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Notion Timeline View

notion.so

171–180 of 191 posts

Re: Notion Timeline View

#171

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…

I think you express the precise reason why I prefer markup formats like Markdown, ReDoc, and LaTeX. I get to write markup which completely eliminates the need to click around menus and buttons or do app-specific keyboard shortcuts for formatting.

Rich wysiwyg editors also seems to have issues where the visible editing and internal formatting state breaks or behaves in weird ways. Like when you insert links and it automatically formats it as a link in some cases, and not in others.

Edit: Personally I always though the split view was okay as long as the compile times weren't too bad. Having a markup editor and then a view of the result is what I do for coding, so why not when writing stuff as well.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#172
post #169
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 collaborat…

IMO multi user sync is extremely hard to do right. It's one of the few things I would flatly refuse to work on, I don't need the headaches.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#173
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 collaborat…

IMO multi user sync is extremely hard to do right. It's one of the few things I would flatly refuse to work on, I don't need the headaches.

agree wholeheartedly - trying to solve that problem in a general way so nobody else has to have the headache (but, as you can imagine, there is a lot of complexity and detail in getting to something general and usable)

Re: Notion Timeline View

#174
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…

> For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible

Friction can be at different levels. All text editors especially the ones we are used to are friction less when we want to quickly open a new file and jot down something. But then, many higher levels things you want to do with chunks of text are not straight forward. You'll have to use plugins or write your extensions which sort of do what's required, but then they become clunky.

Doing the following things in a text editor is very clunky 1. Drop files from a file browser 2. A wiki that you'll stick to and not want to switch every month. 3. Write reasonably large documents that you'd actually also read in a text editor. 4. Have the same experience on all devices 5. Tables that are pleasing to the eye. 6. Visuals cues that enhance understanding of the content. 7. Select a bunch of text and convert them into pages or todos or tickets.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#175
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 collaborat…

IMO multi user sync is extremely hard to do right. It's one of the few things I would flatly refuse to work on, I don't need the headaches.

Áed mac Bricc literally had other people's headaches - nightmare superpower.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#176
post #151

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…

> 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. That reminds me of this blogpost [1]. It's definitely possible to optimize the input latency of rich text editors in the browser: they just have to be close to the metal of the…

Oh this makes so much sense now, thanks for sharing. I only recently had to look into react for the first time (not a web dev at all) and was shocked by the depth of call trees and render processes for even simple tasks.

No wonder these things are so unusable. But I guess slack know who they're targeting? People who won't notice the latency because when the pixels show up they're still busy finding the next key to press, or trying to find the right button for the text formatting... /s

Re: Notion Timeline View

#177
post #164
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

More than 500ms to open an email? One that's already stored locally?!

If that is the case, I advise you check what's taking so long, I get nothing like it with my thunderbird setup.

Given, I disable html formatting where I can, that might make a difference. But even on my 2009 i5 desktop with hdd storage it doesn't take that long to load the actual email.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#178
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO multi user sync is extremely hard to do right. It's one of the few things I would flatly refuse to work on, I don't need the headaches.

agree wholeheartedly - trying to solve that problem in a general way so nobody else has to have the headache (but, as you can imagine, there is a lot of complexity and detail in getting to something general and usable)

Thanks for your sacrifice, you're my hero!

Re: Notion Timeline View

#179

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…

The mentioned Bear and Typora solve this by showing you the "raw" Markdown at least when your cursor is there. So anytime you edit, you're editing in text, as you mention. But you don't need a second "display" panel to do that.

Both tools do it differently. Typora shows it when your cursor is there, but otherwise hides the Markdown. Bear always shows the Markdown but applies the corresponding style to it.

Re: Notion Timeline View

#180
If the Notion timeline view had more granularity (hours and not just days), it would become a great tool to plan novel scenes! (I’m using Aeon Timeline for now, but it’s clunky and doesn’t get any updates. I’d switch to Notion in a heartbeat!)
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