Bill, as impressive as ever. I wouldn’t mind engaging you directly to solve my team’s software development issues, as well as our Coda set-up needs, haha!
With things like reciprocal references showing up around Coda, more manipulation of text into rows, visualizing these relationships, and the potential of the text around Coda being more readily “convert-able” to rows and data, I think you have about 90% of my desired features covered! I’m not sure if you would include those in feature bloat, but I’m hopeful most of what I am looking for is a matter of just surfacing stuff in the existing Coda architecture. I am no developer, but we use Python extensively on some of our platform (as well as Elastic Search we discussed earlier), and this all sounds like a dynamite implementation of it!
This is primitive compared to what you just wrote, but much of my desire for the reciprocal references and easy manipulation of text has to do with somewhat successful use of Confluence/Jira for a long time. As you may know, you can easily manipulate text in Confluence into Jira issues, and references are picked up all across the two apps. It was the one probably redeeming feature of an otherwise failed experience with my team and Atlassian. Also, although I just said “easy,” that is with caveats: The process in Confluence to link with Jira was simple to understand, but it took many clicks, highlighting with the mouse, and generally those two apps were S-L-O-W. So as I work in Coda, I long more and more for being able to see these wonderfully quick relations I create in Coda show up in the destination I point them to! And you can really get a sense of how well that can help with usage of a tool by seeing how Roam is manipulating this concept.
And apologies for another long post, but I thought I’d also shed some light on my own use of MindMaps /visualization. Again, hope this is helpful as I know the Coda Team likes use cases!
We wanted to create a “Feature Map” of our Software Platform. The idea was to show the relationships between components in the various tiers of the system. So, a webpage where you sign up and submit your resume (one of our sites is a job site) would have a link to the db in the Infrastructure level where that resume data does in. If there is a parsing process, the link would also incorporate the mid-tier parsing service we built. In the end, the opportunity is to wind up with a “live” diagram of our system, that will update as we adjust links in Jira, a we were still using it at the time. This eliminates the need for the likes of Lucidchart or Miro, which typically are used by a dev team building a static diagram of a Dev Platform. Then, they build completely separately in the repositories, and have a nightmare to keep the diagrams updated.
After @Paul_Danyliuk’s SVG example here…
and now reading your thoughts, makes me even more aware about how this should not be that hard to accomplish. And, I think if Coda came out with this natively, they would have a potential disruptor in the Diagramming Software space. Unlike the market leaders I just mentioned, Coda actually is a place teams will maintain the structures that they represent in external tools in Lucid and Miro.
And I am in favor of paying for doc making through Coda as soon as you guys figure it out, too!
Take care.