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Notion Timeline View

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Re: Notion Timeline View

#131

Post by wrcwill »

niels_bom wrote: post #71

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?

For me notion is much faster in browser than on the desktop client for some reason. Scrolling in some tables is butter smooth in firefox and super laggy on desktop (chrome sits between both) on my 2014 mbp.

I initially thought i would prefer tabs, but I find it faster to alt-tab between the browser and the desktop client when working with both, so its unfortunate that it's laggy sometimes.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#132

Post by optemization »

it's a long awaited update for the Notion community. Beyond the timeline view, they introduced the ability to hide database properties in card view, so that doesn't obstruct content, which btw, adding content to a database record in a vertical UI is one of the best Notion features, so they made it so much nicer.

just like any new Notion features, there are bells and whistles so, i went ahead and carefully broke them down in today's blog post: https://optemization.com/timeline-view-notion

Re: Notion Timeline View

#133

Post by boringg »

_alex_ wrote: post #120
deckard1 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

mimestream for me.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#134

Post by BoorishBears »

black_puppydog wrote: post #96
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…

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…

Comments like this makes me glad I never got into the vi/emacs rabbit hole

Not that I don't believe you, I know this is real stuff that bothers people!

But it's so nice that this stuff never gets to steal brain cycles or cause me stress

Writing code in a heavy editor over VNC from the dog park wifi where I can type out my statement and pet my dog before it finishes? No problem!

Powerful IDE with everything including the kitchen sink but in some Faustian bargain it chugs at basic text editing? Let's try it!

Cool new editor doesn't have Vim bindings and a ton of mouse movement required? No problem!

It feels like I'm unencumbered by so much that some of my colleagues are always obsessing over, and yet we're all capable of the same output

Re: Notion Timeline View

#135

Post by pembrook »

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…

Joplin, obsidian, etc. and other open source note systems I've used all suffer from the same problem: bad writing experience.

I can't be the only one who believes this...writing in a 2 panel markdown+preview side-by-side view is just horrible and backwards.

And I like the idea of markdown! Of course I want the ability to export to markdown for portability to the web. But for the love of god, don't make me surround my words in 4 character markup to make them bold, and then show me a second panel next to it so I can "preview" what bold looks like. Didn't we already solve this with 1980s word processors?

Hell, why don't we create a 3 panel writing view? On the left you can write in binary, in the middle you can see live base64, and on the right you can preview what it will look like to actual humans. Awesome!

The only good implementation of writing in markdown I've seen is Typora or Bear, which abstracts/fades away the markup after you type in a single view.

Notion also solves this by only allowing you to select from semantic HTML styles (ie. H1, H2, H3, etc) but you see what the final text will look like in one view. When you export, generating markdown is trivial since you're already using a markdown-esque set of options to style your text.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#136

Post by Semaphor »

prepend wrote: post #128
deckard1 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> that’s not a lot of time.

That’s an extreme amount of time… GMail and Outlook are both horribly slow and I can’t understand how anyone wants to use them. Outlook even manages to be slow with their desktop app. Not as slow as either web app, but still a noticeable delay.

Fastmail at least is true to it’s name and fast.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#137

Post by pmohun »

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.

Whenever I read a comment that says "email is dead" I feel it is my responsibility to point out that ~it doesn't have to be this way~

The email standard(s) are great. Powerful, decentralized, and damn near universal. It's just that we live in a world where a Duopoly has taken over most of what we consider to be email.

If this comment resonated with you, I am working on something you might be interested in. Feel free to DM me for details.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#138

Post by zestyping »

pembrook wrote: post #135
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…

Joplin, obsidian, etc. and other open source note systems I've used all suffer from the same problem: bad writing experience. I can't be the only one who believes this...writing in a 2 panel markdown+preview side-by-side view is just horrible and backwards. And I like the idea of markdown! Of course I want the ability to export to markdown for portability to the web. But for the love of god, don't make me surround my…

Funny that we feel so different about Markdown.

The whole point of Markdown (in my opinion) is that the formatting is a function of text that you can see and edit. The entire state of the document is visible, and there are no formatting operations you have to learn, just regular text editing operations like backspace, copy, paste, and so on. For example, if you press backspace, you always know exactly what the result will be: it will delete the character to the left of the cursor.

This is not so in rich text editors; when you press backspace, it changes both the document and invisible internal state, and you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen; you need to be aware of the invisible formatting structure, or perhaps a recent history of things you did, or it might be entirely impossible to tell because it depends on some invisible state that was created weeks ago and saved in the document file.

For this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power (you can only do a limited set of things like headings, lists, bold, and italic).

That's why Markdown tools that hide the markup are, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds: you sacrifice formatting power, and you sacrifice editor predictability. After the markup is gone, how do you edit it? How do you unbold something, or change the indentation of a list? If there are separate commands for all that, then there was no point in using Markdown.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#139

Post by zestyping »

ryanSrich wrote: post #73
rattray wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Page load, painting, uploading, everything. It's all very very slow. I use Notion very heavily at work, and until March of this year personally. In early 2020 I switched to Roam and I can't go back now. Roam is so amazingly fast it's like they're cheating or something. I wish every app would adopt the way Roam does it. Load everything up front. But, everything is slow these days. Aside from Roam, HN and maybe a handf…

This is why I've never left Notational Velocity. Too hard to switch to something slow.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#140

Post by zestyping »

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 love the spirit of Notion as well, and I've tried it a few times and just can't get on board because of how sluggish it is.
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