This is pretty cool, and I want to try it! but I was expecting it to be a paid Mac native app, not a web app behind a sign-up process... If you plan to keep it web-based, I'd encourage you to create a demo portal that doesn't require a signup. But I'd love a native app with export functionality (so I can use my own backups)!
A native app is definitely on the to-do list. The reason why we chose the browser is mainly so that we can distribute it to a broader audience. Also, I use a MacBook and my Co-founder uses windows, and we'd both like to use the app ourselves haha.
I may be wrong on this, but I think the friction to download a native app is much higher than a web app. And we really want as many users, from as many demographics, as we can to test the product and guide our development.
A demo portal/sandbox on our front page would be cool too! But we have some bugs/features that are much higher on our todo list.
I think the threshold for downloading a native app vs a web app is when you have to start putting your person data in the application.
what you are creating is something that will be filled with peoples personal data. Many of us, are required by employers, law, or a sense of owning the data, are going to prevent people from storing the data on your server.
you could look at a native app, if your rending is done client side, you could make the data files exportable, and make use of client side encryption.
Think the way a lot of password managers are working.
Additionally, on your demo video, I know voice over can be a pain for small devs, but have some on screen techs would really be helpful, or hell even some background music.
I know I personally started checking my headphone, trying to see if they were muted.
"Many of us, are required by employers, law, or a sense of owning the data"
Ahh, interesting. I've never thought about this when it comes to web vs native. It is surely one of my blind spots. Thank you for pointing that out!
We will definitely work towards that, however, at this moment we are quite limited by our development speed. So it is unclear how long it will be until our #1 prioritization becomes creating a native app.
Also, will definitely make the demo vid better, eventually!
Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate them.
Seconding the native app. The concept is great and I'd like to put it to work right now but (like a few other commercial products) it's a non-starter to store my data on your servers.
This is slightly tangential. But, in line with visual representation of ideas to aid with memory I found that memories of things I did in VR were more like "real life memories" than anything I ever did in a 2d game.
I have a few odd memories of Echo Arena where I swear I can remember feeling the cool air of the arena on my skin and smelling the cold metal walls mixed with sweat. It felt like I was "there".
I wonder if some memory palace concepts could be combined with VR.
This is a literal reciency bias. You did these things more reciently than the wd games. And the 2d games were more fanciful... did you play mario in 3d or was it some simulator???
So what happens when I fill up an island and I want to capture an idea in the proper place RIGHT NOW? Especially if I've got it surrounded by other islands. Aw shit, I just lost my fragile new idea while getting distracted by landscaping.
Also holy crap the body type in these notes is microscopic.
I think the app is more a solution for organizing your thoughts rather than capturing them when they come. But I agree that something should be done in that regards.
Great point! The idea of running out of real estate is something that we thought quite a bit about in the beginning.
So, we used to have somewhat like a tag system that we thought would lower the friction required to make a note. Where you can open up a notebook anywhere and we'll put it on the correct island for you after #tag it. But it kinda defeated the purpose of this app, for people to place their notes down like how they place a lego block down.
Also, it turns out, people usually don't fill up their islands to the point of collision. They have a lot of empty spaces between notes. So, it's actually a problem that we haven't encountered yet.
Additionally, note blocks can be seen as their own word documents and the tiny words on top are previews. So you can also just "open up" one of these blocks and put your idea there.
OR, what I do, is I have an island for random ideas like that. Write it down first, organize it later.
lastly, we will add a font size option for the rooftop fonts soon, don't wanna get eye damage lawsuits haha.
Definitely need that font size option! ... or, better, just good dynamic autoscaling based on f(text_length, box_size, zoom_level) and maybe a font size override option for static association.
Also need a drag feature for increasing island size, not just click. I would like to be able to create a large island quickly, like using a paintbrush almost. Even if I don't have notes to populate it with anytime soon.
I’m looking at how much stuff I have in Evernote after around a decade of using that and... if anyone uses this, you’ll definitely have that problem.
I wasn’t talking about the fonts in the scroll-around-the-islands view being tiny, I meant the body copy when you open up a note. At least on OSX Safari it is like 6pt.
I remember we got one of those workstations at work. No one could figure out what it’s purpose should be.. someone suggested it would make a decent mmorpg server... and it was.
I recall that one of the demos included with some versions of Irix was a multiplayer fighter combat simulator, one of the first users of IP multicast :D
Relatedly: I often run while listening to podcasts. When I do, I remember much more of the material. And when I revisit certain blocks around the neighborhood, I find myself recalling what I heard during the run.
The spacial encoding of memories seems very potent and under-investigated.
I first learned about memory palaces in the book Hannibal, named after the character in Silence of the Lambs [0], but the description there is of a lavish imaginary palace inside your mind you can wander in. I did use this technique to try to remember some physics formulae for an exam once, in my memory palace there was a room with giant equations.
