November 19, 2021
Questions That Need To Be Answered
- How to design backlinks?
- Do we call them threads or stacks?
- How do we label and distinguish a card’s text and a card’s body? Do we just keep it simple make them the same? Then the name can be the first line and the body is the rest of it?
- Will exposing the account’s activity stream work as a design feature?
- Or should we just go with cards with no activities?
- How do I present and position bookmarking versus archiving versus attachments?
- What is the conceptual model for attachments in the first place?
- Should the card body be plain text, HTML (rich text), or markdown? I keep changing my mind on this, so I think this can only be settled by making HTML prototypes.
- Do we have a separate editing versus reading mode for the card body?
- Do we implement the first run at the reading features on the card body’s reading mode?
- Or do we need to add something like EPUB support from the very start?
- Should the user be able to have multiple top-level threads, each a separate workspace? Or do the child cards of a solo top thread serve the same function?
- How should cross-referencing work?
- What specific kinds of annotation should this support?
- Should cards have colours or some other form of non-tag typing or labelling?
- How are tags presented on the card?
- How exactly should the system track reading position?
- How should it be presented?
- How should we price this?
- Does ‘mark with attachment’ make any sense as a feature?
- How much of an issue will storage be?
- Will a web app (Progressive Web App) be viable on its own as a service or will I have to have some sort of native app on the roadmap? (Suspect the answer to this question might change, anyway, over the next few months.)
- People are going to expect to be able to interact with card stacks in some way that reflects the metaphor, aren’t they? Something like Apple’s piles idea might work. Maybe a child card menu? Is that too simple?
- Except piles is a great idea for an UI feature on its own, so it’s more a matter of rhyming with it than copying it wholesale.