Thursday, January 3, 2013

IdeaCrafting

Welcome to IdeaCrafting!

Ideas can be formed and modeled like clay. This is the idea behind IdeaCrafting. It is a little like mind maps and a little like a wiki, but not quite like either. When I drive or walk, I often have all kinds of ideas on all kinds of subjects. Sometimes the ideas are related, sometimes not. I usually just write them down in one big text file. But the problem is, that this text file keeps on growing and growing, and it is a daunting task going through all these ideas and getting them into some order. Here comes IdeaCrafting to the rescue: It allows me to take my ideas and associate them with keywords. This then makes it much easier to work with them, i.e., craft them into some greater thing.

DISCLAIMER: THIS APP IS IN BETA STADIUM. IT IS VERY LIKELY THAT THIS APP MAY LOOSE DATA YOU ENTERED, HENCE USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK AND ALWAYS KEEP A BACKUP OF YOUR DATA. ALSO, DO NOT ENTER ANY PRIVATE OR SECRET INFORMATION, SINCE THIS SITE IS NOT SECURE, THROUGH SESSION HIJACKING OR SIMILAR MEANS OTHER PEOPLE MAY BE EAVESDROPPING ON YOUR IDEAS!

To use this app, you may watch a little tutorial on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMmCA9KT2yE):

or just start typing your ideas, we call them 'idea bits'. Each idea bit is separated by an empty line. An idea bit can be as short or as long as you want. After you entered a couple of ideas, you may want to classify them. Simply click on the 'Classify' link below. It will separate all idea bits, and ask you to provide one or several keywords for each of them. The default is '_new', so in case you don't know yet how to classify an idea, simply leave it with '_new'. Then click again on the 'Classify' link to do the actual classification. Do this about every five minutes when entering new ideas, since your session will expire after about 10 minutes of inactivity.

After each classification, you will see that the navigation area changes, when you enter new keywords. Clicking on the keywords in the navigation area shows you the idea bits you filed under that keyword. If you want to change classifications, simply click on the 'Classify' link again. If you want to remove a keyword, simply re-classify all the ideas to a new keyword, and the old keyword will disappear.

This app is intended to be as simple as possible and uses as little server resources as possible. All the information you enter is stored in a session variable. As soon as the session expires (which happens after 10 minutes of inactivity) all your data gets erased, nothing is stored on the server. To prevent the complete loss of your data, after about 9 and a half minutes, the server redirects you to the 'Save' page, so that whatever you entered up to that time will be displayed in a text area. You can copy it then and save it into some text file. You can enter that text back via the 'Load' functionality and continue where you left of.

Functionality

This app has a menu area, a navigation area and an edit area.

Menu area

Gives you access to the major functionality of the app.

  • Home: It is the same as clicking on the '_new' keyword. All new ideas are first classified under this keyword. 
  • IdeaBits: Simply lists all currently stored idea bits. This can be used to search or to just see what ideas you had so far.
  • Keywords: Lists all keywords that currently exist. The numbers indicate which idea bits belong to which keyword. 
  • Navigation: The navigation normally is just an alphabetical list of your keywords. But you can modify that here, simply arrange it to your liking, maybe a different ordering, maybe you want to mimic a tree like structure. 
  • Zip: Allows you to download all your ideas and keywords as one zip file. 
  • Save: Also allows you to download all your ideas and keywords, but it presents it in a text area. Your need to select the whole text area, copy it and save it locally to some text file. 
  • Load: Since no information is stored locally, after your session expires all data you entered is lost. But if you saved it, you can come back and continue where you left off last time. Simply enter the text from the text area, or the zip file into the area provided and upload it. 

Navigation area

It basically lists all the keywords you entered. There is one special keyword '_new' which is used for new, not yet classified ideas. This area can be customized via the Navigation menu.

To get started, click on the 'Classify' button and classify this text. Then just start typing, play around and don't forget to click the 'Classify' button once in a while. If you don't know yet where to classify an idea, simply classify it under the '_new' keyword, as the app suggests. Enjoy!