This website is a bit of a let-down for me since it's just a bird's eye view, it would be cool to create a palace using a 3d game engine, with signs that point to things like physics formulae, and then some Sims or Google-Sketchup-like tool to add objects that you want to remember.
No one can arrive to use a memory palace technique proper good without first learning to visualize space-time. That is FOUR dimensions, not a 2-d map, not a 3-d picture, an actual space you can walk around that changes.
Hans-Lukas Teuber[1] was the head of the psychology department and my professor for the intro psychology class at MIT. He gave one two-hour evening lecture per week, which were delivered without notes. The lectures were riveting, they were given in MIT's largest lecture hall; it was standing room only to hear him speak--many students and faculty would attend even though not enrolled. I don't remember ever hearing a better live lecture than those that he gave (and I've heard many lectures--I spent more years at university than Belucci's character in Animal House).
He used the memory palace method to remember his lecture's organization.
I once memorized 200 digits of pi when I had nothing more fun to do on a long boring lecture. Sherlock popped into my mind, so I imagined a journey through my house where I chunked numbers to make them represent certain things or people, and me interacting or talking with them, like in a story of some sort. But it feels like I never applied this method to anything significant, apart from memorizing a few things from my biochemistry course. Although now I remember credit card numbers, every single phone number of my friends and family (by associating numbers with particular facial features or character traits), and some other things. I would say before that day I never fully realized just how much I actually like to memorize stuff like words and numbers. Anyway, I think everyone should give it a try, this is fun.
I visualize and remember code that way. For me, it's hard to forget somewhere I've been, even if I only imagined being there.
Each function is a little building like an office or a shop, which has a sign out front telling what services or products it sells, and contains everything inside you need to solve some kind of problem or produce some kind of product or service (where equipment in the room is like references to other objects and functions and imported libraries).
You're standing behind the front counter, just about to receive a customer though the front entrance door with the parameters you need for one particular instance of that problem.
You go into the back room, solve the problem, then deliver the results out the exit door at the back of the building (or through any of the other earlier emergency exits, if you had to exit prematurely or throw an error and run away).
The front/back flow is a metaphor for the top/bottom flow of control through a function.
If you squint you can see the example Nassi-Shneiderman diagram in that article as a map of a building, with its front at the top, and exit at the bottom.
You can have internal hallways and rooms for branches and loops, like a Nassi-Shneiderman diagram. The "Sub to Determine Wiki-Article" room is like the front entrance lobby of a theater where buy your ticket. The "Select Favourite Genre" room is like the stage of The Price is Right, and you get to pick what's behind door #1 (History), #2 (Science), or # (Geography), or else choose Other. They each have one or two rooms behind them with your rewards, and then they all finally exit out to the same back stage loading dock, where you take your wonderful prize (or consolation donkey) home.
What if you listen to the same podcast, do you remember that part of your run? This flipped relationship is very powerful for me, i get vivid almost intrusive visuals of what i was doing last time i listened.
Yes I get this too! Not so much with podcasts, but with concepts and things I’ve learnt. For example, when I think of the Python framework Flask or the iOS autolayout framework, I get vivid visuals of where I was when I was first trying them out or debugging some issue.
Is there any name for this effect, or any related research? It’s kind of like the memory palace idea in reverse, where the concept sparks the imagery of the place involuntarily, instead of intentionally thinking of places to spark recall.
The Method of Loci is an ancient technique that used to be taught for thousands of years as a standard part of a classical eduction, way back when people needed to remember things before the invention of smartphones and printing presses. But in the middle ages it was banned for being immoral! Apparently, some bad apples were abusing the Method of Loci to remember "immoral" things they shouldn't be thinking about, using "fabulous" images they shouldn't be imagining.
>Remember to use physical objects in these palaces since they have easily imaginable traits; when you are dealing with more abstract or untranslatable ideas it is best to convert them into objects based on the way the words sound, so Valmur becomes Val Kilmer, Les Preuses becomes purses, etc. Additionally, you don’t need to be concerned with reality when making these memory palaces. The more slapstick, unique and vivid they are, the easier they will stick. Raunchy imagery always works well, to the point where some religious orders in the middle ages banned the practice because it was deemed immoral.
Memory Palace techniques have been known as the Mind Palace, Method of Loci, and Memory Journey, Art of Memory, Ars Memorativa, Memorative Art, Mnemotechnics, Architectural Mnemonic, Graphical Mnemonic, and Textual Mnemonic.
