Design: Augment

You ever been overflowing with creative work, unable to keep track of or organize it? Pissed because there's no software supporting it?

There's no way to zoom in or out of anything. I can't zoom out of a project file and get a project statement + title. I can't zoom out of that to see what super-project it's part of. I can't zoom out of that to see a listing of and organization of all my projects.

I can't zoom out of a project file and see a list of entryPoints in it. JUST the entryPoints, the landmarks where I need things done.

Landmarks; along with nodes, edges, districts and paths. They're the fundamental elements of navigation = locomotion + wayfinding.

Project files (text files) are districts. Where are the fucking landmarks? The objects that can easily be seen from far away? Nowhere. Where are the paths between districts? Oh right, nowhere too!

I can't take usable notes because even though I date them and make sure they're time ordered, I can't TAG them! And even though I'm tagging my diary for future use, there's *no software* that can fucking read the tags! I can't read my notes by tag.

And because I can't read my notes by tag, I can't just dump my notes into a new project file. Something that SHOULD take 30-60 seconds takes 15 minutes if I bother to do it at all, which I generally don't. It's prohibitively expensive.

Organizing ... is prohibitively expensive! I've lived with that fact for more than a decade.

Augment

What are the design elements of software that supports the organization needs of systems designer? There's four if I recall correctly.

• deltas
• state
• entryPoints (these are meta, hence beyond the ken of programmers)
• dependencies (also meta)
• integration between all of the above and fluid switching between them

You can ALMOST fake these with a combination of the craptastic software we have available. You can use Natrificial Brain to keep track of dependencies. You can laboriously manually organize your files per-project as well as keeping a general log. Though it doesn't really work. You can insert symbols lie hashmarks (####) to indicate important entry points, though you can't do anything too elaborate like discriminating between important and urgent.

And unless you've got OCD or are anal about staying organized, all these efforts will FAIL. They won't work for one simple reason: they're too expensive. Faking Augment with crapware is not Augment.