Writam
Linear note apps flatten the relationships between your ideas. You end up with a searchable pile you never reopen.
In developmentWhat a spatial canvas is
Most note apps give you one direction to move: down. A spatial canvas gives you two. It is a surface much larger than the screen, and you put things anywhere on it — a note here, a quote a little below it, a question off to one side because it does not belong to either yet.
You move around by dragging the surface, and you zoom out to take in more of it at once. Nothing is in a folder. Nothing is in an order. Things are in places, and the places are yours.
The problem with lists
Chronological order records when you had a thought, which is rarely what you need to know about it later. Folders make you decide where something belongs before you understand what it is — which is precisely the moment you know least about it. Tags postpone that decision and then multiply it, because now you are maintaining a vocabulary as well as a set of notes.
All three work at thirty notes. At four hundred they have quietly become a second job. The folder tree stops being a way of finding things and becomes a structure you prune and second-guess, and it no longer pays for the effort.
Meanwhile the thing you actually knew is still unrecorded: that these two ideas belonged together, that this quote was the objection to that argument, that this whole corner was a dead end worth remembering as a dead end. None of the three had anywhere to put it. What you are left with is searchable, and searchable is not the same as thinkable.
How Writam works
Position is information
You place a note somewhere and it stays exactly there. Two things near each other are related because you put them near each other, and that holds after you close the app. Built this way because the relationship between two ideas is usually the first thing you know about them, and the last thing a list will let you write down.
Zoom out for the shape, in for the detail
Zoom out and you stop reading individual notes and start seeing the arrangement: dense areas, thin ones, a cluster sitting on its own. Zoom in and you are back in the text. Overview and detail are separate screens in most tools, which turns the shape of your work into something you have to remember instead of something you can look at.
Clusters form before you name them
Groups appear because you dragged related things together, not because you made a container first and filed things into it. You can name a cluster once it is obviously a cluster, or leave it unnamed. An unnamed group is a real state of understanding, and a folder cannot represent it. Structure that arrives late tends to be structure that is actually true.
A quiet surface to think on
The canvas is dark and the palette is narrow. The visual language is the night sky: what you place stays put, groups read as constellations, and distance means something. A tool you use while thinking should not compete for the attention you are trying to spend on the work. It is also why nothing on the canvas moves unless you moved it.
Sync, search, export and the rest
{{TODO: Which of these exist in Writam today — sync across devices, search, export, images and other media, links between items, offline use? These are the first questions visitors ask, and this block stays a placeholder until they can be answered. — CONTENT-TODO #8}}
Where Writam runs
Writam is built for iPad. The canvas is designed around a large screen you drag directly with a finger or a pencil, which is the whole reason it feels like a surface rather than a document.
There is no web version and no desktop version.
{{TODO: Is Writam iPad-only, or does it run on iPhone as well? — CONTENT-TODO #2}}
{{TODO: Is there a public Writam TestFlight, and may the link be published here? — CONTENT-TODO #3}}
{{TODO: Is there an Android or Play Store position to state, or should this page say nothing about it? — CONTENT-TODO #4}}
Who Writam is for
Three situations rather than three job titles, because the tool does not care what you do for a living.
You are planning something long
A dissertation, a book, a season of something. The pieces exist in different states of doneness and the running order keeps changing, so any list you write is out of date by the end of the week.
You are holding a research project in your head
Forty sources, six threads, and a sense of which ones are converging that you have never managed to write down anywhere. That sense is the most valuable thing you have and the least recorded.
You think by moving things around
Some people work out what they mean by rearranging it. If you have ever spread paper across a table to see all of it at once, the table is the thing being rebuilt here.
Who Writam is not for
If you want a to-do list with reminders and a checkbox, Writam will frustrate you. It has no concept of a due date chasing you, and that absence is deliberate rather than unfinished.
It is a place to work out what you think, not a system for confirming that you did it.
Related
The other half of that problem has its own product: Explore Swaya plans around the capacity you actually have on a given day.
The behaviours every Anahadh product follows are written down: How Anahadh builds these products.
Something broken, confusing, or missing? Contact support — bug reports during development change what gets built next.
Questions about Writam
- Do I need to know what a canvas app is to use this?
- No. If you have ever laid pages out on a desk to see them together, you already have the idea. The rest is dragging, pinching, and putting things where they belong to you.
- What happens to my work if Anahadh stops building Writam?
- The honest answer depends on export, which is unresolved. {{TODO: Confirm whether Writam can export everything a user has made, and in what format, so this answer can be a commitment rather than a hope. — CONTENT-TODO #11}}
- Does it work without an internet connection?
- {{TODO: Does Writam work fully offline, and does anything require a connection? — CONTENT-TODO #8}}
- I already use a canvas app. Why move?
- Probably do not, if the one you use is working. Writam is worth a look if you have found that your canvas turned into a wall you stopped visiting, because the design here is aimed squarely at what a canvas looks like after six months rather than on day one.