>The most common account of the creation of the art of memory centers around the story of Simonides of Ceos, a famous Greek poet, who was invited to chant a lyric poem in honor of his host, a nobleman of Thessaly. While praising his host, Simonides also mentioned the twin gods Castor and Pollux. When the recital was complete, the nobleman selfishly told Simonides that he would only pay him half of the agreed upon payment for the panegyric, and that he would have to get the balance of the payment from the two gods he had mentioned. A short time later, Simonides was told that two men were waiting for him outside. He left to meet the visitors but could find no one. Then, while he was outside the banquet hall, it collapsed, crushing everyone within. The bodies were so disfigured that they could not be identified for proper burial. But, Simonides was able to remember where each of the guests had been sitting at the table, and so was able to identify them for burial. This experience suggested to Simonides the principles which were to become central to the later development of the art he reputedly invented.
>He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and the images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written upon it.
>[...] However, this transition was not without its difficulties, and during this period the belief in the effectiveness of the older methods of memory training (to say nothing of the esteem ...
I've found this to strangely work (tangentially) with music and intense exercise too.
When I accidentally listened to an old gym playlist from 2 years ago at my office desk, I felt a rush of the old determination that used to fuel my HIIT workouts. It was jarring and incredible.
- The recall effect when you see the same areas again. [0]
- The effect of running itself. Your ARAS (or Ascending RAS, or Ascending Reticular Activating System -- not everyone uses the same acronym) in your brainstem is hurling a whole lot of neurotransmitters (like adrenaline and dopamine) towards your hippocampus. Long story short: you'll be able to remember better for the next 30 to 60 minutes. [1]
[0] Too lazy to look up the source (sorry, not having my day in terms of productivity), anyone who studied psychology would've learned the study about people diving under water and doing a memory task and then having a much better recall underwater then on land regarding that memory task.
[1] Source: learned it at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam from Prof. Dr. Erik Scherder. I still don't know where a paper is that describes the full story. I also couldn't find too much information about it online, and I never had enough time to fully figure the story out. So if there's a neuroscientist in the room, please help me out :D
There's a lot more to this. E.g. there's is constant neurogenesis (new neurons being born) but most of those die before they can attach themselves. Aerobic exercise tends to improve their attachment (exact mechanism is not clear) so a lot of new brain cells find their place during sports activities.
This is described in the book Moonwalking with Einstein. It's mentioned that one way to remember things would be to "put them" somewhere you are familiar, like where you run, for example.
The idea looks cool and useful. But I’m not a fan of hosted services for such needs. I’d very much like a (paid) mobile/desktop app that can manage everything locally and allow syncing through any of the several cloud storage services available.
Great idea, I totally get it! Your graphics are beautiful, and the layering and gridding look helpful.
It reminds me of some experimental user interfaces with pie menus I designed for creating and editing memory palaces: "iLoci" on the iPhone for notes and pictures and links and web browser integration in 2008, and "MediaGraph" on Unity3D for organizing and playing music in 2012, both of which I hope will inspire you for ideas to implement (like pie menus, and kissing!) or ways to explain what you've already created.
A memory map editor can not only benefit from pie menus for editing and changing properties (like simultaneously picking a font with direction, and pulling out the font size with distance, for example), but it's also a great way for users to create their own custom bi-directionally gesture navigable pie menus by dragging and dropping and "kissing" islands together against each other to create and break links (like bridges between islands). (See the gesture navigation example at the end of the MediaGraph demo, and imagine that on an iPad or phone!)
I think your crisp clean abstract graphical style would go nicely with something like Simon Schneegans' designs for Gnome-Pie, Coral-Menu, and Trace-Menu:
I wrote an iPhone app called "iLoci" [1] that was based on the Method of Loci [2], which had a gestural interface that let you construct and navigate your own networks of locations by dragging rooms around and "kissing" them together to connect and disconnect them. Another way to think of it is as a pie menu editor.
Later I elaborated on the idea in a Unity prototype called MediaGraph [3], which lets you arrange your music in an editable gesture navigable map.
[1] iPhone app iLoci by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp:
A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam.
This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata.
It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.
Pie menus frame this kind of interaction as pop-up menus, which provide a "self revealing gestural user interface". The menu pops up and leads you through the possible selections. That feedback trains you to rehearse the gestures. Soon you begin to make the gesture without looking at the menu, then wait for the menu feedback to confirm you'...
As soon as I saw Nototo's demo vid, I immediately came here to say "This reminds me of Don Hopkins' MediaGraph!" It seems I am late to the party, however. :)
MediaGraph has a special place in my heart. Back in 2014 I built a zoomable UI prototype that very much embraced the concept of real-world objects as metaphors, which I think is vastly underappreciated. An antithesis to traditional graph visualization techniques of sorts, and it even had radial pie menus!
That project grew in scope and work on that prototype was discontinued in 2016 pending a major redesign.
