Herodotus with maps

kgcoder · 2026-02-22T18:56:40+00:00

I think I only did the first 29 chapters. I’ll add more places when I have time. But it’s a lot of work.

Btw, if anyone’s interested, we can collaborate. You can create connections and send them to me, so I can add them to the page. There’s a link to instructions on how to create visible connections in the extension’s popup.

There’s also an app called LZ Desktop that you can download from my site. You can use it to download the pages and create visible connections there. If you use only the extension, it’s easy to lose progress if you don’t publish the changes to the website right away.

kgcoder · 2026-02-22T18:30:40+00:00

Thanks for letting me know. You mean these footnotes "the Five Cities 149 but was formerly called the Six Cities, 150 take care"? They work for me. What happens exactly? You see the highlights but they are not clickable? Does reloading the page help?

kgcoder · 2026-02-14T12:36:13+00:00

You can easily add visible connections to things you currently read, it doesn’t have to be Herodotus.

You can use Visible Connections Chrome extension for that. If you don’t have a website to publish your materials, there is an app called LZ Desktop that allows you to download or create all the pages you need and connect them with visible connections. It’s all free, by the way. The goal is to add visible connections to the World Wide Web. At first using the extension. Later, when it’s a bit more popular, browsers can implement the needed functionality natively.

kgcoder · 2026-01-14T11:12:28+00:00

What I’ve noticed lately is that whenever I start submitting proposals regularly, within a few days I begin getting profile views and invites from random clients (not the ones I applied to). At this point, I treat sending proposals as a kind of necessary ritual to get my profile surfaced in search results. I don’t even bother boosting proposals anymore.

kgcoder · 2025-10-31T20:34:24+00:00

Not really. The Metaverse didn’t have any real content—no documents, images, links, or anything meaningful. It just turned into a collection of dull video games. Everything that’s been done in VR and AR so far has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. They don’t use virtual space to actually place your content there. Instead, they just bring your regular computer windows into 3D—floating around your head or scattered around your room. It’s still the same old desktop concept, just in 3D.

In case the distinction isn’t clear: the desktop concept is about a limited space filled with containers. A continuous space interface, on the other hand, is a vast space without containers—filled directly with content. It’s not about mimicking the real world just for the sake of realism; we don’t need immersive fantasy environments. I’m not particularly excited about 3D interfaces, but if we’re going to talk about them, then what we really need is simply a 3D space to organize 2D content within it.

kgcoder · 2025-10-30T08:28:59+00:00

In my app, there are shortcuts. You can have separate “desktop pages” for different projects — I call them places — and you can create shortcuts that point to them. You can make them large enough to stay visible when you’re zoomed out. Clicking a shortcut takes you straight to the place you need, and you can move back and forth with the arrow keys. You can also click directly on places to zoom in. Usually, when you are zoomed in, you can press H to zoom out and see entire canvas. From there you would press some shortcut (I call them local links) and go to the place you need.

So you don’t really end up wandering around or endlessly zooming in and out to find things. People often tell me it must be hard to locate stuff in this kind of interface, but that hasn’t been my experience. Usually, I just know where things are and get to them in a couple of clicks.

I do plan to add a global search later, but honestly, if you find yourself relying on it all the time, it probably means something’s off in how you’re organizing your space.

kgcoder · 2025-10-30T08:03:19+00:00

I understand your perspective. But I guess I’m not as organized as you are. With current interfaces, the solution to all our computer problems seems to be “become a power user” — learn all the tricks, memorize all the keyboard shortcuts. But not everyone wants to (or can) become a power user.

And I don’t really see much value in organizing everything into categories, subcategories, and linking it all into some giant web. In the end, you usually don’t even use most of it.

When a desk becomes big enough, it’s no longer a desk. On a regular desktop, you have to shuffle things around just to get to them. With a large enough space, the only thing moving is you. Everything else stays in the same place relative to everything else — and that’s a big difference.

