Scapple is the software equivalent of how I work out my rough ideas on paper. (If I didn't hate the word "brainstorming" so much, I'd probably call it brainstorming software.) When I'm in the early stages of any project, whether that's a writing project or a software project, I tend to throw a bunch of ideas down on a big piece of paper, spacing out as-yet unrelated ideas, clustering related notes, and drawing connections between them, trying to work out how everything fits together.

In short, then, Scapple is a tool for getting early ideas down as quickly as possible and making connections between them. The main advantage of doing this in Scapple instead of on paper is that you don't run out of paper (the Scapple canvas expands to fit as many notes as you want to create), you can move notes around to make room for new ideas and connections, it's easy to delete and edit notes, and it's easy to export your notes into other applications when you know what you want to do with them.

I'm well aware that there's already a plethora of mind-mapping software out there. Where Scapple is slightly different from most is that it doesn't force you to make any connections, and it doesn't expect you to start out with one central idea and branch everything else off that. Instead, you are free to write anywhere on the virtual paper and individual notes can be a short or as long as you like. Creating and removing connections is as easy as dragging one note onto another. Most importantly, because its purpose is to allow you to get ideas down and make connections between them quickly, Scapple is dead simple to use. Although I'm currently writing a full manual for it, the QuickStart Guide a little further down should contain everything you need to dig in and get using Scapple.

What's New:

Version 1.5.0:

Compatibility

• An extensive overhaul of the underlying code, modernising and converting most of the codebase to Swift — the minimum supported operating system is now macOS 10.15.0 “Catalina”.
• Adjusted Spotlight module’s code signing, which has changed in macOS 15.
• Fixes made to Quick Look and icon previews to support new methods in macOS 15.
• Disabled previous Ctrl-Return behaviour to allow for keyboard access to contextual menu in macOS 15.
• Fixed crash on loading a .scap file with a background texture found in macOS 15.2+.

Refinements and Changes

• Board textures now attempt to detect the overall lightness of the image, and adjust the foreground colour appropriately, when the Default Color is cleared in the Document Settings area of the inspector.
• Improved adaptive foreground colour handling in contextual cases where a shape or note background is different from the overall board background. E.g. black shapes on a white board will no longer host black on black notes.
• Native macOS window tab support has been restored. This will mean the window now always uses a native toolbar instead of sometimes showing the background colour of the board within it.
• Experimental live dragging mode added, which shows notes and connections move in real time. Use the Shift key while dragging and dropping to use it.
• Shift-clicking on a note or shape that is partially out of view will scroll the canvas until it can be fully seen.
• The Replace All button will now replace text found in connector labels.
• When stacking notes together, the width of each note is now respected rather than changed to match the width of the first note. If you prefer stacked notes to have even widths, use the Notes ▸ Make Same Width command.
• Blank documents that have never been saved or modified now conform better to standard behaviour, closing quietly in the background when another document is opened.
• The Sparkle framework, used to check for and install upgrades for the direct-sale version, has been upgraded to the latest version. This should reduce excessive requests for update checks on some older systems.
• Optimisations have been made to overall board drawing speeds, which may reduce stuttering and lag when scrolling, panning and zooming under some circumstances.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug whereby dragging two notes by their connection line would cause a crash in macOS 13 “Ventura”.
• Fixed a bug that could cause some boards to silently fail to load.
• Fixed a bug and would cause some boards to not save, throwing an error dialogue stating that “there was a problem creating the XML data”.
• Fixed issue with connection labels printing and exporting to PDF as white-on-white if the board itself was dark and the Default Color was cleared.
• Fixed a crash whereby typing a ‘dead key’, such as ´, meant to be combined with a letter, like “é”, would cause a crash if typed into a board without a note open for editing.
• Fix issue where dragging an image note could lead to the app hanging for several seconds.
• Fixed bug whereby multi-byte fonts, such as Japanese or Korean, would not properly hold inline formatting applied to portions of the text within a note.
• Fixed copy and paste issues that could cause multiple notes to have their text combined into the same line rather than being separated by newlines.
• Reverted to standard native window title bar, which has resolved:
• a) Issue of title bar graphics being drawn at the top of the screen in native Full Screen mode; b) Drawing issues that could result in zooming or resizing the window causing the solid title bar to “flicker” on and off; c) Inability to use native window tabbing.
• Fixed issue with the cursor colour not following the board’s current foreground colour, causing it to become invisible in some cases.
• Fixed crash on adding new notes to connection lines that also contain labels, in .scap files that were originally created with the Windows version.
• Modified inspector’s behaviour to end the editing of notes when it is opened, to avoid issues with modifying a notes appearance while it is being actively edited.
• Fixed issues where stack order was corrupted by array ordering, where stack order sometimes produced unexpected results.
• Fixed a display bug which would cause exception reporting to use black text on dark grey, when in Dark Mode.
• Fixed bug that would cause stacks to break formation, when editing notes within them that contain multiple lines.
• GUI layout fixed in the RTF and RTFD export dialogues.
• Fixed bug whereby notes containing more than one line would not auto-fit after editing the note, when applicable.
• Fixed bug in style storage and application whereby the Size attribute was not properly read when loading an existing board, and would be subsequently lost once saved.
• Fixed bug whereby changing the text colour while editing a note would not set the note colour upon concluding edit.
• Fixed bug whereby the text content of Scapple boards were not being saved into the Spotlight index.
• Fixed bug whereby under some conditions multiple save confirmation dialogues could be presented, when closing a new unsaved board.

Screenshots:

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