The funny part is, I didn't discover MediaGraph until just a couple years ago, so it blew my mind to learn I was unknowingly on a very similar path back then, long after I had mothballed the thing.
As a solo founder, to find out my thinking was even in a remotely similar neighborhood as you and Will, was incredibly meaningful. It was and still is one of the few tiny little kernels of hope I hold on to that keeps me going. Thank you.
Suggestions from an old side-project: automate land management.
- Placing a note automatically creates an island around it with a recognizable landmark nearby. Add a tree after each addition. Add or enlarge a pond after each deletion.
- Dragging a line between two islands/hills either merges the two or moves them closer, depending on the size of the islands/hills involved and the population of the area. Locations, distance, and scale can change but the relative direction should not.
1. automatically adding landmarks
This is a potential solution to a problem that we think about quite often: it's easy to teach people HOW to place components, but it's hard to teach people WHERE to place components.
We introduced templates to not only help people get started with their notes but also give them an example that they can follow when it comes to making memorable islands.
2. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by dragging a line. Do you mind expanding a little?
Re 1. The template is a nice 'developer' solution but I think the best is freeing users from the burden of learning unnecessary abstractions.
Re 2. I mean the gesture of pressing mouse or finger down on an island/hill then drag to another island/hill then releasing to gesture that the two are related. The line I mentioned is just a feedback mechanism. You can also use an outline of the first island/hill. The ideal reaction to such a gesture is bringing the two notes/topics closer which is where my comment about changing location and/or scale of island/hill while keeping the relative direction (angle) constant. I think relative direction more sticky than the other two.
I was thinking of using an old game one was addicted to for the memory palace. I still remember a lot of the maps in Doom, which I played as a student, for instance.
Interesting! I spend quite some time sim-racing, so I know some track layouts very well. I might try and use them as a memory palace.
As a trial, I'll map all James Bond movies in chronological order to the track while I drive through it and see whether I'll be able to recall them more easily than I can now.
Why does this have to be a cloud app? Just make a great app, sell it for download for ten bucks, and go away. Repeat this if you come up with more awesome ideas.
I think given the amount of manpower we had, it was the best choice to make the browser version first. If we desperately want a desktop version, we can use Electron or some tools to convert the browser version into a desktop version. The performance may not be the greatest, but it's cheap.
We can do the same for iOS and Android.
This may just be me, but I feel like the app is somewhat like my kid. This may make it tough if we need to ditch the app or pivot one day, but yea...great question!
If somehow I can't work on this any more for the rest of my life, I'd probably still just keep it running. The amount of credits we have for these hosting services is enough to keep it running for a long time.
Also, it's quite unethical to just shut the app down without giving people the ability to export the notes. I can't really see myself doing that. And I don't think neither of my 2 teammates would allow that to happen.
It looks like there’s no desktop app of any kind? The idea looks fascinating, but unfortunately it’s a complete no-go for me without a native and offline option.
Since this seems tailored for remembering content, it might be nice if you published some content in this format rather than just having it be a blank note-taking tool. For ex, let people explore a world that represents a biology textbook, or drivers-ed manual, or something else that commonly needs to be studied & memorized.
It's a quote from the first "Jurassic Park" movie; one of the characters sees a graphical representation of a directory tree, and says the, "Hey, it's a Unix system! I know this!" line.
> We are just three engineering students in an apartment living room, eating lentils everyday, and spending every waking moment of our lives trying to make Nototo into something that people love.
> Therefore, we really can't afford to spend time and figure out the best way to take money from you.
I really dislike this trend of "formulating a business plan for our business isn't important for us". It's supposed to come off as "we care so much about delivering a great product that we don't care about money" but once you remove the stigma about making money (you're a for profit business, you should be making money. It's a good thing. There's no shame in that) it just comes off lazy. Designing a pricing system and monetizing strategy is just as much a part of making a product as designing the frontend or the tech, and all that directly affects me as a user.
It doesn't really inspire me to try it if I have no idea if their pricing will be something I'm ok with or if their product won't exist because they didnt think coming up with a business plan was important.
Mining notes for data is a terrible idea and a very quick way to guarantee that you never get any users.
Pricing in this regard is a signal for stability. If you’re paying for a service, it is far more likely to stick around. And the more stable the product, the more likely is a user to actually use the app — especially for a note taking app.
Agreed, especially with a note taking app. You want me to live in here? Ok, you better be around in 10 years. Charge me some money so that will be the case.
I just wanna say that these are very valid points! It does make us seem less professional. And is potentially losing us some users.
We kind of scrambled that page together quickly because we wanted to get launch and get users as quickly as possible. Designing a pricing system may not take too long, but implementation would have delayed our launch date quite a bit and we really didn't want to delay the launch any further.
I think our lack of professionalism can also be an upside. It kind of allows me to create a personal relationship with some of our hardcore users and talk to them in order to guide the development direction of the app.