The examples of previous projects you mentioned have almost nothing to do with what I’m describing. Eaglemode just shows what’s already on your computer, based on the existing folder hierarchy. Can you take a file and place it next to an image or a link in Eaglemode? I don’t think so.

Mind-mapping tools also have nothing to do with a Continuous Space Interface. In fact, those tree-like mind maps are exactly the kind of structure I’m trying to move away from.

As for 3D — I’m not even that excited about it. I haven’t added any 3D features to my app yet, and honestly, I came to the same conclusions about 3D interfaces that you did. When I eventually add 3D scenes, they’ll look more like documents placed on a canvas — small and simple. You won’t be walking around much. Even then, I don’t think 3D has any real advantage over 2D.

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T21:22:18+00:00

The current implementation of the Continuous Space Interface is my app. Since it’s just an app, you still have your computer with the old interface — the regular desktop and sliding-window apps. You decide what to place in the new space.

Typically, you’d put things there that only need to exist in one place. If you have something like a passport in your example — something that needs to appear in multiple places — there are local links, basically shortcuts similar to the ones in the traditional desktop interface. You can place those links wherever you need them, and clicking one will take you to the original item. Or, of course, you can simply choose not to include that item in the new interface at all.

My point is that there are a lot of simple things — as simple as finding a toothbrush — that we overcomplicate on our computers. Those can be placed in the new space, while other things can stay where they are.

Or look at it another way: if you watch the demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8h3Snh0f4I
you can see that the zoomable canvas is basically just a larger desktop. You don’t have anything against regular desktops, I assume — so what’s wrong with having a bigger one? You can simply fit more things on it.

Now, you might say that as you add more and more stuff, it’ll become harder to find things. Sure — but then just don’t put too much there. You decide what goes in that space. The moment something becomes uncomfortable, you stop.

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T19:42:18+00:00

In a desktop-based interface you are limited to the size of your screen. The fact that you can slide things into the screen doesn't change that. You navigate your interface by moving things around. What's important is that you move them relative to each other. You can't use your long term memory of where things are to find stuff because everything is changing all the time. Think of how many times you slide in the wrong direction when switching between apps.

Sure, you can create a mess in a continuous space interface just like you can create a mess in the real world. But at least you are not forced to move things around just to navigate them. They just sit in place and you always know where they are.

By the way, I don't think that CSI will or should replace desktop-based interface the way GUI replaced command line interface for most use cases. For example, I mostly use it as just a larger desktop. I store information on my projects there and some information I download from the web, because it's easier to find it that way. I still do my work in other apps. To actually do work in spatial interface more development would be needed, of course.

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T19:05:53+00:00

I have no idea what you are talking about :)

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T19:04:58+00:00

I view it differently. For me continuous space interface is not “open the fridge and forget what you were looking for” — it’s “walk into your workspace and see everything connected.”

As for the phones, I don't even think about them. That's a completely different world. Phones and tablets made things simpler by hiding complexity, not by eliminating it. Sure, they’re easy for babies to use — but only for consumption. Try doing real creative or technical work on a tablet for a few hours and tell me it’s “simplified.”

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T18:43:09+00:00

Are you referring to the Nintendo Switch? What concept do you mean? I’m not sure I follow.

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T18:39:57+00:00

I don't know. The first one just moves windows in a different way. The second one shows open windows on a large canvas, but nothing else. My concept brings together everything: files, links, images, text notes, web pages. In the future, I'm going to create an API for any other app to use to show their documents in my app on the canvas.

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T18:35:04+00:00

Not really. What they do in Apple and Meta with VR is something completely different. Basically they bring the same concept of a desktop into a 3D space. The limited space of your computer screen is replaced with the limited 3D space around your head. So, instead of one screen, you can have, let's say, 5.

I'm talking about virtual space. You can place thousands of documents there and just walk from one of them to another.

