Show HN: Kinopio.club – visual thinking, brainstorming tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kinopio.club – visual thinking, brainstorming tool

kinopio.club

181 pointspketh64 comments

Hey HN,

Kinopio is a visual thinking tool that can be used for things like brainstorming, organizing thoughts, mood-boards, planning, basically for figuring stuff out (by yourself or collaboratively).

I've been building it for the last year after leaving my job as the co-creator of Glitch (http://pketh.org/hello-kinopio).

There's no sign up required to use it, let me know what you think,

thx!

– Pirijan

Good job Pirijan! I like the style very much, it feels like an old mac + a nintendo ds game + a 90's website + the future.

Thanks! I was also inspired by 80s synths and electric instruments too

Nice work. This answers my question about why this looks so much like Glitch.

hah ya it's like an evolution of my personal style/functional reqs

This looks really cool. The spaces I've found so far from the explore tab are delightfully wacky[0] and make me excited for what I can do with this.

Are there limits for how many cards can go on one space (with a subscription)? I couldn't find that in the help docs.

[0] https://kinopio.club/things-on-heads-that-do-not-belong-hpbu...

nope no limits, space size is limited to 6000x6000, but this is just a temporary technical restriction

Looks good. Just wondering how is this different from a mindmap. Is the multimedia ability the differentiator?

I hacked together a simple textual mindmap with colors, fonts, etc on a canvas that I use for personal thinking. Just wondering how this improves the process.

The differentiators for me are: 1) super-streamlined card creation and editing. It lets me quickly capture, then move around with ease. No fiddling with appearance or sizes 2) less structure than traditional mind-mapping. I don't always think in hierarchies. Sometimes I have unrelated thoughts that later coalesce. This tool matches that mode.

From what i notice this is looser and easier to create notes. The nodes can be connected in any aleatory way, you can even make circuits. Mind maps are organized in a different way which might yield better results for different tasks

Real cool! What tech did you use to build it?

Thx! I tried to keep things pretty simple technology wise. I use Vue/vuex for the frontend and node/express/sequelize for the backend

The architecture is a bit more unique local-first approach (everything is saved and loaded from a localstorage cache and can be immediately interacted with, Then the slower-to-retrieve source of truth version of your data from the server is transparently swapped in for the cached data when it's ready)

I've been a big fan of brain storming tools for a long time so appreciate new tools with different takes on the problem.

I do have one observation and it maybe just me. I have no way of clustering a group of connected thoughts, or a way to 'chunk' the concepts. I see some attempt by using coloured lines but there should be a way to make these ideas hierchical and from that be able to zoom up and down various levels of conceptualisation. It would make managing a large network of ideas a lot easier, possibly a bit more ergonomic. Similar to the way the brain works.

It may just be me but was wondering if there's a way to achieve that with the current tooling or if you think there are workarounds?

Same here. I think that should be prioritized as next feature, as it is required to do more serious thinking with this tool. Otherwise I like it.

Could you maybe link to a different space with your cluster of thoughts/cards there? I'm not sure if there's a limit for spaces.

yup you can put any link (including space links) in a card. And there's no card limit per space.

I recently added the ability to select some cards and move them to a new space (screencast: https://twitter.com/KinopioClub/status/1296205302988025856)

The idea is that if you've got a bunch of cards you want to 'group' to isolate and expand on seperately, it's pretty convenient to be able to do so in a new space.

Let me know if this addresses grouping for you, thanks :)

I'm really excited about this tool. It hits all the right notes for me in terms of flexibility and constraints. I've used it to write an academic paper, run collaborative retrospective sessions with my team, organize my thoughts, and more. I wrote about it here: https://www.bentsai.org/posts/2020-08-06-i-joined-the-kinopi....

Here's a fun one documenting my guitar setup: https://kinopio.club/-my-guitar-setup-iIo8rVWavPruON76J_GPt

Happy user and recent subscriber here. What differentiates this for me vs. other mind mapping tools is its idiosyncratic and opinionated interface. Yes please to more interfaces that feel like a human has made them.

I like the art, not a fan of the text boxes not having white backgrounds when editing but I get the stylistic choices.

Interesting approach to mind mapping, limiting by # of cards seems like it encourages large cards though. Could you do a time based trial instead? Or limit collaboration/public for paid plans?

I was concerned about the performance a large graph would have when I toggled filters on/off on my iPhone and it took about a second for each change to apply (that’s with < 20 cards). If someone really used this they’d end up with thousands.

to ensure that cards comfortable fit in all screensizes, cards can only have 255 characters, so cards can't get too big (also because that's the default postgres string limit).

I'll look into optimizing filter performance, can you email me (hi@kinopio.club) the space you used for this? It usually isn't that slow.

re time trial: there's certainly no perfect trial scenario that works for everyone, so if you hit the limit and you're still evaluating just shoot me an email and i'll adjust your limit.

For those looking at rolling their own, see https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre-d3/wiki#demos and http://viz-js.com/ both based on http://graphviz.org/

This is really cool. One issue: I accidentally created a checkbox card with no text and there's no way to edit or remove it (Safari). I can tick the checkbox and move it around and connect it to other cards, but I can't bring up the edit window.

