I am, as I may have mentioned, a bit obsessed with graph editors.
DAGs and other graphs are hugely important. And we want to tell the computers about them all the time.
However they don't map conveniently on to text.
And this infuriates me because I like text. A lot. I think text is the greatest UI known to humanity. That's why we evolved to speak not sign to each other. And alphabets not ideograms took over the world.
So it pains me, deep in my soul, that when making graph-shaped things that I love - from synthesisers to dataflow pipelines and process models - that text (and lexical scoping) doesn't quite work for them.
Perhaps we just DO need to draw graphs with something else. I need to be flexible on this.
But what's really annoying is continuously having to switch between mouse and keyboard when editing a graph. Mouse for the topology, and keyboard for the labelling of nodes.
So my last project in this area was the Keyboard Only DAG editor. And that works pretty well. (As an idea. There are a couple of bugs in the implementation)
But what about turning the problem around? Instead of staying on the keyboard, being able to stay only with the mouse or drawing tool? The issue here is how to label the nodes. To tell the computer what each is meant to be and what extra data it holds or function it executes.
Well, if my hands are occupied with the mouse, what about my voice? Are we yet in a stage where we can use voice to label nodes?
I made a simple experiment using the Vosk voice recognition model, that runs completely in the browser.
The fact that it's do-able in the browser is one of those things that still impresses me but I need to recalibrate my expectations to get used to. But it's still not great.
Nevertheless, I can imagine this combination of drawing + voice might well become a comfortable way of working for many people on many tasks. To me neither drawing nor voice have the virtues of typing text. But combined they become far more compelling.
When I have the next, better, demo of something like this, I'll put it up to play with.