App that Extends Your Brain
Grafio is an amazing piece of work that really brings out the best balance in typing, touch, and audio recording. I strongly recommend you just give it a try yourself if youre looking for mindmap/diagramming software but heres my findings if youre interested:
THE GESTURES:
It becomes obvious after using this app how much the design team thought carefully about the action of every tap and gesture. The user experience is amazing! Like most anything worthwhile, the taps/gestures (particularly the order of them and the timing of them) takes some getting used to, but when muscle memory starts to kick in you will be able to fly through some diagramming and will be pleased how spot-on Grafio responds to what you are trying to do.
HOW TO USE THIS:
I believe we are very visual and spatial learners. I was looking for an app that would help me collect notes rapidly and flexibly in a diagram (spatial learning) while being able to augment that with art & drawings (visual learning). A lot of books (such as Moonwalking with Einstein) support this idea, i.e., making "memory palaces" to memorize things.
If this is the learning route youre looking to do but actually in recorded form, Id suggest getting a visual app (like Grafio) and then augmenting that with a drawing app (I like Paper or Adobe Draw).
For diagramming and spatial learning, this app fits the bill. You can:
- move entire sections of objects & connectors in bulk.
- expand the canvas to any standard print size, and even massive custom sizes as the map grows!
- snap objects to grid and align to other objects to keep things neat
- copy objects and even entire selections of objects, yes! Alternatively, you can draw basic shapes which is very accurate.
Other mindmap/diagramming apps I tried include iMindMap and Ideament. The issue Ive found with other apps is that theyre very rigid compared to Grafio. Grafio surpasses the competition by giving you the freedom to do what you want but also makes it easy to keep your diagram consistent. Other apps Ive tried sacrifice freedom of diagramming for the sake of consistency, and Grafio found a sweet spot.
Some other apps also lack note collection capabilities, meaning large blocks of text get unwieldily and they dont let you cant take audio notes). If you take a lot of typed notes in Grafio I recommend a bluetooth keyboard with the iPad or iPhone, which works very well with Grafio.
HELP & SUGGESTIONS:
Their help docs are also very helpful, easy to consume, and easy to read.
My suggestions for improving the app are minor but I offer them here for the Ten Touch team:
- there are some minor typos and spacing issues in the detailed help docs
- I wish there were an automatic backup feature to iCloud or Dropbox. You can export to Dropbox but its manual and on a per document basis. Would be sad to lose my documents.
- If you manually curve some connectors and then move the connected objects around, sometimes the connectors snap back into straight lines. You then have to manually re-curve them.
Brain Extension about Grafio 4 - Diagram Maker
