking on a post or a link, it'll still be counted as click

---

Imagine SW to lay out a newspaper; the user will spend their time mainly

• writing
• drawing
• cutting
• moving
• rotating
• stretching
• cropping
• layering
  all pseudo-physical operations, but within a virtual space.

The main challenge in designing this tool is to give the user affordances that make these operations

• available (discoverable)
• understandable, and
• comfortable
  But when you physically make a newspaper, writing, moving and cropping it would all be done with different, specialised, tools; on a computer, you're limited to clicking and dragging a mouse & typing on a keyboard, mainly in 2 dimensions.

In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.

Information software design can be seen as the design of context-sensitive information graphics. I demonstrate the crucial role of information graphic design, and present three approaches to context-sensitivity, of which interactivity is the last resort. After discussing the cultural changes necessary for these design ideas to take root, I address their implementation. I outline a tool which may allow designers to create data-dependent graphics with no engineering assistance, and also outline a platform which may allow an unprecedented level of implicit context-sharing between independent programs. I conclude by asserting that the principles of information software design will become critical as technology improves.

v0.3.1

Changelog

• the action button menu in the bottom right should always be usable on phones
• the focus button is at the top of each post, so you can always see it and the graph at the same time
• exhaustive Firebase syncing testing/fixes
  • changing settings, no sync -> sync, keep using local data
  • changing settings, no sync -> sync, overwrite with Firebase data
  • changing settings, sync -> no sync
  • importing data
  • importing data && importing settings
  • importing settings && not importing data && will sync when not already syncing, keep using local data
  • importing settings && not importing data && will sync when not already syncing, overwrite with Firebase data - this had a race condition so it didn't work, I forgot Vuex actions are async

(The way I'd written the load/save tab before there were loads and loads of different options to do here, but most of them were wrong, shouldn't have been possible, and were driving me crazy trying to check if they were correct, so I thought what the different possibilities actually should be, and came up with the ones above)

• not-autosaving and opening a single post at a time actually works now - state.shouldAutosave = newState.shouldAutosave || true; is always true
• doesn't let you attach a post to a graph it's already a part of

Changelog changelog

• started recording changes as I made them

v0.3

Changelog

• the graph is now visible in Chrome _{(I forgot to test it in Chrome beforehand)}
• even more significant UI upgrades:
  • you can do almost everything you'd want to do from the Viewer tab now - add posts, attach posts to graphs, create/change/remove links between posts, edit posts, ... - the one thing you can't do is make or change an existing graph, if you want to do that you'll need to go to the Graphs tab
  • you can reply to posts directly from the post bar: click on actions then add linked post
  • if I can show something with an arrow rather than say "to" or "from", I do
  • the graph itself takes up more of the screen. To compensate, I've added in little arrow buttons so you can jump to the posts/the graph without needing to scroll.
  • you can focus on a post from the post bar, so you'll jump to it in the viewer
  • you can re-order posts you have open in the post bar by dragging and dropping them
  • no more extremely long lists of posts/links! now you either click on a post directly in the viewer if you want it, or you can search for its title or body
  • if you click on a link, you'll jump to the other end of it - clicking the start will jump to the target post, clicking the end will jump to the source post. It's pretty useful with a long link
  • when you zoom the graph out, the text gets bigger so you can still read it, and vice-versa
• it should be a lot harder to accidentally delete your data now, when you start or stop syncing it with Firebase
• whenever you import exported data or settings, you can choose if you want to import the data and/or the settings, separately. You can also choose whether you want to immediately save that data to Firebase.
• probably other things I can't remember

v0.2

Changelog:

• bug fixes & performance improvements
• (optional) Firebase storage! - you use your own API keys, I never see them. No more exporting the state, copying it to a different computer, and importing it, unless you want that. Be careful you don't overwrite data
• autosaving
• significant UI upgrades:
  • you can see far more of the graph
  • the UI in general is less claustrophobic, thanks to Amy Hoy's helpful suggestions
  • arrows point from source to target posts
  • hovering over a post hides all non-neighbouring posts, and the current post will be on-top of all others, so you can see it easily
• in the post viewer:
  • you can see which posts link to the current one, and view them too
  • you can see which graphs include the current one, and open in the graph bit
• settings:
  • autosaving
  • local/firebase storage
  • opening multiple posts at the same time
  • graph height, in viewport height units
  • post height, in viewport height units
  • post width, in viewport width units
• a few bug fixes, like making the source and targets of links the right way round (and more obvious) when adding a link to a new, unlinked, post
  

The first alpha version

Introduction

Spiderweb lets you

• make posts
• add those posts to graphs
• link the posts together
• view the graphs of posts you've made - you can look at more than one graph at a time

I'd recommend going to the "load/save" tab first, uploading the spiderwebExport-xx.json file that's in the release, and pressing "import", to see what the app looks like with data in it.

They're all kinda independent:

• You can make a post by itself, without linking it to another one, or adding it to a graph.
• You can add a post to a graph without linking it to another post
• After you've made a post, you can link to many others - you don't need to link the post while you create it
• Deleting a link doesn't delete either the source or the target post
• Deleting a graph doesn't delete the posts in it, only the links - you can add the posts to another graph