Snap notes in place in map view

Hi all
Recently, I began exploring a much less detailed but more visual procedure of keeping track of my projects in Tiddlywiki and despite a few rough edges here and there I found that I am enjoying it quite a bit.

One aspect of this I would like to carry over to Tinderbox and that is having notes snap into place relative to other objects on the map
In Tinderbox terms, is the following possible?

  • prepare a Kanban view of adornments (e.g. four evenly spaced vertical columns)
  • have a note always expand to the width of an adornment whilst having a constant height (e.g. title and first line of text)
  • each note keeping a constant distance to the preceding and following note
  • rearranging notes by dragging and dropping

Admittedly, most of the functionality is possible already but what I am missing is the fluidity of motion afforded by the above.

Thanks for any help!
Chris

The adornment’s OnAdd could set $Height and $Width.

Tinderbox guides do a nice job of enforcing constant separation between notes.

To your 4 bullets:

  1. You could create a container with the 4 adornments and put it in the /Prototypes container, thus making it a prototype. I just tested and it seems to work. I created a prototype container ‘pKanban’ with 2 adornments. Applying that prototype to a new note made it a container holding 4 adornments.

  2. Not as such - the menu note resizing controls aren’t action-accessible. However, you could set the adornments (above) $OnAdd: $Xpos=$Xpos(adornment);$Width=$Width(adornment);. This would make a note created on, or moved onto the adornment left aign with the adornment’s left edge and be as wide as the adornment. If you want the note slightly narrower, add an adjustment to the above. Thus $Xpos=$Xpos(adornment+0.25);$Width=$Width(adornment)-0.5;. this makes the note 0.5 map units narrower and the adornment and with a 0.25 unit gutter either side within the adornment.

  3. If the notes are in sibling order ($SiblingOrder) top to bottom, the $Ypos of a note could be the previous sibling’s $Ypos plus its $Height plus the vertical separation needed between notes.

  4. If you mean moving a note up and dropping it shoving all others down then no. See the rider below. If this seems odd, don’t overlook the implicit assumption that Tinderbox knows these notes are a list. There is an interesting spatial hypertext angle to this but i’ll avoid that rabbit hole.

If the suggestions in points 1, 2 and 3 above seem onerous, then essentially the way forward is one of:

  • make a feature request for formal Kanban functionality (though as a niche use of Tinderbox the ROI simply might not be worth it for the maker).
  • stay in the Kanban app and import data from Tinderbox to that context (don’t overlook Tinderbox now has AppleScript support).
  • stick with the ‘close enough’ ideas as in my code suggestions above.

I hope that helps :grinning: