Inspiration
We are both creative people, going on tangents whenever we sit to brainstorm, yet trying to document brainstorming and planning sessions for creative processes on existing note taking applications forces us to lose a lot of our thoughts and insights. You are forced to place things in a linear or hierarchical fashion, and you lose the flexibility of drawing things on paper to show various connections, multiple uses of a singular idea, and more.
What it does
Our application organizes all elements into nodes and connections between nodes. With this organizational fashion, you are able to add nodes to your network through a graphical or text-editor interface, and have changes seamlessly transfer between the two. In this way, a singular node is an independent entity, not tied to any hierarchy unless the user chooses to do so: it can be connected to many other nodes, can be reused, and can contain detailed data under it as well. The connections themselves are objects that contain details about the connection between two nodes.
How we built it
We built this application using Electron.js, an add-on to ReactJS for desktop applications. The coding was in JavaScript/React.
Challenges we ran into
The idea is very much in the abstract, revolutionizing the way we tangibly represent and manipulate thoughts in our head and the creative process itself. For this reason, we ran into a lot of interesting yet confusing discussions about how we want to organize the different layers, how we represent and work with information, and practical use cases where the application will actually prove useful. We needed to pick an aspect of it to start with that would be modular and useful on its own which we are also capable of achieving in such a short time period.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the concrete implementation we were able to make of such an abstract space. The tool we built is also usable on its own, (we used it to map out itself as we wrote this description!) In addition, the UI is simple to use and not very crowded, so it would be intuitive to a user to get value from it even in this preliminary form.
What we learned
We learned about the difficulty of picking one focus point that encapsulates the idea of the whole project, is modular and fully functional on its own, and can be accomplished in this time crunch. The ability to distill and eliminate peripheral features/parts is very valuable when it comes to developing useful software.
What's next for GraphIQal
We believe that creativity is a muscle you can make stronger. We selected this project for the Hackathon with a larger picture in mind: a tool that would help people become more creative through linking them with resources, facilitating the brainstorming/ideating process, and helping with the execution. In terms of this specific feature, here are some of the things we have in mind:
- Being able to select nodes and expand to a detailed view of that node as well as its connections
- Being able to create custom views that show different sets of nodes and arrange them in different visual forms
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