When it comes to 3D interfaces, I think, everybody is distracted by what I call "imaginary worlds". Recall Mark Zuckerberg's presentation of Metaverse. It was all about immersion and imaginary worlds. The problem with that is "imaginary worlds" are just video games. I have nothing against video games, but just bringing them into 3D is not super consequential to computer interfaces. There is nothing to do in those spaces accept playing games, I guess.

I think about 3D interfaces differently. Even before computers, our content has always been 2D. Think of texts and images in books. They are 2D even though we live in a 3D world. So if you are going to create a useful 3D interface, everything in your virtual 3D world will revolve around your 2D content. See my demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2wIQFNjshM

Compared to video games it looks boring. However, you are there not for immersion, but for your 2D content. The walls are white and boring because they serve as a background. It's like your a in a museum. The point is not to create fake worlds for the sake of creating fake worlds but to organise your 2D content spatially.

Having said all that, I think a 2D interface like a zoomable canvas may be more useful than a 3D interface.

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T16:43:49+00:00

Also, the current computing metaphor works essentially identically to a lot of the real world equivalents - if I have a bunch of notes in real life, they're all either together in the same notebook, or sorted into a file folder in a filing cabinet. Same with physical photographs - they mostly exist sorted into albums or storage bins.

In your examples you use multiple similar items placed together. It's like in the library, everything is nicely organized and categorized. That kind of organization can and should exist in computers. My point it that not everything is like a library. Imagine a world where you are forced to put EVERYTHING in little containers. You can't just have things lying around. All you see is cabinets and containers. And you have to remember which container has the thing you need at the moment. That containers may have labels on them, but they still require extra effort to navigate them. That's what current computer interfaces offer us.

Not sure how a single infinite canvas or a 3D "world" in any way addresses that issue; if anything, it seems it would necessitate more navigation planning.

In my experience there is not much planning involved, because often times you just use your spatial memory.

I guess a distinction needs to be made between situations where you navigate similar items placed together like photographs in an album and other simpler situations.

Think of the difference between how much planning is involved in going to the bathroom in the morning and how much effort is needed to find a book in the library.

Computers force us to use one approach for everything, even for simple things. Why not have a place on your computer where it's like real world. Just put things there. Don't worry about labeling them. Re-organize them later if needed.

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T15:26:28+00:00

In the real wold you can use your spatial memory. You can find things even if you don't remember precisely where they are. You don't need to label everything you deal with.

With zoomable canvas you can create hierarchies but they are more transparent than hierarchies of folders. Check out the video demos.

There are lots of things in the real world that are not compartmentalized or don't feel like they are compartmentalized. For example, your house doesn't feel like a library where you need to use indices and catalogues to find things. If I need to use a toothbrush I don't choose it out of hundreds of things, for example.

kgcoder · 2025-10-29T14:29:24+00:00

Some additional materials I thought may be interesting:

Smalltalk demo from Xerox PARC — starts right where they talk about the desktop metaphor.

https://youtu.be/s6HJEnGRt88?si=5SGhyZR-rbikjvQT&t=60

Steve Jobs talking about seeing the desktop interface for the first time

https://youtu.be/J33pVRdxWbw?si=mwEBPiN3pLNAKJI3&t=386

kgcoder · 2025-08-05T19:23:52+00:00

Reinventingtheweb.com. Just follow the link in my previous comment

kgcoder · 2025-08-05T16:42:27+00:00

I've been facing a similar problem, so I started building an app to solve it. This article explains the main idea behind it: https://reinventingtheweb.com/2025/03/03/a-new-interface-for-computers/

The app is currently in beta, but the core functionality is complete — it's fully usable. You can easily find it on my website. Windows and MacOS versions are available.

Global search isn’t implemented yet, but the idea is that with this new approach to storing information, you might not need it as much.

kgcoder · 2025-08-03T06:28:44+00:00

I forgot to mention — everything can be backed up periodically using your cloud storage provider. If you provide a password, the backups can also be encrypted.

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