Pretty cool, I actually explored the same idea several months ago, as you can put a huge amount of information while keeping emphasis on local features
Very interesting user interface concept, and smooth implementation. It's weirdly intuitive, like navigating on the surface of a sphere, or zooming in/out of a kind of spherical perspective where things that are further away are smaller in size. I had difficulty at first reaching some small clustered points, until I got the hang of it.
An idea that came to mind is that maybe some shading would help, with closer areas brighter and more distant areas darker. Or, like another comment said, an option to show/hide a grid.
I like it. The one thing I'd absolutely add is a color difference between the background and the circle, or at least something to indicate the horizon which would provide a better sense of orientation.
This is very cool. It maps to my existing understanding of how knowledge actually works.
You often don't need to see the whole hyperbolic disc, only some region in the center, and there, the text would largely still be readable.
The arrows are drawn in hyperbolic space, but the text is not; it really should be. Then there will never be an overlap problem.
Alternatively, the center of the text (or generally the anchor) of the text box could still be oriented to the screen to seed the render orientation, just like it already is, but allow the rest to be drawn following the rules of geodesics in the hyperbolic space. though I don't know if that would work as well.
I'm a bit more interested in what it teaches about the hyperbolic plane than I am in it's effectiveness as a note taking app (although the way it supports an exponentially growing tree does seem appropriate for depicting knowledge - I'd be interested to see something like a force directed graph of Wikipedia plotted on the hyperbolic plane).
The points and arrows do move and change shape appropriately while panning, but the images and text do not. It might be possible to use feDisplacementMap (an SVG filter effect) cleverly to get the deformations right. This would probably make performance worse, and I'm not sure how readable the text would be, but it would mean that things wouldn't start overlapping each other while panning.
This is neat. I built an LLM once that stored its embeddings in poincare space, and it was a struggle for me to visualise what it was doing at first. This would have helped.
While developing poincake, I actually thought about building a language learning app using a similar approach. The idea was to map word embeddings onto a Poincaré disk so users could explore word relationships and clusters.
This would be fantastic on a tablet; stylus for entry and fingers for navigation would make it very efficient and a great improvement over the standard infinite page. I would probably pay for a non-web tablet version, it is rare my tablet is connected to the internet.
(I'm the dev) I tried it out on an iPad and it seems to work fine. Let me know if you run into any issues. Supporting direct stylus/Pencil input will definitely be a challenge, but I think it’s worth a shot.
It worked on my Android tablet but I can't scribble a note and draw a picture/diagram with the stylus. I don't know anything about iPads but on Android you have the USI pen and for any app that understands the USI pen, it interprets fingers and stylus individually, the stylus is active so the tablet knows when it is input from the stylus or input from a finger. The google Cursive app which is the standard Android note app shows this well, stylus only writes and fingers only pan/scroll/zoom unless you switch it into finger mode so you can write with a finger.
If you managed to give all the features of Googles Cursive app within your Poincaré disk paradigm, I would happily drop $100 on it, assuming it worked as an offline app.
Edit: should mention that I don't think this is worth $100, other than to the handful of people like me who it would be perfect for assuming it was well executed. You would probably make more charging far less. The paradigm could translate amazingly well to the tablet/stylus experience if the details are worked out well.
I really like the approach but it'd certainly be nice to be able to use alternate topologies.
Also it'd be nice if there was an underlying grid plotting the metric/distance function to help conceptualize distance/relationships better when you get to the edges.
I love how wild this is. Thank you for thinking out of the box.
I kind of hate actually using this tho since it's just not how my brain thinks about concept relationships (spatially related concepts even in linear space).
Loving the smoothness of this. One concerning thing is overlapping notes – I don't want to be fucking around with trying to move the canvas just right to read a note under another note and there doesn't seem to be any other simple mechanism to resolve this (especially for larger blocks/images). The 'untangle' feature doesn't really solve this.
I'm thinking LOD might help mitigate the overlap issue, perhaps by having an LLM progressively shorten the text until it's a single Unicode character.
Also, as other comments suggested, shading or similar techniques could help.
That said, I doubt this can be fully resolved unless the text is rendered in hyperbolic space, as another commenter mentioned. I'll need to experiment and see if that's doable.
https://paperverse.net/
I see you also hade a similar idea on what happens when you click on an arrow
An idea that came to mind is that maybe some shading would help, with closer areas brighter and more distant areas darker. Or, like another comment said, an option to show/hide a grid.
You often don't need to see the whole hyperbolic disc, only some region in the center, and there, the text would largely still be readable.
The arrows are drawn in hyperbolic space, but the text is not; it really should be. Then there will never be an overlap problem.
Alternatively, the center of the text (or generally the anchor) of the text box could still be oriented to the screen to seed the render orientation, just like it already is, but allow the rest to be drawn following the rules of geodesics in the hyperbolic space. though I don't know if that would work as well.
The points and arrows do move and change shape appropriately while panning, but the images and text do not. It might be possible to use feDisplacementMap (an SVG filter effect) cleverly to get the deformations right. This would probably make performance worse, and I'm not sure how readable the text would be, but it would mean that things wouldn't start overlapping each other while panning.
If you managed to give all the features of Googles Cursive app within your Poincaré disk paradigm, I would happily drop $100 on it, assuming it worked as an offline app.
Edit: should mention that I don't think this is worth $100, other than to the handful of people like me who it would be perfect for assuming it was well executed. You would probably make more charging far less. The paradigm could translate amazingly well to the tablet/stylus experience if the details are worked out well.
Also it'd be nice if there was an underlying grid plotting the metric/distance function to help conceptualize distance/relationships better when you get to the edges.
I kind of hate actually using this tho since it's just not how my brain thinks about concept relationships (spatially related concepts even in linear space).
Also, as other comments suggested, shading or similar techniques could help.
That said, I doubt this can be fully resolved unless the text is rendered in hyperbolic space, as another commenter mentioned. I'll need to experiment and see if that's doable.
just another user. fun app, feel like theres something here. as with all note taking apps pen and paper for me are just so hard to beat.