It sounds obvious that software isn’t like real world objects, it has no inherent gravity, softness, or squeeze-ability. But it does have its own kind of shape and weight.

That shape comes from helping you do what you can’t in the physical world. Great software responds with the enthusiasm of a puppy on a road trip, you build up a rapport with it, and it becomes an extension of your mind.

Software designed to replicate a physical experience will always suck because it replaces the tactility of the real-world with conceptual baggage that doesn’t fit the medium. Trying to be a whiteboard, for example, means putting a lot of fiddly questions in front of what you want to do:

Do you want to add a note or a comment? Is this text or a photo? What color should the note be? Do you want the font to look like handwriting? Should it be square or circle?

And … I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say. Clippy never left – he just got low.

Software as Software

Kinopio is software designed to be software. The entire interface revolves around creating and connecting small atomic units of knowledge that happen to be in the shape of cards.

Just like life, everything’s simpler when we’re not pretending to be something we’re not. Same goes for interfaces. In Kinopio, thoughts, feelings, ideas, or comments – everything is just a card. Click, type, and connect.

There are, of course, fancy options like card frames and checkboxes, but it’s all secondary to creating. Thinking tools have a timeless good feel when their primary interaction is creation.

Text as Text

My earliest mockups of creating cards imposed a lot of structure like status, custom fields and comments.

I built the first version with just a single textarea because it was the simple, iterative thing to do. But right away, it was obvious that a single field was calmer, inviting, and creatively expressive.

Turns out, you can do a lot with just a textarea. If you want to add a link, paste it in. If you want to comment, make a card and connect it. If you want a checkbox, prepend []:

Software is a conversation between you and a computer. Conversations are better when they’re chill.

A Short Update

It’s been a year or so since I started Kinopio. Encouragingly, I learned that I wasn’t that only one with fragile ideas to plant and grow, or thorny problems to think through.

But building a visual thinking tool for new ideas and hard problems still feels like an experiment. Can software created by one person succeed against corporations with hundreds of people and millions of dollars? Kinopio is an experiment in trust, transparency, and in people over institutions.

Keep paddling,

Let’s enjoy the ride,

🛶

Comments…

Most software is annoying to use. Opening a news article to read 500 words should be instant but takes entire seconds. Try to make a quick update to a Google Doc and you’re waiting even longer before you can type. Hopefully you don’t have to use Jira or Photoshop.

I thought computers were supposed to be nicer than they were in the 90s.

Grizzled vets say that the good times make us weak. That because we have powerful hardware, modern software is built on top of a bewildering goop of high-level languages, frameworks, and dependencies on dependencies that make even simple things sluggish.

It’s a compelling argument. As craftspeople, we just need to not be lazy, get our shit together, and then we can make nice things.

ヽ(´□｀。)ﾉ

But I think self-flagellation is missing the forest for the trees.

As an industry, we’ve moved from putting engineering innovation and efficiency first, towards prioritizing usability and market-fit. I’m not mad at that. Computers exist to help humans do new things, they should be bicycles for the mind and all that good stuff. But there’s nothing stopping software from being useful and elegantly made.

I mean, except for the way most software companies are organized.

Most company structures are based on the Roman empire military. CEO Caesar says he wants something, and the lieutenant managers below him on the org chart break it down into smaller tasks for the soldiers to accomplish.

(Rome military diagram)

On a development team, programmers are the soldiers of these shitty new armies. They open their Jira issues and add whatever feature it says to add, or fix what it says to fix. If I can save time by adding another dependency, or skip a meeting by implementing a mockup exactly as designed, why should I care?

Some people care. Those people suffer:

I now spend 1/4 of my work week fighting dependency hell (after just about each addition of a new package by any other developer on the project), another 1/4 figuring out how the “latest and greatest” tool of the week is best used to do something that would normally take me 5 minutes to do custom (god forbid, not the C-word!), and the remaining half is spent maybe doing actual work. So incredibly frustrating that I’ve just about had it.

I’ve grown to loathe and hate that which I used to adore. (Source)

Building software is nothing like organizing armies in 100 BC. In 2020, we can communicate instantly, victory is ambiguous, and there’s less murder. But most importantly, we’re not conquesting, we’re creating.

