Accidentally fallen into interface design. Been playing a lot with HTML preview actions in #Draftsapp in recent months, starting with things that were just styled lists, and now I've landed on interfaces based on masonry style layouts. Been finding those particularly useful for reviewing collections of items— tasks, projects, knowledge items...
Lists become overwhelming beyond a certain threshold. For me, unless the sequencing is particularly important: long list < masonry board.
Also, there's something appealing about the masonry layout vs a rigid grid. Visual dynamic?
For my "projects + actionables" set-up, I split the board into lanes (a vertical kanban... ish). So not just a sprawling board which could be equally overwhelming, but freeform buckets or areas with a sense of progression between them (plus drag and drop). Feels like a really useful addition to a text editor, the kind of functionality that a lot of people might get from something like Obsidian...
In the text editor, the interface for items is typically a list. (Drafts' list truncates longer titles, which irks me.) Again, once I get past a certain point, things at the bottom of the list will rarely see the light of day again. The "board" layout has been helping with that, too.
That, and an action that displays relationships between drafts (parent/child/sibling relationships, links and mentions, without falling into that graph trope).
...which might beg the question: why not just use something like Obsidian?
Familiarity (I've spent over a decade in Drafts now), native OS integrations, extensibility and a bit of geek-pride in edge-casing. 🤓 I'm using @drafts for journalling, workout logging, inventory management (books, movies/series, podcasts, etc), projects/tasks, knowledge management, habit tracking and "quantified self" (graphing based on tokens tracked in my daily log), and (duh) writing. And it all works. Beautifully.
@drafts Couple of points here remind me of Linus Lee's [Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools](https://thesephist.com/posts/tools/)
> I don’t want to imply that my tools are objectively better than the professional tools on the market like Notion and Dropbox. Those latter services have more features, and might even be more reliable today. But I think my tools fit me better for a different reason.
On the relationship between notes and tasks— how notes are often actionable, and for some of us, systems that separate notes and tasks introduce a false dichotomy:
> The way that I see it, everything I learn and jot down is something for me to act on at some point in my life. If I read something that I never thought would influence the way I lived, it wouldn’t have value to me, and I simply wouldn’t write it down.
@jslr I'm not familiar with Pinterest, but I think I will refer to this as a Kankanbanbanban board.
Thank you!
@gabe Love it. :)
Also, if it helps, an image of my books/audiobooks inventory management interface attached. Doesn't really demand as much structure as when managing projects/actionables, so no lanes. Controlled/filtered through tag selection.
This is probably a more typical usage of a masonry layout (wall of images).
@gabe ...and an alternate take— something I've just started to work with: an interface for starting points for writing; collection of text items that I don't need to process sequentially, but instead want to eye-surf and grab whatever calls to me to progress further.
Formatted as a straight list, the collection would likely get weighty as it grows. This layout allows me to dispense with the notion that I need to work through the each item and instead encourages more of a grab-n-go approach...
Jacob Sam-La Rose
Gabe