I realize Blocks in different lanes may overlap, but multiple overlapping blocks could be displayed in tracks, similar to how multiple overlapping tracks might be shown in A/V editing software.
Hi,
I apologize for the absence. We’ve been moving our platform to EU sovereign hosting, and it’s very demanding.
We do have a block overview, which can be enabled by right-click the timeline tracks area. It’s not exactly the same as this, but it could be a way to investigate the usefulness of the idea.
I never personally found the block overview useful, even though I’m the cause of the idea, and it looked great on paper. But your idea is different, in that it’s the actual beats that are organized by block. That’s new, and very interesting.
What bothered me with the block overview was that it was disconnected from everything else, and I had to mentally re-learn where I was. Still, I’d love if you could play with that overview, and see if you’re getting anything cognitively from it at all.
But let’s spitball. It seems to me that the idea is that we have a Beats track in the timeline, which is all the beats in one long line. That in itself isn’t actually very useful, because they become a blur. But if we then had a feature to organize the beats by either:
- Nothing, raw beats.
- Blocks
- Lanes
- Tags
You only get one dimension, because we only have one vertical dimension, so you have to choose what you want to organize by.
The questions then are whether (a) it works at all, as in being truly useful and not just looking useful on paper, and (b) what the default setting should be.
One thing to note, that we did in block/tag overviews, and that we also do in the emotion graph for non-emotion tags, is that we reuse vertical space. If one tag goes from page 3 to 10, and another goes from page 20 to 30, then there’s no reason for each of these to get their own vertical space, so they share. Otherwise, the timeline becomes mostly empty space.
Try to noodle with this idea, and see which implementation would give you the intuition you’re looking for.
1 Like
Ok, noodling here.