4 ms·

There are a lot of negative comments already - many are not in-keeping with the HN guidelines. Hopefully this won't end up getting your Show HN post flagged. T

There are a lot of negative comments already - many are not in-keeping with the HN guidelines. Hopefully this won't end up getting your Show HN post flagged. The strength of feeling in those comments - such as this one - is really interesting: >"you've missing [sic] the entire point of writing fiction." Some would argue that if art makes you feel anything this strongly, it's 100% doing its job. Maybe you're not missing the point at all! I'm interested to try it out, and perhaps build some features on top of what it's doing already. I've been using trees a lot for the novel I've been working on for the last couple of years, but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on. Trees can get really unwieldy really fast, with basically infinite combinations - especially if you're working at a very granular level. I'm curious about anyone else here who has run into the same or a similar problem, and how they approached it. There are more plausible paths through this manuscript than I can personally hold in my head, which is quite different from approaches I've used in the past, where structures have been more formalised and deviation from them was thus quite limited. Thanks for sharing this!

refsab 2mo ago
>but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on yes exactly. My main motivation for writing this was to try my hand at it. I'm not happy yet. First started looking at loom interfaces but all have the same problem of how you visualize it. My try is a in the map (m) if you want to check it out. I feel like the path view works reasonably well but tree and mass not so much. This is really difficult to solve. Happy to hear your ideas or see your solutions
- gabriel666smith 2mo ago
  Yeah, I started off with looms too, and got frustrated with them. My current hunch is that it requires a Z axis. Google Earth, for example, manages to convey quite a lot of interesting variables simply (and has maybe been underutilised as a type of UI): - Longitude - Latitude - Granularity / altitude ("the same, but different") - Paths between destinations - On Msoft Flight Sim, a slider can amend the time (to change weather, the sun, etc). This gives you another variable to work with. I haven't tested implementing UIs from this hunch yet, but that's where I'm at currently. It feels like there's a lot of useful parallels.
newsy-combi 2mo ago
> Some would argue that if art makes you feel anything this strongly, it's 100% doing its job. It's pretty easy to invoke disgust and pain. That doesn't make public toilets and getting shot pieces of art 100% doing their job.
Towaway69 2mo ago
I agree with your sentiment and all kudos to the author for being so creativity in creating such tool. I like the idea of having a list of "facts" to keep track of characters in the story. Even if I won't use it since I dislike using the terminal, I still think its very creative tool for writing. Strangely I can also understand all the hate but what are you going do? For all those that hate, don't shoot the messenger - the author of the tool is only using those tools that everyone else is also using. We are collectively going down a very sloppery (pun intended) slope and the author of the tool is just being creativity for their own purposes. Hate the companies pushing this slop down our throats, not those that make use of the existing tools and pushing them to new uses - that's called learning.
- refsab 2mo ago
  I also built a webui but it's not very fleshed out. After all this hate I'm thinking about stripping out the ai parts of the webui and making it a manual writing tool maybe. Keep the branching and tree visualizations
  - gabriel666smith 2mo ago
    It would be incorrect to amend your work based on the opinions of people who have chosen to spend some of their finite time on Earth being openly rude to you about your work on the internet. If people don't want to use the free software you have kindly shared with the world, they can simply not use it. Don't stress it.
  - Towaway69 1mo ago
    Failure lies in listening to the fears of others. Listen to your inner soul, not others. Only then can you create something that truly inspires you.

refsab 2mo ago

>but haven't managed to find the best way to visualise them in a UI, so I'm excited to see what you settled on yes exactly. My main motivation for writing this was to try my hand at it. I'm not happy yet. First started looking at loom interfaces but all have the same problem of how you visualize it. My try is a in the map (m) if you want to check it out. I feel like the path view works reasonably well but tree and mass not so much. This is really difficult to solve. Happy to hear your ideas or see your solutions

gabriel666smith 2mo ago
Yeah, I started off with looms too, and got frustrated with them. My current hunch is that it requires a Z axis. Google Earth, for example, manages to convey quite a lot of interesting variables simply (and has maybe been underutilised as a type of UI): - Longitude - Latitude - Granularity / altitude ("the same, but different") - Paths between destinations - On Msoft Flight Sim, a slider can amend the time (to change weather, the sun, etc). This gives you another variable to work with. I haven't tested implementing UIs from this hunch yet, but that's where I'm at currently. It feels like there's a lot of useful parallels.

newsy-combi 2mo ago

> Some would argue that if art makes you feel anything this strongly, it's 100% doing its job. It's pretty easy to invoke disgust and pain. That doesn't make public toilets and getting shot pieces of art 100% doing their job.

Towaway69 2mo ago

I agree with your sentiment and all kudos to the author for being so creativity in creating such tool. I like the idea of having a list of "facts" to keep track of characters in the story. Even if I won't use it since I dislike using the terminal, I still think its very creative tool for writing. Strangely I can also understand all the hate but what are you going do? For all those that hate, don't shoot the messenger - the author of the tool is only using those tools that everyone else is also using. We are collectively going down a very sloppery (pun intended) slope and the author of the tool is just being creativity for their own purposes. Hate the companies pushing this slop down our throats, not those that make use of the existing tools and pushing them to new uses - that's called learning.

refsab 2mo ago
I also built a webui but it's not very fleshed out. After all this hate I'm thinking about stripping out the ai parts of the webui and making it a manual writing tool maybe. Keep the branching and tree visualizations
- gabriel666smith 2mo ago
  It would be incorrect to amend your work based on the opinions of people who have chosen to spend some of their finite time on Earth being openly rude to you about your work on the internet. If people don't want to use the free software you have kindly shared with the world, they can simply not use it. Don't stress it.
- Towaway69 1mo ago
  Failure lies in listening to the fears of others. Listen to your inner soul, not others. Only then can you create something that truly inspires you.