Flatland

From Scrapbook to Flatland:

Ideas for the XO's killer collaboration app, and how to get there incrementally

Strangely, airplane flights seem to be a good place for generating ideas about the XO. Here are some thoughts I had on the recent trip home that grew out of the 2-D shared play space idea that I described at the Friday Fight on March 23. This document will evolve as the ideas evolve; I intend to fill it out with illustrations and more detail as time goes on. Ping 01:47, 25 March 2007 (EDT)

The ultimate vision is a flexible, extensible, collaborative space for storage (collecting and organizing ideas and content), creation (writing, drawing, and programming), and socializing (communicating, playing, and working together). That's a pretty big list of features, so it helps to figure out how we can get there by starting with something simple and immediately useful and adding to it, bit by bit, to get to something powerful and transformative. Also, if we start with something simple and flexible, we can open the doors to let everyone add to its capabilities.

Step 1. Clipboard

Here's an easy place to start. The overlay screen on the XO is the natural place for a visual clipboard, with some advantages over today's clipboards:

• The overlay can hold multiple objects at once, unlike today's clipboards, which usually can only hold one. You can collect many things without losing what you collected previously.

• In today's clipboards, the content is invisible. You don't know what's in the clipboard until you paste it. But with an overlay clipboard, you can immediately see what's in it.

Proposed user interaction: The overlay clipboard that lets you put things anywhere within the screen area, but does not scroll.

Rationale: It makes sense for the clipboard to have a limited size: it is a temporary place, and you don't want to lose track of things you put there. Anything you paste there stays put, just where you left it.

Proposed user interaction: The overlay has a toolbar, probably along the top.

Rationale: The overlay will probably need to do several useful things. The most obvious way to make these functions exposed and discoverable is with a toolbar.

Proposed UI: When you click a tool, that tool stays active (even after deactivation and reactivation of the overlay) until you switch to another tool.

Rationale: The overlay is a place to collect things; it's likely you'll want to collect many things of a particular type, possibly from multiple applications and contexts.

Step 1a. Screen grabs

Screen grabs are the low-hanging fruit here, because the concept of a screen grab makes sense in every application and can be implemented uniformly.

Once you have screen grabs, suddenly you can leverage all the applications to create clippable content: you can pick up whatever you drew in the paint program, whatever you've written in the text editor, anything you've seen on a web page, etc.

Proposed user interaction: One of the overlay tools is an icon for "grab a screen clip". Activate the overlay; switch to the screen grab tool if necessary. Drag out a rectangle over the dimmed screen to "pop" that rectangle up to the overlay (thus you see the clipped rectangle undimmed). Dragging in the empty area cuts out a new screen clip; dragging over an existing clip moves the clip around.

Rationale: Direct manipulation. The first time you try this, it becomes obvious what the screen clip tool does.

Proposed user interaction: One of the overlay tools is an "erase" or "trash" icon. When this tool is active, anything you click is thrown away (disappears). You can wipe out lots of items by dragging the eraser around. An "undo" button recovers what you just wiped out.

Rationale: Direct manipulation. We want it to be fast and easy to clean out lots of stuff, because the overlay is only for temporary storage.

Step 1b. Other types of elements

After screen grabs are working, we can add support for copy and paste across applications. Plain text could be the next easiest and most essential thing to do; then perhaps URLs, then formatted text, and then other media types like vector graphic objects and audio clips.

For invisible types like audio clips, the graphical representation that appears on the overlay should visually indicate the size/length of the object.

Step 1a is all that's necessary to move on to Step 2; Step 1b can start taking place in parallel.

Step 2. Scrapbook

The scrapbook activity is a more permanent place to deposit things you've picked up in the overlay. It's a great big canvas where you can drop anything.

Proposed UI: The scrapbook is infinite. (Maybe it should be only vertically infinite and horizontally large but finite, so you don't get lost.) There is no "save" and "load"; there is only one scrapbook, and it goes on forever. Everything you put here is instantly saved automatically.

Rationale: This is a place where you can store your whole life, if you want. "Save" and "load" are confusing and a hassle.

Proposed UI: To pan the view in any direction, hold down either "hand" button and drag with the touchpad. This should always work, in any context (even mid-operation) and no matter what other tool is active.

Rationale: This is what the "hand" buttons are intended for. It's non-modal (quasi-modal). Non-modality is good.

Proposed UI: To put things in your scrapbook, you have to paste them from the overlay. One of the tools on the toolbar is the "paste" tool; with this tool active, anything you click gets pasted.

Rationale: Modality sucks, but we want to easily let you paste multiple copies of an object or many objects in a lightweight way. We could also add "paste" to a right-click context menu on overlay objects, for times when you want to paste one thing without having to switch tools.