Reading the map
The map lays out everything in your heap so that things that are alike sit near each other. It's midden's guess at how your things relate, worked out from their text on your device. This page explains what the shapes and colours mean, and, just as important, what they don't.
The short version: trust what's close. Don't read anything into what's far.
The colours
Each dot is one item, coloured by its kind:
| Colour | Kind |
|---|---|
| white-grey | text (notes, snippets) |
| blue | links |
| purple | pictures |
| gold | files |
| orange | audio |
| green | locked items |
Colour says only what kind of thing an item is, never how it relates to anything. A purple patch is a patch of pictures that are alike, not a separate category midden has made.
The rest of what's drawn:
- Circles with a number are your tags. The number is how many items carry the tag, and the circle sits at the middle of where those items are. A tag whose items are spread all over the map ends up near the centre, even if none of its items are there. Hover or pick it to see where they really are.
- Soft grey areas with italic labels are midden's guess at a topic: a dense patch, named from what's in it. They're in italics because they're a guess, not something you wrote.
- Faint dots are items outside the current search or filter. They stay visible to show the map's shape.
The shapes
Things that are close are alike
This is the map's one strong claim. Items next to each other have similar text: the same subject, the same site, the same kind of note. Zoom in anywhere and the neighbours should make sense together. That's the part to rely on.
A dense patch: lots of very similar things
A tight cluster, like a block of purple, is many items that are very alike. Pictures are placed by the text read from them, their names and the page they came from (not yet by what they show), so screenshots of one app or photos with little text in them tend to gather together.
A band or a line: a run of near-identical things
When many items differ only a little, say pages from one site with similar titles or notes written from the same template, they often string out into a line or a band. The items along it are alike. The order along a band doesn't mean anything: it isn't time, and one end isn't "more" than the other.
The middle: the main body
The large central mass is everything midden could connect to everything else. Within it, neighbourhoods are meaningful. Where one neighbourhood sits relative to another across the middle is only roughly so: nearby areas are usually related, distant ones less so, but don't measure it.
The outer ring: things that stand on their own
Around the edge is a ring of small groups and single items, spaced more evenly than the middle. These are things midden found nothing much in common with: not with the main body, and not with each other beyond their own little group. midden packs them in around the edge so they're easy to reach, rather than leaving them scattered far away.
- Being in the ring doesn't mean an item is less important, only that it's unlike the rest. A one-off note, a link on a subject you saved once, a picture with no text in it.
- Where in the ring something sits means nothing. Top or bottom, left or right: the side is arbitrary, and so is the distance between two things in the ring.
- A small group in the ring is still meaningful on its own: its items are alike.
What the map doesn't tell you
- Distance across the map isn't a measure. Two things on opposite sides aren't "the most different"; they're just not near.
- Up, down, left and right mean nothing. The map has no axes. It keeps its orientation from one layout to the next only so it doesn't jump around.
- Empty space means nothing either. A gap is just room between groups.
- It's a guess, made from text. Two things can be closely related in your mind and sit far apart, if their text doesn't say so. Tags are how you tell midden what belongs together. Tagged items are drawn towards each other, and the tag's circle shows them.
- It changes. Re-settling the map ("re-settle map") lays everything out again from scratch, so the layout can look quite different, with the same neighbourhoods inside. Pinned items stay where you put them.