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Kinopio

499 points| Crazyontap | 3 years ago |kinopio.club

139 comments

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[+] pketh|3 years ago|reply
Oh Hi, I'm the solo creator of Kinopio. Before this, I was the designer and co-creator of Glitch. I'll go through and answer things, feel free to AMA.

If you're curious about me or about the process of designing/creating, these blog posts might be helpful:

- https://pketh.org/how-kinopio-is-made.html

- https://pketh.org/designing-for-thinking.html

- https://pketh.org/the-first-four-years-of-glitch.html

[+] gabereiser|3 years ago|reply
I was about to say that the design language of this site feels exactly like glitch. No wonder. Congrats on the launch!
[+] stagas|3 years ago|reply
Hey congrats on the launch! The site looks amazing, i've been digging into everything. There's a lot more going on than what seems at first glance and it's super fun to peek around and discover :D - can you share a little more details about the backend and how you manage to keep all these in sync, seems to be a lot of work there as well and it'd be interesting to learn more about your tools/process. It's very rare to see creative projects like these that go beyond a simple PoC and actually have plenty of effort and development behind them, so many kudos also for that, it's very hard to manage both creativity and sticking to a plan (i'd be interested in learning how you manage that as well :) Is this app part of the solution? Thanks and keep it up!
[+] zkid18|3 years ago|reply
Hey! Congrats on the launch. Love the emerging thought and products around spatial web apps. Building the company in adjacent space – www.spatial.chat let's chat one day. feel free to dm in twi: @kidrulit
[+] mertnesvat|3 years ago|reply
Congrats on the launch! I'm also a fan of glitch so congrats on that good job too.

Just out of curiosity have been reading the engineering part and came across with below for not using websockets, confused because debounce and throttle is mainly used to avoid many updates over sockets so it's very well known problem for reactive programming

( https://pketh.org/how-kinopio-is-made.html )

> You might be wondering, why don’t you just update the database with websockets instead of relatively slow API requests?

> The problem with saving data with websockets is that they’re too fast. Authenticating that many messages per second and writing them to disk would be really inefficient. E.g. If you’re moving a card from position x: 20 to x: 420, Kinopio will use websockets to broadcast many updates during the move: moving card x to 21, moving card x to 24, moving card x to 28… potentially hundreds of messages.

[+] throwaway4good|3 years ago|reply
I can see it is using one big canvas element; what draws on that canvas - is that vue.js, some other framework or a bespoke setup?
[+] eps|3 years ago|reply
Glitch as in that dorky MMO game that resulted in Slack as a spin-off?
[+] roguas|3 years ago|reply
Congrats, love the design - doesn't feel like typical flat/material/lowestdenominator style that is absurdly popular. Feels like the old web we all miss.
[+] stavros|3 years ago|reply
Is the name Greek?
[+] shawn-butler|3 years ago|reply
Organic farming isn't really about transparency, but obfuscation nor is it always the more sustainable option.

I would rethink your metaphor about organic software[0].

[0]: https://pketh.org/organic-software

[+] drakonka|3 years ago|reply
This is so cool. I love the aesthetic and UX. The only thing is, I really wish I could self-host this. This seems like just the kind of thing I'd use for personal journaling brainstorms, and I'd really love to be able to just have that kind of data locally or self-hosted in my own location of choice.
[+] pketh|3 years ago|reply
I get that, it's hard to do self-hosting with a commercial product, but something I'll look into in the future for sure
[+] spicyusername|3 years ago|reply
Infinite canvas apps are such a great way to brainstorm.

Kinopio has a little more... personality, but I use an infinite canvas app called Concepts when brainstorming for work or play.

https://concepts.app/

[+] kaliszad|3 years ago|reply
What do you love about Concepts? Do you pay for a subscription (and how much is it - I must be blind or I just can't find it on the website)?
[+] ptato|3 years ago|reply
The design is really cool, but the tool is useless (to me) if I can't use it offline and store the data on my own hardware. For some reason everyone in this space is building cloud tools!
[+] SamBam|3 years ago|reply
I created one note, deleted it, scrolled to the bottom, and tried to create another.

From then on, everything was broken. Taps didn't create cards, scrolling became janky, sometimes I'd see the pink circle of a tap from something I did 10 seconds previous, and in the wrong place.

The was repeatable when I exited the site and came back in.

Android Pixel 6 Firefox 100.2.0

[+] pketh|3 years ago|reply
Hey SamBam,

Ya Android is the only platform that currently has this bug (and a couple others). It's hard to diagnose, but I'm working on it. Sorry about that!

