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

161–170 of 191 posts

Re: Notion Timeline View

#161

Post by siscia »

sethgecko wrote: post #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 Noteabl…

I was going through the same process and I ended up creating https://nostashapp.com

It features fast search and a very fast interface.

It is going to stay forever up because it contains my own notes.

Export to HTML or Markdown is coming.

You can support the application through patreon if you like or use it for free.

Open to any kind of feedback.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#162

Post by bosie »

zestyping wrote: post #138
pembrook wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Markdown isn't just text though, it also does images. Which is when the argument about rendering falls apart IMO. I really would like to see the image i am working on. Describing a chart/graph when all i see is ![Important](blah.jpg) isn't really that great.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#163

Post by slightwinder »

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.

That's far from being the truth. The only benefit electron brings is one codebase which can server multiple device-platforms. Without electron you would need separate clients for desktop, mobile and web. But what notion is offering in terms of features is not so special. Can be easily done on desktop with classical GUI-frameworks. I know it because I already did things like that 10+ years ago.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#164

Post by bosie »

ksec wrote: post #152
prepend wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. I guess that is why people dont understand I am annoyed as I will only give a time budget of 500ms to open and load an Email on the Web.

how do you open an email in 500ms even locally on your desktop? do you use spotlight or something to find and open it? asking since even when i am in thunderbird, it takes me way longer than 500ms to open an email

Re: Notion Timeline View

#165

Post by sagark1992 »

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #154

Like many others here I've tried more or less all of the productivity services and only one of them has actually stuck: Discord. I made a server called Diary, accessible only by me, and I have a few different channels like work-log, life-log, d&d session notes, joke ideas, etc. I also feed all screenshots I take into a channel, and set up a chrome extension that sends whatever page I'm on to the web-log channel as a…

Wow I too have a personal discord channel where I add ideas, bookmarks, journal etc. in separate channel.

What I like about discord is the full text search - its super fast. Is your chrome extension public, really interested in it.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#166

Post by CathedralBorrow »

sagark1992 wrote: post #165
CathedralBorrow wrote: post #154

Like many others here I've tried more or less all of the productivity services and only one of them has actually stuck: Discord. I made a server called Diary, accessible only by me, and I have a few different channels like work-log, life-log, d&d session notes, joke ideas, etc. I also feed all screenshots I take into a channel, and set up a chrome extension that sends whatever page I'm on to the web-log channel as a…

Wow I too have a personal discord channel where I add ideas, bookmarks, journal etc. in separate channel. What I like about discord is the full text search - its super fast. Is your chrome extension public, really interested in it.

Yep! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/discord-link-sende...

You just set up a bot on your server, and give the extension the URL the first time you activate/click it.

Edit: To be clear, it activates on user action, i.e. it doesn't send all my history to the channel. I did try that for a while but it just made a lot of noise that I never combed through. This one suits me much better; just right click and send to discord.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#167

Post by slightwinder »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #118
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…

> 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.

Just use your regular filemanager? All the new features are just additional, on top of the core-functionality, which BTW is still top-notch and stable as ever. As long as this does not change, who cares with what they attract new customers.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#168

Post by marbletiles »

slightwinder wrote: post #156
pembrook wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. It's called markup and a matter of efficiency. With richtext I need to mark the Text and click some button/menu-item OR learn a gazillion shortcuts for every little syntax-function. With Markup I use the same keys that I use for writting text, because the syntax is internal to the text…

> With richtext I need to mark the Text and click some button/menu-item OR learn a gazillion shortcuts for every little syntax-function.

Cmd-B for bold is exactly the same number of keystrokes as shift-8, and is exactly the same amount of cognitive load to learn. (You can also apply styling both on selected text and for text about to be typed, unlike plain text environments like this textfield I'm using now where you can't do shift-8 on selected text.)

When you get into the more esoteric syntax, it's still a tie: look how often even Gruber gets the Markdown link syntax wrong, and he designed it.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#169

Post by LukeEF »

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…

It seems to me that we need local and sync for this to work well. Make your changes locally and either sync behind the scenes automatically or when you push 'commit'. Many applications (like notion and a bunch of the other browser based applications) go the cheap SaaS route. One central database behind a web service and every frontend only displays an instantaneous view of some part of the data. That's not collaboration - you want to be able to work offline (at high speed) and then sync when you are ready. Multiple people should be able to work on the same artifact at the same time (and deal with conflicts at the point of the commit). While the sync works well for google docs, I think the experience of working on a single shared resource is bad. (All part of the problem we are trying to solve over at https://terminusdb.com/ - giving a native versioned DB so you can build collaborative apps)

Re: Notion Timeline View

#170

Post by mvp »

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…

Roam takes a while to startup. Once up, it's quite fast to switch between pages. A bit like an IDE. It's still browser based I think, and there are no native apps for Android and iOS. So I feel constrained when I'm not at the desktop.

Notion mobile apps are quite good, so I never have to tell myself I'll do something when I go to my desktop.

Post reply on HN