Correction: there is a small area just below the checkbox in the card that I can click to bring up the edit window. Was difficult to discover.

good call, i'll look into fixing this soon

just pushed out an update that adds some safe clickable area in this case

I've been using Kinopio for a few things in the last few weeks. It's a great bit of kit, and for me the excitement of the UI keeps me more interested than traditional mind mapping software.

Pirijan is super responsive on support. Glad to be able to support his project financially!

it's appreciated!

Great work on this Pirijan. I use Glitch.com almost daily, but I did not know that you were the co-creator. But, the moment I landed on the site I knew it had something to do with Glitch. I felt that familiar design instantly.

Is there any chance Nintendo could look rather disapprovingly upon the use of the Japanese name for the Toad characters, Kinopio?

The demo on the site also uses the wii store music or some recognizable version of it.

The demo song is a mashup version of Drake's hotline bling that I found on youtube. It'd be awesome if Nintendo went after me for using it though, because it might mean that they'd use the iconic tune for themselves again

'kinopio' in japanese is a general word meaning mushroom, and kinopio.com just happens to a bicycle store in japan

It was a lot of fun exploring how you're UI/UX worked. I like the particle effect into a selection tool especially.

Very cool visual design. Reminds me of Nototo.app because it also relies on visual cues for information organisation. It works wonders for intuitive information recall.

HN discussion of Nototo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087780

This is really neat. Found it to be pretty intuitive, and selecting multiple nodes is super useful. I noticed the arrow links on the top of the node open on the same window, which I would have expected to open on a blank window so that I don't lose the current view.

the links open in the same page because navigating away from kinopio.club doesn't result in any data loss.

Because there are usability issues with new tab/window spawning for less pro computer users, the w3c recommendation is that you should only use target=_blank links when moving to a new page would destroy your page state (e.g. if you were filling out a form).

(Just in case you haven't tried it yet, middle mouse clicks will open the url in a new window/tab)

Really cool design choices here. I love how simple and responsive it is.

Can see myself using this quite a bit for work.

Are there plans to add more types of cards? Html embed might be quite cool.

It would also be nice to be able to give the connections an angle so they can go around different blocks

html embed is def possible , but using an actual iframe might lead to some performance impacts. Instead what I eventually plan to build is a url unfurling/screenshot tool that I can use on cards with urls

I would love that.

Have you considered adding markdown support to the cards?

Within an hour I paid for premium and have used it to mock up diagrams and workflows at work multiple times. This is a really fantastic tool for non linear ideas & brainstorming. I hope you are able to continue development!

Hey! Nice tool! I created a similar mind mapper a while back - it's completely free to use: https://mapsofmind.com

If someone is looking for a similar tool, do take a look! :)

Love it! It's great. Works for me. I needed something like this today.

I'm not sure why it's so much better than other mind mapping tools, but it is.

Also, really big fan of the local storage only, no login required feature.

The local storage is great. Looks like the export to JSON and the local storage cache are one and the same meaning importing data should be straightforward as well.

Have you considered making your background draggable? (Example: https://beta.mindcast.com/ )

it's a neat idea, def something I'll think about.

In general my goal is to have the main navigation interactions be as native as possible so there's less to learn. e.g. if you know how to scroll a webpage, you know how to scroll a kinopio space.

Thank you for making this it's cool and is basically the exact way that I use Keynotes on Mac to organize ideas (only better because of adding videos and other content)

I might be a dummy, but if I create a card with a checkbox and nothing else I can't seem to edit it. Is this a bug?

By the way I love the product :)

thanks! I'll also look into addressing this bug soon

It might need some tweaking, but the target area for bringing up the edit UI is pretty small in that case. I think you have to click on a small section below the checkbox :P

i just pushed out an update that adds some safe clickable area in this case

Been following this from the start, like where it's heading and hope to see more things like this in the future.

The tool freezes sometimes - The elements stop working until you refresh the page

P.S: Great tool. Loved it

Hey aus_sua, this is the first I've heard of that. Could you let me know what actions occured when you noticed the freezing (scrolling, card editing, etc.)?

As well as any device or browser info. If I can replicate this I should be able to eliminate the freezing.

(For a quicker response, feel free to email me at hi@kinopio.club)

thanks!

Isn't name of the product going to cause copyright issues? "Kinopio" is the Japanese name for Toad from Super Mario franchise.

Names cannot be copyrighted, though they can be trademarked, but trademarks are rarely enforceable outside the trademark’s domain. Since this site has nothing to do with video games I think they’re fine.

"kinopio" in Japanese just means mushroom. (Nintendo's character is officially named "kinopio kun", roughly translating to mushroom pal)

I love this. Any plan on adding a premium pricing so I can be confident I can use this in the future?

Ok I just saw this:

> Kinopio is free for 150 cards, afterwards it's 4$/month

Cool!

Really cool. It's easy to use.

Great job! Love the design, reminds me of glitch.com

Looks similar to Miro

try them both out, I think you'll find the differences in feel and use readily apparent :)

great job!

thanks!

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