It is that. It's free unless you find it so compelling you want to give the creators money you can. I'm sure the only thing stopping that from happening "back in your times" was that setting up a payment processor and accepting payments didn't take 15 mins. At no point do they say you can't use it if you don't pay
I disagree with the critique. Not all software or services need to be businesses - they don't present themselves as one. It's a student project fur fun and maybe recognition.
You could also argue in the other direction that they could release the source and let people self-host it.
For someone with the intention to make a profitable SaaS business (which, as you say, there's nothing at all wrong with) it'd be valid advise, but there are many models under which to release software and not having it figured out yet is totally fine too.
Student projects are great, but for me to invest my time and effort into using just about anything (especially something that is supposed to store my notes), I do need to see a stable long-term sustainable business.
Incidentally, that also excludes most VC-funded companies, because these are neither long-term nor sustainable and usually have a user-facing lifespan of 3-5 years.
It's totally fine to dip feet in the water without commiting to anything.
Clearly this is all just validation of a product. Will people use our product if it's free? Will they use if there is a small price? A business plan is easy when theres demand for a product established.
@dang - is this some kind of marketing post that was promoted? There’s very little chance that there are this many people this excited about some note taking app where you drag your notes as trees and park benches on a windows 95 looking map UI.
Also, the number of people requesting a native app for purchase and talking about pricing… Something isn’t right here.
Not as far as I can tell, but I only have my phone and can't do much with that. I'll check again when I've got my laptop. But the votes look clean and the comments I saw so far are by established users.
It's not uncommon that a post like this strikes a whimsical chord. Promotional behavior is usually more mechanical and samey.
When I heard about "memory palaces" I thought it would be cool if there was some sort of "hashing function" from concept to 3D space, to initially accommodate the thoughts/notes of a certain kind in a certain area of that space. That way you would get closely related concepts closely together in space too.
My initial reaction was "Cute, in a 'dots I's with hearts' type of way, but not really for me." And after watching the video and reading the site, I still feel that way, but I can see where you are going with this, with spatial memory. It isn't a bad idea.
But I do have a question though---I have my island with the "World Domination" plans on it. On that, I have a plateau with plans for the "Mega Death Laser". But those are related to Tesla's patents, and all his stuff is over there on the other island. Is there a way to link the Tesla patents "over there" with the Mega Death Laser plans "over here"?
- An old HN comment I rediscovered that lists out many older note-taking projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401550 (notably realized connectedtext had a feature akin to roamresearch)
I don't if this was totally a joke, but I use a mincraft world I made years ago as my "memory castle" - and have pretty detailed notes about making a voxel world "memory scrapbook" like Nototo!
This is cool. I agree about the pricing page. If you're going to charge, charge.
I like where this is going. You are right that humans are visual. But we are more than that; we need to create more tools that complement our biological form. This is a cool step.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadA native app is definitely on the to-do list. The reason why we chose the browser is mainly so that we can distribute it to a broader audience. Also, I use a MacBook and my Co-founder uses windows, and we'd both like to use the app ourselves haha.
I may be wrong on this, but I think the friction to download a native app is much higher than a web app. And we really want as many users, from as many demographics, as we can to test the product and guide our development.
A demo portal/sandbox on our front page would be cool too! But we have some bugs/features that are much higher on our todo list.
Again, thanks a lot for the feedback!
what you are creating is something that will be filled with peoples personal data. Many of us, are required by employers, law, or a sense of owning the data, are going to prevent people from storing the data on your server.
you could look at a native app, if your rending is done client side, you could make the data files exportable, and make use of client side encryption.
Think the way a lot of password managers are working.
Additionally, on your demo video, I know voice over can be a pain for small devs, but have some on screen techs would really be helpful, or hell even some background music.
I know I personally started checking my headphone, trying to see if they were muted.
We will definitely work towards that, however, at this moment we are quite limited by our development speed. So it is unclear how long it will be until our #1 prioritization becomes creating a native app.
Also, will definitely make the demo vid better, eventually!
Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate them.
I have a few odd memories of Echo Arena where I swear I can remember feeling the cool air of the arena on my skin and smelling the cold metal walls mixed with sweat. It felt like I was "there".
I wonder if some memory palace concepts could be combined with VR.
Someone did a research study on it here if you're interested.
https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/virtual_reality_study/10.1007-s10...
Also holy crap the body type in these notes is microscopic.
So, we used to have somewhat like a tag system that we thought would lower the friction required to make a note. Where you can open up a notebook anywhere and we'll put it on the correct island for you after #tag it. But it kinda defeated the purpose of this app, for people to place their notes down like how they place a lego block down.
