It was VERY cool - basically a big screen where he could lay out various elements of his story, with the factors (i.e., characters) would drop down/pop up when he went to that element.

eta: it was actually more like an on-screen organizational diagram projected on a big screen than one of this fancy white board things

Touchscreen, of course.

It might be product placement from some company. The latest Bond movie had a cool computer table that I saw in a PBS show on prototype technology from Microsoft.

Yeah, Cisco's making some crazy stuff these days too.

In my surfing, I have stumbled upon some thing called a SMART board:

Add interactive power to your LCD or plasma panel with a SMART Board interactive display. Simply touch the display to control computer applications, write in digital ink and save all your work.

Oh! Those came up in one of our long discussions of teaching, last summer I think. Probably in Natter.

I'm sure it is mondo expensive. Though I wonder what the software was that was organizing his murder board data. Maybe that is more reasonably priced and I could just pretend I was running it on a touchscreen LCD.

No name is springing to mind, of course, but there is software that will create cloud diagrams like that.

I really liked the drop down/pop up/whatever it is actually called feature.

Sometimes, when I'm outlining, I'll have notes about a beat -- a funny line I want to remember, the tone a scene should have, etc. -- so I'd like to be able to include those somewhere. But I also want to be able to hide those notes so I can see just the beats in order and figure out what I'm missing.

I have no idea if that made any sense outside of my head.

I'm the whack job who just keeps notebooks. Part of it is my own addiction to blank journals, so I figure I should use them for something. The other is my own linear writing style-- the thought of breaking things down into arcs and turning points and beats makes me twitch.

But dang, that board was way cool.