[+] xhfloz|3 years ago|reply
One of my favorite people and websites out there :)
[+] pketh|3 years ago|reply
Thanks xhfloz, I love what you're doing with mmm.page too!
[+] programmertote|3 years ago|reply
When I saw "Kinopio", I thought it's about Toad character (my favorite) in Super Mario universe. :) But I'm still pleasantly surprised to see a site that looks very unique.

I wonder if the word "Kinopio" means something other than Toad in Japanese (maybe someone here who knows Japanese can answer?)

[+] YeezyMode|3 years ago|reply
Straight from Wikipedia: Kinopio, which is a mixture of the word for mushroom (“kinoko”) and the Japanese version of Pinocchio (“pinokio”). Those blend to be something along the lines of “A Real Mushroom Boy.”
[+] nammi|3 years ago|reply
I used this and it's really cool, but like others the fact I didn't have my files on disk made it way less useful
[+] IceHegel|3 years ago|reply
2D canvas is by far the most natural way to brainstorm.

I've been using the Vienna beta (https://vienna.earth) but am interested to see how this compares. So far I like Vienna for visual stuff - but going to try this for mind mapping.

[+] pambea|3 years ago|reply
Never been a huge fan of mind mapping. You have to kind of force the information into a certain structure, whereas with a paper/canvas, you can just put everything down without connecting stuff with lines.
[+] alakep|3 years ago|reply
Would brainstorm with pen and paper only. Publishing thoughts and brainstorms to friends is the only thing I would use a tool online for
[+] jack19|3 years ago|reply
Honestly mind mapping is a waste of time, just trying to look smart
[+] alakep|3 years ago|reply
Really wanna try Vienna. Been on their waitlist
[+] contingencies|3 years ago|reply
Congrats on the launch but personally can't see myself using a tool like this. What problem does it solve? Mind maps have been around for years and remain niche for a reason reminiscent of Lamport's take on UML: fuzzy pictures of boxes and arrows.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. - Ansel Adams

IMHO the best value tools in our company are clipboards with blank pages and three colors of pens on every desk, and an auto sheet-feed scanner to get the results in to git without fiddly photography. I love graphviz/mscgen as much as the next unixer, but for ideation paper wins hands down.

Don't use the computer to do things that can be done efficiently by hand. - Richard Hill, Hewlett-Packard

[+] deluxeroyale|3 years ago|reply
Amazing work @pketh, been following your blog and work for a while. Really inspiring, not a lot of work out there that reaches this level of quality in all aspects. Are you doing all the work on this or do you have a team with you?
[+] deluxeroyale|3 years ago|reply
Yeah I should have phrased that question better since you wrote solo creator. Do you use any external people to get anything done?
[+] 2sk21|3 years ago|reply
This is a very promising tool - I can see many uses for it. My one fear nowadays is that this data could be valuable to the likes of Google etc for training ML models. Hope you can keep this away from the crawlers.
[+] rambambram|3 years ago|reply
Nice examples! I miss a tooltip with text though, when I hover an icon.
[+] pketh|3 years ago|reply
Makes sense. At least in these early days I didn't want to rely on that as a crutch because Kinopio is designed to also work on mobile/touch devices which don't have hover
[+] rnmp|3 years ago|reply
Really glad to see apps that help you explore your thoughts without feeling like productivity. This is a trend that will continue growing.

Shameless plug on an app I’m working on: Bleep (https://www.bleep.is)

Similar concept though different execution - customization + organization in a way that doesn’t feel like a productivity tool which is what I think Kinopio is aiming towards. Definitely an inspiration for me!

[+] pketh|3 years ago|reply
ya somewhere along the way 'productivity' became 'enterprise', a depressing association to tools that are ideally supposed to help you build a better and funner life
[+] culi|3 years ago|reply
bleep.is looks like a less brutalist are.na
[+] nwatson|3 years ago|reply
Looks very compelling, I'm curious as to whether it covers all the bases.

At my day job the sales-side folks Zoom with customers all day to discuss financial API integrations. Every potential customer is different. They draw out everything in Whimsical, https://whimsical.com/, which has a very bare-bones aesthetic. It seems to work, they got to US$10M ARR in short order.

[+] pketh|3 years ago|reply
I believe that Kinopio does most or all of what whimsical can do, but with a very different (less rigid and less structured) approach. Happy to answer any specific Qs as they come up
[+] hkon|3 years ago|reply
Looks cool. Would have been great back when I was creative.