Also, it turns out, people usually don't fill up their islands to the point of collision. They have a lot of empty spaces between notes. So, it's actually a problem that we haven't encountered yet.
Additionally, note blocks can be seen as their own word documents and the tiny words on top are previews. So you can also just "open up" one of these blocks and put your idea there.
OR, what I do, is I have an island for random ideas like that. Write it down first, organize it later.
lastly, we will add a font size option for the rooftop fonts soon, don't wanna get eye damage lawsuits haha.
Also need a drag feature for increasing island size, not just click. I would like to be able to create a large island quickly, like using a paintbrush almost. Even if I don't have notes to populate it with anytime soon.
Really love all this though.
Right click can be context menu for changing color/placing objects etc.
I wasn’t talking about the fonts in the scroll-around-the-islands view being tiny, I meant the body copy when you open up a note. At least on OSX Safari it is like 6pt.
reminds me a bit of Jurassic Park's OS :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
This is awesome!
Relatedly: I often run while listening to podcasts. When I do, I remember much more of the material. And when I revisit certain blocks around the neighborhood, I find myself recalling what I heard during the run.
The spacial encoding of memories seems very potent and under-investigated.
BTW, I wonder if anyone here in HN used it to learn significant things using this method?
This website is a bit of a let-down for me since it's just a bird's eye view, it would be cool to create a palace using a 3d game engine, with signs that point to things like physics formulae, and then some Sims or Google-Sketchup-like tool to add objects that you want to remember.
[0] The relevant excerpt about Hannibal's memory palace: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/hannib... , it describes a painting that he uses to remember the fictional address "3327 Tindal, Arlington VA 22308".
No one can arrive to use a memory palace technique proper good without first learning to visualize space-time. That is FOUR dimensions, not a 2-d map, not a 3-d picture, an actual space you can walk around that changes.
He used the memory palace method to remember his lecture's organization.
[1] http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/m...
Each function is a little building like an office or a shop, which has a sign out front telling what services or products it sells, and contains everything inside you need to solve some kind of problem or produce some kind of product or service (where equipment in the room is like references to other objects and functions and imported libraries).
You're standing behind the front counter, just about to receive a customer though the front entrance door with the parameters you need for one particular instance of that problem.
You go into the back room, solve the problem, then deliver the results out the exit door at the back of the building (or through any of the other earlier emergency exits, if you had to exit prematurely or throw an error and run away).
The front/back flow is a metaphor for the top/bottom flow of control through a function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diag...
If you squint you can see the example Nassi-Shneiderman diagram in that article as a map of a building, with its front at the top, and exit at the bottom.
You can have internal hallways and rooms for branches and loops, like a Nassi-Shneiderman diagram. The "Sub to Determine Wiki-Article" room is like the front entrance lobby of a theater where buy your ticket. The "Select Favourite Genre" room is like the stage of The Price is Right, and you get to pick what's behind door #1 (History), #2 (Science), or # (Geography), or else choose Other. They each have one or two rooms behind them with your rewards, and then they all finally exit out to the same back stage loading dock, where you take your wonderful prize (or consolation donkey) home.
You're effectively building "memory palaces" without consciously doing it by associating podcast content with real-life locations.
Some memory athletes use that ability to remember digits of pi or decks of cards!
Is there any name for this effect, or any related research? It’s kind of like the memory palace idea in reverse, where the concept sparks the imagery of the place involuntarily, instead of intentionally thinking of places to spark recall.
The Method of Loci is an ancient technique that used to be taught for thousands of years as a standard part of a classical eduction, way back when people needed to remember things before the invention of smartphones and printing presses. But in the middle ages it was banned for being immoral! Apparently, some bad apples were abusing the Method of Loci to remember "immoral" things they shouldn't be thinking about, using "fabulous" images they shouldn't be imagining.
https://www.guildsomm.com/4cb697f52c/discussion_forums/f/gen...
>Remember to use physical objects in these palaces since they have easily imaginable traits; when you are dealing with more abstract or untranslatable ideas it is best to convert them into objects based on the way the words sound, so Valmur becomes Val Kilmer, Les Preuses becomes purses, etc. Additionally, you don’t need to be concerned with reality when making these memory palaces. The more slapstick, unique and vivid they are, the easier they will stick. Raunchy imagery always works well, to the point where some religious orders in the middle ages banned the practice because it was deemed immoral.
