Post-PostBoard Discussion

(Last work for 2001)

Problem: Drawing across zoomscapes is invariably weird; when an object on one side is merged with an object on the other side, the picture warps. (This is a problem in PostBrainstorm)

PostBoard's Solution: Drawing is in the context of a postit or a board, and all drawing in that object is at a fixed zoom level at the time of the drawing.

Another Solution: Drawing stops at the zoomscape border; this does constrain your use of the available white space, but it prevents the above weirdness. As a consequence, no object can be allowed to visibly overlap both regions. When you move an object from one area to another, the transition between areas must be portrayed smoothly.

Problem: Drawing "underneath" post-its is bizarre

Solution: Don't use post-its! Have everything exist on the same conceptual layer, a la postbrainstorm

Problem: If everything is on the same conceptual layer, then it's too easy for unrelated sketches to accidently merge because they bump into one another

Solution: Use arbitrary-shaped regions rather than rectangles. This means that two unrelated sketches are unlikely to merge unless their actual content gets very close.

Problem: Sometimes I _want_ to make a broad, sweeping mark or annotation across the board without disturbing the underlying content.

Solution: We're not sure. Drawing a line between two chunks of data should ostensibly merge those into one chunk... maybe there should be a way to make "temporary marks", like the little squiggles made by TV sports commentators during an instant replay.

Problem: If we make a collage out of several pieces of independent information, like some imported jpegs, how can we "ungroup" those or dig beneath our markup to get at the original data?

Solution: In PostBrainstorm you use undo to accomplish this... but that obliterates all the other work you've done in the meantime. We don't have a good solution to this problem yet.

Draw vs. Paint: Which to use for future versions?

• Paint lets you do freehand erasing. Draw makes freehand erase painful to implement.
• Drawing makes for easier implementation of unlimited undo/redo; undoing a paint operation requires storing the previous state, not just the previous action... so history files will get real big real fast.
• Paint, when zoomed down, becomes visually unintelligible much moreso than draw does.
• Draw is much more computationally expensive, while Paint is more memory intensive... but we have more memory at our disposal than CPU power
• Paint makes region copy/paste feasible
• Java painting isn't terribly fast, and overuse of memory causes thrashing when garbage collection is invoked.

And in closing, I'd just like to mention that having a video stream on the screen, as a moveable, resizeable object, would be cool.