Creation moves differently

To illustrate this, let’s talk about Super Mario 64, the landmark 1996 game that used an unusual new technology: 3D graphics. You might think that Mario 64 was built with tickets and sprints, but, according to interviews, there was no master plan, only the principles that the game should feel good and be fun. They started with just Mario in a small room, and tuned his animations and physics until he felt nice and responsive. After that, the levels were also created as they went, with the designers, developers, and director going back and forth using sketches and prototypes.

Building like this is never a straight line. Ideas and code get left on the cutting room floor because part of innovation is questioning whether what you made should exist. The process is cyclical and iterative, looking something like:

Good software comes from a vision, combined with conversations not commandments. In a craft-focused environment, care for efficiency, simplicity, and details really do matter. I didn’t leave my last job just because I wanted to make something new. I left because I wanted to make it in a way I could be proud of.

So here’s what’s up, I’m working on my own right now, in a race between my diminishing savings and my typing fingers. But I’m not stressing too much. I’ve got a lot of work to do, but people seem to like what I’m making. Maybe one day though, it won’t just be me. When that happens I’d love to build a small company/collective/thing that’s the best place for creators to work.

Special thanks to Michelle and Hao for helping edit this.

Comments…

Over the last couple months, it’s been super encouraging to hear from teachers, programmers, designers, and students about how they use Kinopio to map out and make sense of their ideas, feelings, and plans.

Right now I’m working on features to make it easier to share and collaborate with other people on those spaces. But I’m taking a little break to answer some questions that really deserve public answers.

How Will Kinopio Make Money?

My plan is to eventually require people to pay $4/month to create more than 100 or so cards. I want the pricing to feel simple, straightforward, and obvious.

What About User Data and Privacy?

I haven’t written a legalese privacy policy yet. But either way, here’s the common sense human version.

• Kinopio won’t show you ads of any kind.
• No cookies are used for anything. LocalStorage is used to save your info. Unlike cookies, other websites cannot access localStorage.
• To share spaces and collaborate, your user data and spaces will be hosted on AWS (via Heroku). Besides this necessity, your data will not be shared with any third party.
• The only analytics I use are from Netlify. Which does not allow me to uniquely identify anyone.
• Children, and anyone else, will always be able to use Kinopio anonymously and collaborate with others on public spaces.
• You can permanently remove all of your data anytime.

What Happens to My Data if Kinopio Dies?

We don’t live in a deterministic world. I could do everything right and still run out of money without being able to turn Kinopio into a healthy, sustainable business. If that happens, you won’t lose any data and Kinopio will still be usable.

Kinopio consists of two codebases, the client app that runs when you hit kinopio.club and the server app which will enable sharing and collaboration. The client app is like a cockroach, it’s tiny, free to host, and doesn’t depend on a connection to the server app. So if I can’t afford to run the kinopio server anymore, I can just switch it off and you can continue to use Kinopio as you do now – with all your data intact.

Besides all that, there’s already a bunch of ways to export your data. Either as entire spaces, or just the specific cards you care about.

So When Are You Going to Get a Real Job?

chill mom

🌱

Comments…

It’s been ~3 months since I quit Glitch. From outside the city, amidst community gardens, fireflies, and lazing cats, I want to tell you what I’ve been working on.

Kinopio is designed to:

1. Get the chaotic messy thoughts and ideas out of your head
2. Show you how they’re connected
3. Help you figure out what they mean, and how to start working on them

Instead of neatly structured forms and lists like a traditional planning tool, Kinopio works like your brain does. The best way to explain that is with a little tour of kinopio.club:

Tap anywhere to make a new card. Put an idea, thought, or feeling in it. It doesn’t need to make sense right now. Make some more, wherever you want. Drag cards to move them with a jolly wiggle.

By now some of these ideas might be connected – so let’s connect them by dragging from one card connector to another.

Connections can also be tapped on to edit their color and type, among other things.

You’ve got the gist!

I made Kinopio for people who have ideas, feelings, or thoughts they’re struggling to express, organize, and understand. I used it to plan out this blog post [screenshot].

It also works great on phones and tablets.

Coming soon, I’ll be adding collaboration features that’ll let you whiteboard with a team, and better connect what you’re doing to why you’re doing it.

Here’s one more thing. You can use your art skills to manipulate multiple cards at once. Paint over them, and a menu of multi-card options will appear. You can also drag multiple cards around together too.

Come through and let me know what you think. You can also follow my progress at are.na or twitter.

In future posts, I’ll talk about design choices, aesthetic influences, how I built it, and my business “plan”.

See you later,

Be kind to animals,

✌️

Comments…