Memory Palace techniques have been known as the Mind Palace, Method of Loci, and Memory Journey, Art of Memory, Ars Memorativa, Memorative Art, Mnemotechnics, Architectural Mnemonic, Graphical Mnemonic, and Textual Mnemonic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
https://books.google.nl/books?id=MRFFAQAAQBAJ&printsec=front...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_memory
>The most common account of the creation of the art of memory centers around the story of Simonides of Ceos, a famous Greek poet, who was invited to chant a lyric poem in honor of his host, a nobleman of Thessaly. While praising his host, Simonides also mentioned the twin gods Castor and Pollux. When the recital was complete, the nobleman selfishly told Simonides that he would only pay him half of the agreed upon payment for the panegyric, and that he would have to get the balance of the payment from the two gods he had mentioned. A short time later, Simonides was told that two men were waiting for him outside. He left to meet the visitors but could find no one. Then, while he was outside the banquet hall, it collapsed, crushing everyone within. The bodies were so disfigured that they could not be identified for proper burial. But, Simonides was able to remember where each of the guests had been sitting at the table, and so was able to identify them for burial. This experience suggested to Simonides the principles which were to become central to the later development of the art he reputedly invented.
>He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and the images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written upon it.
>[...] However, this transition was not without its difficulties, and during this period the belief in the effectiveness of the older methods of memory training (to say nothing of the esteem ...
When I accidentally listened to an old gym playlist from 2 years ago at my office desk, I felt a rush of the old determination that used to fuel my HIIT workouts. It was jarring and incredible.
- The recall effect when you see the same areas again. [0]
- The effect of running itself. Your ARAS (or Ascending RAS, or Ascending Reticular Activating System -- not everyone uses the same acronym) in your brainstem is hurling a whole lot of neurotransmitters (like adrenaline and dopamine) towards your hippocampus. Long story short: you'll be able to remember better for the next 30 to 60 minutes. [1]
[0] Too lazy to look up the source (sorry, not having my day in terms of productivity), anyone who studied psychology would've learned the study about people diving under water and doing a memory task and then having a much better recall underwater then on land regarding that memory task.
[1] Source: learned it at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam from Prof. Dr. Erik Scherder. I still don't know where a paper is that describes the full story. I also couldn't find too much information about it online, and I never had enough time to fully figure the story out. So if there's a neuroscientist in the room, please help me out :D
If anyone has questions feel free to ask me here! or at chen@nototo.app
shame on he who thinks evil of it ;)
It reminds me of some experimental user interfaces with pie menus I designed for creating and editing memory palaces: "iLoci" on the iPhone for notes and pictures and links and web browser integration in 2008, and "MediaGraph" on Unity3D for organizing and playing music in 2012, both of which I hope will inspire you for ideas to implement (like pie menus, and kissing!) or ways to explain what you've already created.
A memory map editor can not only benefit from pie menus for editing and changing properties (like simultaneously picking a font with direction, and pulling out the font size with distance, for example), but it's also a great way for users to create their own custom bi-directionally gesture navigable pie menus by dragging and dropping and "kissing" islands together against each other to create and break links (like bridges between islands). (See the gesture navigation example at the end of the MediaGraph demo, and imagine that on an iPad or phone!)
I think your crisp clean abstract graphical style would go nicely with something like Simon Schneegans' designs for Gnome-Pie, Coral-Menu, and Trace-Menu:
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#ed08
Some HN posts (updated with updated links):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12982329
I wrote an iPhone app called "iLoci" [1] that was based on the Method of Loci [2], which had a gestural interface that let you construct and navigate your own networks of locations by dragging rooms around and "kissing" them together to connect and disconnect them. Another way to think of it is as a pie menu editor.
Later I elaborated on the idea in a Unity prototype called MediaGraph [3], which lets you arrange your music in an editable gesture navigable map.
[1] iPhone app iLoci by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98
A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam.
Illustrated transcript:
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopki...
[2] Method of Loci: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
[3] MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus Prototype developed for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc
This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata.
It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.
Discussion of the pie menus:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7262849
Pie menus frame this kind of interaction as pop-up menus, which provide a "self revealing gestural user interface". The menu pops up and leads you through the possible selections. That feedback trains you to rehearse the gestures. Soon you begin to make the gesture without looking at the menu, then wait for the menu feedback to confirm you'...
MediaGraph has a special place in my heart. Back in 2014 I built a zoomable UI prototype that very much embraced the concept of real-world objects as metaphors, which I think is vastly underappreciated. An antithesis to traditional graph visualization techniques of sorts, and it even had radial pie menus!
That project grew in scope and work on that prototype was discontinued in 2016 pending a major redesign.
The funny part is, I didn't discover MediaGraph until just a couple years ago, so it blew my mind to learn I was unknowingly on a very similar path back then, long after I had mothballed the thing.
As a solo founder, to find out my thinking was even in a remotely similar neighborhood as you and Will, was incredibly meaningful. It was and still is one of the few tiny little kernels of hope I hold on to that keeps me going. Thank you.
Edit: I would happily pay for something like this if it worked well and addressed above concerns.
Edit2: I’m going to try it anyway.
