Heptapod Notes

I was adding text to notes I had taken about a podcast recently. I ended up inserting text rather than appending it. I realized that I wanted a note that did not have a beginning and an end. 

I wanted a note that was circular, without a top or bottom. I had been listening to the soundtrack of the movie Arrival, and I realized that i wanted a note-taking app designed by Heptapods.

Heptapod writing is circular without a beginning and an end. I wanted a note taking app where the writing surface was a circular ribbon. This would allow me to add information anywhere on the loop, without having to scroll up and down through a traditional document. A quirk of the heptapod writing system is that one must know how a sentence will end before one begins to write it. I can’t do that, but I do want to think about a piece of writing as a whole, without a beginning or end.

Image from fsmedia.imgix.net

By the “If I can think it, somebody's done it” rule, something like this already exists. It shouldn’t be hard, a small matter of programming. Word processing documents already give us an infinitely extensible sheet of paper, but it has a top and bottom. I want a circular note-taking app, so just connect the bottom of the data structure to the top.