A ten-minute tour

Make a project

⇧⌘N, name it Reading. You land in Shape with an empty dot grid: “Draw the shape of your graph”.

Draw two types

Double-click the canvas. A card appears with a colour, a name field ready to type in, and one property, name, already set as the title. Type Book and press Return. Double-click again a little to the right and name it Idea.

Add properties: click Add property at the foot of the Book card, type year, then click the kind on the row’s right (“Text”) and pick Number. On Idea, add summary (Text) and, in its options, switch on Vector search so it can be searched by meaning later. (The model download is offered now; say yes or not now, the setting keeps either way.)

Connect them

Hover the Book card: a gold handle appears on its right edge. Drag it onto the Idea card. In the little form, type PRESENTS and click Add. The line now reads PRESENTS, Book → Idea. Drag from Idea back onto Idea and name it BUILDS_ON: a self-loop.

The status capsule says Saved: the database already has these tables. There is no finalize step.

Build a few nodes

Switch to Graph (⌘G). Double-click the canvas: a composer opens where you clicked. Pick Book, type Gödel, Escher, Bach, set year 1979, press Return. Hover the new bead, drag from its halo to empty canvas: a composer offers a New Idea connected by PRESENTS; name it Strange loops and write a summary.

Or let the AI do it: press ⌘N, type “Add the books and main ideas in this article:” and paste a link. Claude reads the page on your Mac, drafts nodes and relationships that fit your shape, and shows the draft for review. Nothing is in your graph until you click Add.

Look around

Click a node: the inspector shows its properties and connections. Hover for a card. Click a type in the sidebar to bring its nodes onto the canvas; click a node a second time to bring in its connections. ⌘T shows everything as a table.

Ask

⌘F opens the search bar. With the chip set to Auto, type which ideas does Gödel, Escher, Bach present? and press Return. The trail shows the steps: translated to Cypher (open it to see the query), ran on your graph in a few milliseconds, and the answer lights up on the canvas with a table below.

Switch the chip to Vector (⌘3) and type self-reference in formal systems. The closest passages come back as cards, with how close each is.

Switch to Raw Text (⌘5) and type ::Idea:: loop: only Idea nodes are searched, and the scope is drawn as a pill.

Arrange

Click Arrange in the top bar, choose Stacks, and sort by year: a bar chart of your books on a baseline. Free layout puts them back.