- Placing a note automatically creates an island around it with a recognizable landmark nearby. Add a tree after each addition. Add or enlarge a pond after each deletion.
- Dragging a line between two islands/hills either merges the two or moves them closer, depending on the size of the islands/hills involved and the population of the area. Locations, distance, and scale can change but the relative direction should not.
1. automatically adding landmarks This is a potential solution to a problem that we think about quite often: it's easy to teach people HOW to place components, but it's hard to teach people WHERE to place components.
We introduced templates to not only help people get started with their notes but also give them an example that they can follow when it comes to making memorable islands.
2. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by dragging a line. Do you mind expanding a little?
Re 2. I mean the gesture of pressing mouse or finger down on an island/hill then drag to another island/hill then releasing to gesture that the two are related. The line I mentioned is just a feedback mechanism. You can also use an outline of the first island/hill. The ideal reaction to such a gesture is bringing the two notes/topics closer which is where my comment about changing location and/or scale of island/hill while keeping the relative direction (angle) constant. I think relative direction more sticky than the other two.
As a trial, I'll map all James Bond movies in chronological order to the track while I drive through it and see whether I'll be able to recall them more easily than I can now.
I think given the amount of manpower we had, it was the best choice to make the browser version first. If we desperately want a desktop version, we can use Electron or some tools to convert the browser version into a desktop version. The performance may not be the greatest, but it's cheap. We can do the same for iOS and Android.
This may just be me, but I feel like the app is somewhat like my kid. This may make it tough if we need to ditch the app or pivot one day, but yea...great question!
Also, it's quite unethical to just shut the app down without giving people the ability to export the notes. I can't really see myself doing that. And I don't think neither of my 2 teammates would allow that to happen.
You could integrate it into the site a bit as well and display release notes or your blog.
Second thought: "wait, this actually makes perfect sense. I want it"
Kudos for the great idea!
...and everything old is new again, apparently.
> We are just three engineering students in an apartment living room, eating lentils everyday, and spending every waking moment of our lives trying to make Nototo into something that people love.
> Therefore, we really can't afford to spend time and figure out the best way to take money from you.
I really dislike this trend of "formulating a business plan for our business isn't important for us". It's supposed to come off as "we care so much about delivering a great product that we don't care about money" but once you remove the stigma about making money (you're a for profit business, you should be making money. It's a good thing. There's no shame in that) it just comes off lazy. Designing a pricing system and monetizing strategy is just as much a part of making a product as designing the frontend or the tech, and all that directly affects me as a user.
It doesn't really inspire me to try it if I have no idea if their pricing will be something I'm ok with or if their product won't exist because they didnt think coming up with a business plan was important.
Pricing in this regard is a signal for stability. If you’re paying for a service, it is far more likely to stick around. And the more stable the product, the more likely is a user to actually use the app — especially for a note taking app.
We kind of scrambled that page together quickly because we wanted to get launch and get users as quickly as possible. Designing a pricing system may not take too long, but implementation would have delayed our launch date quite a bit and we really didn't want to delay the launch any further.
I think our lack of professionalism can also be an upside. It kind of allows me to create a personal relationship with some of our hardcore users and talk to them in order to guide the development direction of the app.
All in all, I appreciate the criticism!
Good luck with the product, looks very cool! Mistakes happen, nothing that would be a problem in the long term
You could also argue in the other direction that they could release the source and let people self-host it.
For someone with the intention to make a profitable SaaS business (which, as you say, there's nothing at all wrong with) it'd be valid advise, but there are many models under which to release software and not having it figured out yet is totally fine too.
Incidentally, that also excludes most VC-funded companies, because these are neither long-term nor sustainable and usually have a user-facing lifespan of 3-5 years.
Clearly this is all just validation of a product. Will people use our product if it's free? Will they use if there is a small price? A business plan is easy when theres demand for a product established.
Also, the number of people requesting a native app for purchase and talking about pricing… Something isn’t right here.
It's not uncommon that a post like this strikes a whimsical chord. Promotional behavior is usually more mechanical and samey.
Wilmot's Warehouse also comes to mind [1] :-)
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAcyPIJYOx4
But I do have a question though---I have my island with the "World Domination" plans on it. On that, I have a plateau with plans for the "Mega Death Laser". But those are related to Tesla's patents, and all his stuff is over there on the other island. Is there a way to link the Tesla patents "over there" with the Mega Death Laser plans "over here"?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22089694
- Older ideas based around Xanadu ZigZag (e.g. fenfire.org): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACPav69eW78 .
- Tinderbox guide videos
- An old HN comment I rediscovered that lists out many older note-taking projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401550 (notably realized connectedtext had a feature akin to roamresearch)
I like where this is going. You are right that humans are visual. But we are more than that; we need to create more tools that complement our biological form. This is a cool step.