Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notion Timeline View

notion.so

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 191 posts

Re: Notion Timeline View

#111

Post by 7ewis »

tomasreimers wrote: post #72

Notion seems to be one of those companies going wide before they go deep. By my count, they want to be a: * Todo list / task manager / long-term planner * Blogging/publishing platform * Internal wiki * Note-taking app One of the more cynical takes I've heard is that this is the result of an incredible product sense without the necessary direction to support it. Regardless of the reason, they seem to be releasing feat…

I do love Notion, I think it's a great tool - but it almost does _too_ much.

I spent ages trying to build out a To Do list, added different views, filters, an inbox for it, categories etc. then ended up giving up and just using their out of the box kanban style board in exactly the same way I'd use Trello.

I suppose it's on me, the user, to learn how to use all these different features properly but then that's more investment than I have time for, for a To Do app.

Similarly with say Tasker for example on Android, you can literally automate anything on your phone yet I rarely use it for anything. I don't think I would outright say too many features are a bad thing... but are they?

Re: Notion Timeline View

#112

Post by acjohnson55 »

Lazare wrote: post #36

I love the idea of Notion, and I love what the team is trying to do, and I love almost all of Notion. Unfortunately, it's too slow , at least for me. For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible, and Notion (for me!) is just a bit too annoying for me to put up with after extended usage. If you value features over snappiness, Notion may be great for you though. It's an amazing concept! And I certain…

Agreed with the slowness. I absolutely love using Notion, but my #1 complaint is that time-to-note is too slow. I wish that were a northstar metric for them. One thing Notion excels at is allowing me to refactor quick notes into increasing levels of structure, but that first step of getting information into the system from my brain is the biggest gap.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#113

Post by acjohnson55 »

alex_portabella wrote: post #42
scrollaway wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a way to self host it. Are you willing to consider it? It seems like you're targeting a particular niche and not having it open source or self hostable seems like a mistake.

No way right now. I do think that self hosting takes away most benefits we provide. Hopefully open source soon!

What are the benefits that would be lost?

Re: Notion Timeline View

#114

Post by peteretep »

baron816 wrote: post #17
lordleft wrote: post #5

Notion is a great tool and I recommend it as a solid "all-around" personal-wiki / notetaking tool. That being said, the fact that it's electron-based means it's not always as snappy as I'd like it to be when I want to quickly capture a thought -- sometimes the "page" has to reload, even when I'm using the desktop app. I also notice that like slack, it suffers from the same in-line text formatting woes, which can be i…

Always a complaint about Electron on here. Frankly, Notion and it’s ilk would not be nearly has great or feature rich without Electron. It perhaps wouldn’t even exist. Trust, it being an Electron app is a good thing for you, despite its limitations.

> Notion and it’s ilk would not be nearly has great or feature rich without Electron

I’ve been using Notion _hard_ for the last couple of months and only just realised people use it outside of the browser, so I’m not going to agree with that

Re: Notion Timeline View

#115

Post by timmattison »

Lazare wrote: post #36

I love the idea of Notion, and I love what the team is trying to do, and I love almost all of Notion. Unfortunately, it's too slow , at least for me. For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible, and Notion (for me!) is just a bit too annoying for me to put up with after extended usage. If you value features over snappiness, Notion may be great for you though. It's an amazing concept! And I certain…

I think it is all relative. Notion feels so much faster than Quip. Quip takes forever to start, stop, search, etc. it is nearly unusable. Search in Notion is so much better too.

Maybe I should avoid anything faster than Notion so I don’t get spoiled.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#116

Post by jeromenerf »

BenGosub wrote: post #80
jeromenerf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notion is indeed slow. Slack is slow. Google drive is slow. Trello is slow. Some local/native alternatives can be snappier. Speed and snappiness don’t always come together, but when they do, there is no going back to something even a little slower or less reactive. That’s why I don’t test nor try new hardware until I actually need more than what I have. It’s too strong to resist ;)

I think that Trello is pretty fast on all platforms and notifications are sent instantaneously

I really appreciate trello and it’s fast enough as long as you don’t need to open multiple cards side by side. Trello is optimized for certain workflows, in board view or single card view.

In a text editor, you would just have multiple windows, panes, splits ... and it’s just fast to jump, reference, copy/paste, etc. On trello, you need to reload the full board in another tab or lose context.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#117

Post by jakecopp »

Lazare wrote: post #36

I love the idea of Notion, and I love what the team is trying to do, and I love almost all of Notion. Unfortunately, it's too slow , at least for me. For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible, and Notion (for me!) is just a bit too annoying for me to put up with after extended usage. If you value features over snappiness, Notion may be great for you though. It's an amazing concept! And I certain…

If you want something:

- crazy fast

- saves to plain text

- renders to html with links between pages

- one keypress to turn a word into a link to a page with that name and create the page

Try Vimwiki!

https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

Re: Notion Timeline View

#118

Post by PragmaticPulp »

tomasreimers wrote: post #72

Notion seems to be one of those companies going wide before they go deep. By my count, they want to be a: * Todo list / task manager / long-term planner * Blogging/publishing platform * Internal wiki * Note-taking app One of the more cynical takes I've heard is that this is the result of an incredible product sense without the necessary direction to support it. Regardless of the reason, they seem to be releasing feat…

> Previous companies which have done this (e.g. Evernote) grow really quickly with a lot of user-love and then stagnated in growth without a clear sense of what to do next.

Evernote is one of those tools that I really wanted to like, but actually using it was an endless stream of disappointments. They're always reaching so far to implement grand features that the core functionality was constantly buggy. I'm sure they've improved since I last used it years ago, but I gave up before they could stabilize it.

Dropbox is another example of a tool that started out nearly perfect in its simplicity and laser-like focus on doing a few things well, but continues to get worse and worse with each additional layer of features. I was so much happier with Dropbox when it integrated transparently into my filesystem instead of trying to force their UI into everything. Now, even clicking the button to open the Dropbox folder launches a customized Dropbox file browser UI instead of just taking me to my Dropbox folder.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#119

Post by burtonator »

lordleft wrote: post #5

Notion is a great tool and I recommend it as a solid "all-around" personal-wiki / notetaking tool. That being said, the fact that it's electron-based means it's not always as snappy as I'd like it to be when I want to quickly capture a thought -- sometimes the "page" has to reload, even when I'm using the desktop app. I also notice that like slack, it suffers from the same in-line text formatting woes, which can be i…

Electron isn't any slower than any other app. Might use an extra 100MB of RAM but that's like $5...

With notion it's probably the app. Not electron's fault.

source: me... developer and worked with the Electron platform for 2+ years

Re: Notion Timeline View

#120

Post by _alex_ »

deckard1 wrote: post #105
black_puppydog wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack & notion make me close my eyes while typing, just because the delay between key press and pixels lighting up is so long that I get confused. It's like speaking with a 400ms or so echo of yourself being played back. Hugely distracting. When writing longer things on either, I find myself firing up vim to copy paste afterwards, just because it's impossible to get into any kind of flow in these apps. VS code also f…

I feel all of this is why email is dead. It's not because Slack or anything killed email. It's because Gmail (and other web clients) killed email. They made it dreadfully slow to do anything in. Go download Thunderbird. I haven't used it in 10 years, so it could be worse today. But I remember it being a joy to use. Or the Agent usenet/email reader.

i’m playing with mailmate on macos and it’s making me hate email so much less.
Post reply on HN