Live data from Hacker News

Notion Timeline View

notion.so

121–130 of 191 posts

Re: Notion Timeline View

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've ended up using Obsidian, since it saves its stuff as plain Markdown as opposed to Joplin's weird kitbash format... ...but the deeply ambiguous licensing info makes it a non-option for a lot of people.

I've never understood the draw of Obsidian. Their website makes it seem like the "graph view" is their big differentiator, but why is that useful? Why is it useful to know how various topics are vaguely related, and view a giant web of it? Or is their marketing just confusing me.. and really it's just a markdown editor with linking?

there’s a style of note taking called zettelkasten, recently popularized by a service called Roam Research, that is ALL ABOUT linking notes together and traversing the note graph. obsidian is targeted at that use case.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#122
post #12

Anyone have insight into how they built this? Custom Gantt solution or you think they bought one? There are no good and free JS gantt libraries, but many, many paid ones. I've been trying to find a good one for Portabella ( https://portabella.io ) as they're an essential part of project management platforms, but no luck yet.

I also needed something similar but instead of a lack of libraries, I actually remember seeing an overwhelming amount of choices. There are 200+ libraries with the word gantt in it: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=gantt&ranking=popularity. And a lot more if you also include calendar timelines like https://github.com/namespace-ee/react-calendar-timeline.

Did you evaluate them and consider all of them to be bad? I ended up building my own because everything looked too flexible for my use case. I only needed basic layout/time tick marks and zoom/pan.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#124
post #65
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 don't use notion, so I'm curious - what kind of slow? UI lag? Page load? API responses?

In dark mode, the desktop app can't even resize the window smoothly without white strips appearing on the right and bottom edges.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#125
I see a lot of nice recommendation for note taking apps, but for me the 2 biggest features that I need are

1. No vendor lock in. I can’t lose access to my notes because of random account bans or the company going under or w/e. Also plain markdown, no nonsense proprietary formats.

2. Platform independence, I work across mac/windows/ios on home and work.

So I ended up using a git repo with markdown files. I use Noteable and Typora on mac/win. No need to import/export anything they both work with plain markdown files on the fs with tags as markdown front matter (I sync manually with git). For mobile I use GitJournal which basically has the same features and it can automatically sync with a git repo.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#126
post #111

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 i…

I think too many features can absolutely be a bad thing. By allowing everything, you have to cycle through every possible solution to a problem to settle on the best one. With a more limited/focused feature set, landing on the best solution -- even when it doesn't quite match up to what you'd choose in the feature-rich environment -- is much easier. This difference can add up a lot over time, making a simpler tool easier to use because it takes less cognitive effort to find optimal solutions.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#127
post #15

I have some serious data privacy concerns with Notion. The excruciating slowness of the platform in all its forms and iterations is also completely unworkable. A real shame as I really need something like this in my life - both personal and professional.

While this has become a thread for talking about alternatives, has anyone found a solution with a premium Latex + markdown experience? So far I've found VSC to be the best experience.

Typora is the best WYSIWYG editor. I can't stand split edit-preview editors in my notes, and nothing has done as good a job as Typora while also being local-only and open formats.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#128

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.

It’s funny that I recently started using the Mac desktop mail app and outlook app and they are so quick compared to gmail (or outlook.com).

I had forgotten how nice it was to quickly go through email and remember how quick gmail was when it launched. A colleague said “it’s just five seconds to open and load an email, that’s not a lot of time.” But that adds up.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#129
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried using that Wiki inside of Microsoft teams? If you want to talk about slow.. dear lord, it's like every action I do is manually being forwarded to a country with cheap labor to approve my action before it's approved in the dtabase.

Whoever is on that product team is either grossly incompetent or terribly understaffed. It’s one of the worst wikis I’ve seen. (Sorry if you’re reading this MS employee!)

I wonder about that and came up with incompetent or team bloat. Since there are so many single person passion project wikis that are OSS, I can’t understand how even if they had a single decent dev working on this it could suck so hard.

I think that the wiki in Teams is not intended to be used but is rather there to tell someone in a position to buy who wants a wiki, but doesn’t use them, that the product has a wiki.

I tried using it and just basic stuff like linking to the wiki from various places is so difficult. I think the (incorrect) assumption Teams makes is that users are super stupid and only use Teams and nothing else, and only use what they are explicitly trained to use.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#130

I’ve been using Notion quite a lot the last 1.5 years at work and I’ve got similar gripes as others have already written about. My major wish, and this has been on their roadmap for a while now: an API. Question: how many of y’all use Notion in the desktop client version (which seems a bit faster) vs. in the browser where you can have multiple tabd open?

API going into closed beta before the end of the year, IIRC
Post reply on HN