Submitted by lucasd on 2023/09/16 22:41

Now that each Grid can have a Surface sub-view, InfoQube has become, in my view, the premiere concept-mapping tool. I would love to see it get even better. There are a number of ways that I think Surface view could be improved, but the main issue is Auto-Arrange. When I have lots of items and multi-directional links, Auto-Arrange often overlays items on top of each other and/or criss-crosses links in a confusing jumble. I think I remember hearing that that the software behind Auto-Arrange is a 3rd party component, so it may be hard to improve, but I'm just mentioning this here. For now, perhaps I'll just stick with manual arranging, but it would be nice to get more robust auto-arrange functionality in the future.

Comments

Hi Lucas,

Great! Can you explain what you'd like implemented? Is it a The Brain/Roam/Obsidian-like dynamic Graph view which centers on the current item or a more static presentation-like view, similar to mindmap software?

Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer

That's an interesting question. There could certainly be value to both approaches, but for my purposes I don't think I want the layout to automatically center on the selected item. I'd rather have it automatically find the clearest possible layout to view the relationships between all the currently visible items. 

By way of reference: CMapTools works similarly to IQ in this regard, but does a slightly better job with finding good layouts when there are complex relationships. Flying Logic does a beautiful job with layouts. And stemic.app (a web-based concept-mapping tool) also does a nice job, although items are much further apart.

(And IQ currently works great when the items are in a simple hierarchy. It's just when there are more complex relationships that it gets more tricky.)

Thanks for considering this!

Actually, I was going to post a screenshot of one of my jumbled maps, but in the process I stumbled upon a workable solution: My jumbled map had all items detached, and repeated executions of Auto-Arrange failed to create a clearer arrangement. But I tried first doing an Auto-Arrange that re-attached the items, and then did another Auto-Arrange that detached the items again, and this produced a much clearer arrangement. So, for now, this seems to be working.

Okay, for good measure, here's a screenshot of a simplified example:

Surface arrangement

This is after executing Auto-Arrange. This is just to demonstrate some minor issues that can start to arise. Highlighted item #1 should really be moved over to the left, so that it's link paths wouldn't need to cross other link paths. And highlighted item #2 should be above the two items that are right above it (and the two items above should be moved below), which would also avoid crossing link paths. This is the kind of thing where I was thinking maybe some tweaks would be possible.

(As I described above, re-attaching and then detaching helped a lot, but the issue in the screenshot here remains.)

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