I’ve added a few new features to Gingko Desktop:

• You can now export not just the whole document, but also “Current card & subtree” as well as any “Single column”.
• You can now export to MS Word as well (again, whole document or the options above).
• You can now copy and paste the currently selected card and it’s children, with the standard shortcuts.

There have been plenty of bug fixes made and deployed, as well. I’m still having issues with the experience on macOS though (for instance, the menu doesn’t follow mac conventions, and neither does the app’s exit experience), but it’s getting there.

Changes I made to the online version:

• Added “Import JSON” option to the “New Trees”
• Added a way for users to change their email address
• Added a way for users to delete their accounts and associated data
• Fixed a bug where long domain extensions in account emails (like “.studio”) weren’t allowed

That’s it for now!
If you have any questions or comments, let me know.

I recently finished writing my PhD thesis in Physics!

And no, I didn’t write my thesis in Gingko, as it didn’t exist when I started. In fact, it be more accurate to say I dreamed up Gingko to avoid writing it.

In any case, as with most equation-heavy scientific papers, it was written in LaTeX, the standard for beautiful and accurate equations. Up until now, if you did want to write or draft an equation-heavy thesis with Gingko, you’d be out of luck.

But Gingko now supports LaTeX, and you’re free to use Gingko to work through the details of a proof (the tree structure suits this use-case well), or any other math-heavy work you’ve been forced to write.

Inspired by this, I decided to write a quick tree explaining three of my favourite equations:

Without much fanfare, we’ve added a feature that might change the way you create presentations or storyboards. Quite simply, you can now view any tree as a slideshow in your browser.

Powerpoint-killer?
Maybe for some.

Here are just two ways of using this for your work:
Continue reading Gingko for presentations & storyboards →

Internally, I’ve been toying with the idea of using Gingko as a Lisp editor. We’ve already tested exporting a Gingko tree to lisp (with parentheses inserted in the correct places), so the only thing missing is having more than three columns (the current limit).

I believe Gingko is a natural way to write Lisp, for the following reasons:

Continue reading Gingko as a Lisp Editor →

Aleksey has been working hard on a very challenging, but essential feature: real-time collaboration.

Because Gingko is card-based, we feel that collaborating in real-time with Gingko is far more user-friendly than in “modeless” editors like Google Docs.

If someone else is editing a card, that card is simply locked and greyed out. You are not distracted by your collaborator’s real-time typing, and it doesn’t feel like a giant chat window (remember Google Wave?).

This is a big feature, and I am surprised by the speed with which it’s being developed. [Edit: June 18th. Turns out there were many hidden challenges, now finally overcome.]

We’re still ironing out some minor bugs with it, but it will be ready for use soon.

We often use Gingko internally as a shared todo list. It works well, since we can have projects, tasks, and sub-tasks arranged hierarchically.

We’ve been using [ ] to denote empty checkboxes, and [X] for completed tasks. This was not pretty, a bit of a pain, and did not give feeling of satisfaction from completion.

Well, we now have proper checkbox support. Just add square brackets [ ], and it will render as a checkbox which you can click to toggle. Making a checklist? Pressing enter will automatically create the next checkbox for you.