[yodon]

Your post and site would be far more effective with an explanation of what it is and how it works. You probably spent months or years crafting this so it's obvious to you but to the rest of us it's not and 99.99% of visitors you drive to your site are just going to move on without an explanation.

[Zeminary]

I'll make the changes inside the webpage.

It's like Excel but without automatic grids. You have to add them manually.

The way I write, I think things and then I think ABOUT things. Word & Excel's structures kinda work for this but not exactly. Excel didn't have enough freedom and was clearly designed for numbercrunching and all the extra features also got in the way of thinking. Word had too much freedom.

Also, they were really slow after a certain size.

So I made Zeminary.

EDIT: my guiding philosophy and roadmap https://twitter.com/Zeminary/status/1432571606744899587

[joecool1029]

This makes a ton of sense. I've heard it said that there are those that spread and those that stack when organizing. This is an example of a spread, where Word is made for stackers.

When I work on stuff it drives some people nuts because the idea I have is to spread all the pieces spatially so I can see all the parts at all times as I take things apart, and then condense it in as I finish. So when taking things apart, it uses a larger area. People like my dad will take things apart and all the parts get mixed into a place I find it hard to remember where they went, my short-term memory is shit.

For writing, I've always felt there hasn't been tools that allow writers that need to scatter parts/ideas and be able to drag them around and arrange them. Sometimes on writing papers and long-form works I write the bits, then later on 'stitch' them together. I can't remember if I just file in a note software, doesn't work super well.

Needs some UX work to better explain this, I hope I'm describing something along the lines of what you're trying to create, but that's how I'd use this.

[Zeminary]

That's exactly what led me to make Zeminary. I kept running into problems with decomposing my thoughts in a way that didn't interfere with my main line of thought. Or with trying to grasp all the thoughts in a situation.

[wolpoli]

Scrivener is a popular writing program that allows you to compose pieces of your content and reoganize them later as you put your document together. I encourage you to give it a try as it might just be what you are looking for.

[Zeminary]

Scrivener was my first writing app that wasn't a part of MS Office. I also recommend it.

Tangentially, for anyone wondering — Zeminary isn't meant to replace other PKM and writing apps. You can have your ideas elsewhere, then assemble them in Zeminary.

Zeminary is complementary.

[wingerlang]

I still don’t understand what it’s for. You think things then write about things makes no sense as an explanation to me. The fact that word/excel kinda works but not really also doesn’t help.

Maybe make a video where you write something in the boxes and explain why they go where they go.

[Zeminary]

Here's my guiding philosophy (on Twitter).

Zeminary to me is supposed to be an Ideamusicsheet.

I didn't want to call it that in my post cause that just ... sounds a bit kooky.

https://twitter.com/Zeminary/status/1432571606744899587

Zeminary is more for artists than technologists.

Artists are very concerned with relationships of meaning and time.

When I write, I really only have one main line of thought, but to grasp what that thought means, I have to decompose it. I need to write to the side, to show that at this point in time, this and other thoughts arise. I don't want just the final line, I want to see all the lines that make up that line.

That's overkill for alot of usecases, but necessary for mine.

I also do alot of annotations of dense philosophical works. I have to seriously grasp them because I want my art to cohere.

I guess you could say Zeminary is a metathinking app. Or a chordal or a contrapuntal thinking app. It makes Ideamusic more deliberate.

You can do the same work in other places, but Zeminary makes it alot easier for me. For example, writing in one place doesn't cause everything else to shift around. Images and extra context local to a specific grid can be hidden in that grid (scrollable). The soft shadows help to "bleed" ideas. You can unborder grids to separate context. The bareness and the lack of distracting UI helps me to focus. Movable mindmaps are easier to pull off. There's marks, there's multipoint comments. There's alot of subtle touches. Etc. I'll be adding more feature layers in the future.

One of my future art projects is to write a 4096 part work based on the King Wen Sequence. 64 x 64 = 4096. It'll be very dense. I'm making Zeminary Tensor for that.

Zeminary Tensors might even become an app of choice for anyone looking to author & publish large textworks.

And progressive summarization / expansion / composition.

And analogical thinking.

[wingerlang]

> I need to write to the side, to show that at this point in time, this and other thoughts arise.

So it's a non linear writing app.

[Zeminary]

Well, it's still linear, but with more dimensions. It thinks of writing as a progression of chords rather than as a progression of arpeggiations.

EDIT: Actually, no you're right. It's nonlinear.

[tunesmith]

What's an ideamusicsheet? What's ideamusic?

[Zeminary]

It's just an analogy of music. Music is a succession of sounds. Ideamusic is a succession of ideas. Here's the guiding philosophy of Zeminary if you don't have a Twitter.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GECsGXoAEU3l6?format=png&name=...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GEQbGWUAAmZJ5?format=png&name=...

It's kinda "out there" tbh.

[captn3m0]

A short video or screenshot of the old workflow in Execel vs how it improves here would be nice as well.

Not having the prior context of “excel for writers”, makes the new context “better excel for writers” impossible to get.

[Zeminary]

I'll definitely make a comparison video or post.

COPYPASTE: A video would take a really long time. I'll make one when I'm done fixing everything. One thing you could try right now is making a 10x10 grid, then clearing the borders of the 2nd column from the left. Everything on the right would be inspiration or raw material. The leftmost column would be the actual draft.

[gus_massa]

The indentation of submenus is too small. You should try something more similar to usual menus.

It would be nice to be able to export this as a docx, xlsx and pdf file. Importing is perhaps impossible, but exporting should be doable.

> The way I write, I think things and then I think ABOUT things.

I don't understand. You are talking about writing a book? About writing an internal memo for your team?

[Zeminary]

So, the main set of thoughts goes up and down, and the thoughts about the main set of thoughts go to the left and right. Usually on the same level but sometimes not.

Writing books, movies, screenplays, etc. Contexts where subtext is heavy. Contexts where meaning per time is dense.

I'm planning to be able to export this as an HTML on top of those formats.

You'll be able to upload your Zeminary writings as a static webpage.

I'll change the indentations.

[lelanthran]

> EDIT: my guiding philosophy and roadmap https://twitter.com/Zeminary/status/1432571606744899587

That doesn't tell me anything other than "you need to be logged in".

Why make your project depend on twitter? I need to have a twitter account and login just to read the project help?

[Zeminary]

It's a bit "out there" as a guiding philosophy for a tech product. Here are the images.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GECsGXoAEU3l6?format=png&name=...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-GEQbGWUAAmZJ5?format=png&name=...

The roadmap is on that tweet. It relates to Zeminary and what's in the images.