Feature suggestion - Arrow showing next/previous beat

Causality Story Sequencer
1

I do not find a keyboard shortcut for, from a beat, going to the NEXT or PREVIOUS one.

When we have many lanes or when the next beat is billow/above out of screen, it is cumbersome and effort/time consuming figuring out the next beat, (In both cases between zoomed view and all inclusive view) : we need to take time comparing beat positions.

If we want a LASTING clue displayed, we could enable/hide an arrow towards the next beat or from the previous one (just the one we are interested in)

There could be another mode:

For avoiding many displayed arrows, only one arrow at a time would display towards the next beat and from the previous previous beat (just the one we are interested in)

Also, clicking each beat, in sequence, could be enoying.

Solution:

We could just click shortcut for going to next/previous beat (I did not find it in the doc).

Just hovering the beat, entering by the side could activate the arrow
(Left side: toward previous beat, right side: next beat)

It would disappear when either:

-we hover another beat (Entering from any side, even if hovering the actual beat),
-or click a beat,
-or click the white board background

We can then scroll the white board to the next or previous one.

This would accelerate following the story, while reviewing it or sharing it with somebody.
(Avoiding forgetting/unnoticing a beat)

We could then select which one we need help for, just by hovering on it, by a left/right side.

But remains the problem of beats out of screen or too far: we might not notice them. We might want a lasting clue that the next one is out of screen (out of what we can visually compare) So, when there are beats out of screen, we could systematically have arrows going to and from the hidden part.

1 Like
2

Yes! Totally agree. Summary: When a beat dialog box is open, some kind of right and left keys for moving to the next or previous.

3

My suggestion was about out of the beat editor,
but I agree with your point too.

4

We recently added a Next/Previous beat to the whiteboard, and I agree that along the same lines, more could be done to spread similar features around.

But let’s separate the underlying need for the exact idea for how to implement it. These kinds of arrows and gizmos are almost always dead on arrival, because they look great in a mockup, but in real-time use, they don’t give you the cognitive flash that you think you’ll get.

We’re almost in Groundhog Day of adding these kinds of things and then removing them, because they almost without exception don’t work. Remember the flashing arrows at the top and bottom of the whiteboard that showed that the current beat was out of view and you had to scroll? Yep, we removed that, because it also didn’t work. Nobody had used it once or gotten anything out of it. But it was fantastic in a mockup. It also doubled battery use on laptops from all the rendering.

I don’t have a lot of faith in showing arrows, and especially not on hover, which isn’t a thing on mobile, and just results in a blinky UI that your brain gets trained to ignore. We already have lots of lines showing, especially for tags/storylines, and any arrows would now be smashed on top of that. It’s not promising, the “line” dimension in the UI is already used.

But we have thought about other options, like a window shown around current time that’s only shown when you scroll. Then the current beat is shown at full opacity, and previous and next beats are shown with receding opacity. It’s one idea anyway. I don’t know how to test it.

But there’s a more fundamental problem. Very tall whiteboards are bad. You’d have the same problem in 1920 putting pieces of paper on a wall. The more you expand vertically, the harder it becomes to understand the sequence, especially when things are above or below the viewport.

We have a stated goal of trying to force users to use fewer lanes and build less tall. The sequence becomes incomprehensible.

I only recognize the problem that the sequence is hard to understand on tall whiteboards, and it seems like we could do something. But I don’t have much faith in the currently proposed solutions. And then it’s better to have the problem than to build the wrong solution.