a framework for toolmaking
So once I had sources, was reading them and trying to keep them organized, I had to think about the ramifications of what I was reading. I used a few techniques and the biggest frustration for me was in translating between paper and computer, and between application on the computer. It was almost enough for me to give up on making my own tool for expression and just make research and ideation tools, almost.
Not surprisingly to me, I did my best a thinking just writing and sketching with a pencil and paper. There are no limits and no boundaries to how you can put information together that way. As a visual thinker I prefer to sketch diagrams and visual images rather than type out streams of text. The Freewrite or Freedraw techniques are also called Automatic Drawing or Automatic Writing. Its is when you force yourself to just keep moving your pen or pencil over the paper for 10-15 minutes to get the ideas out. They are a good way to get past blocks.
Card sorting is when you take a stack of things or concepts on cards and literally sort them into separate piles. I didn’t always make cards but I did follow the protocol of making a list of options, organizing them, trying a few test cases that weren’t on the original list and organizing again. This is the process I used to do things like come up with my labels for the different Activity Types and develop models for the Narrative Structure.
http://www.sebastian-krauss.de/software/
This was my favorite software finds this semester. I found it searching for the term visualization on VersionTracker.com It lest you rapidly switch between an outline view and a simple chart. Not a lot of bloaty-features. It allows you output to a file format called OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) which you can then open in programs like OmniOutliner7 or OmniGraffle8. These two are not free and are more complicated, but have more robust feature sets. Using the trail version of OmniOutliner Pro I got some of my outlines ready for Apple Keynote and Microsoft Word.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/
This is my favorite way to write at the moment, actually. I’ve always written version after version of outline and then filled them in as my writing process. The outline view in Microsoft lets you do this really easily. It also doesn’t completely lock you into an outline so if you aren’t sure where information is going to fit you can just type, something which is harder to do in outlining software. That ability to be both structured and structured is a real plus. Once you’re done, you can then open the outline as a Power Point. For me I use the Power Point file to start a Keynote presentation.
http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/
I put this presentation software in my Analysis section because I did a lot of thinking about my project while organizing how to present it. It let me work in the outline structure that I like, but it is also very graphics friendly and in conjunction with the occasional foray into Macromedia’s Fireworks or Adobe’s Illustrator was the closest in feeling to me like working on plain paper. My biggest gripe is that there is no easy way to export the notes along with screen image other than to print it to a non-editable PDF.
http://www.graphviz.org/
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/download.html
This is a software I want to love. It lets you use a straight forward– not XML based – file format to create data visualizations. It is really quiet elegant in its format, but the barrier seems higher than I wanted to deal with in terms of learning how to use the DOT mark- up language it is based on. OmniGraffle will open the files, but you can’t get them back out that way. I used it to make a graph of my problem with getting data back and forth between software packages.
http://www.filemaker.com/
FileMaker was my I-need-to-collect-data-and-I-want-a-GUI-to-input-it-NOW application. It is very good at letting you create quick layouts and databases that you can change around a bunch very fast. That said, it doesn’t handle relational databases in a way that I find intuitive. Among other things, I used it to start collecting data for a tool-timeline that I intend to document further when it is ready to be released.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/
http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.shtml
These are unlikely companions, but I used them both for the same purpose, when I had data in one that needed to get formatted to go somewhere else. Excel is a huge spreadsheet program that lets you create tables very quickly and has nice features like auto-completing words that you had used in the same cell before. You can export data in a ton of different formats for import into other applications. FileMaker Pro can open them directly. BBEdit I used to change files that were in one text based format (like OPML) to plain text or something else when possible by very simple text replacements.