I used to love Notion, but I switch to org-roam and emacs for privacy. The transition took a lot of work, but the cross referencing notation is just as good.
Notion API – public beta
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Re: Notion API – public beta
#72this will be great, people will make notion clients for terminal, i like terminal todo list or terminal apps and having a great productivity tool in terminal which will sync all the device is good idea. LIke there is spotify on terminal.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#73Big fan of notion. Not a fan of the data lock-in or haphazard security. For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. So I’m willing to forego the open source alternatives. But I really wish Notion gave me more options for how to host my data. AFAICT they offer no “dedicated storage” or “on premise” plan, even if you want to pay for it.
In fact I heard a rumor that the entirety of Notion runs on a single unsharded database. If true, combined with the fact that this API took so long to ship, I have to assume that there is a crippling amount of tech debt in their stack. Hopefully it’s growing pains and they’re sorting it out, but it doesn’t make me feel confident about the security of my (most sensitive) data.
It’s maybe also a cautionary tale about what happens when you dismiss too many early decisions as “premature optimization.” You ship fast in the beginning but a few years later you’re buried in all the debt you generated.
Granted, it’s a good problem to have. If the choice is between a profitable, popular company buried in tech debt, or the perfect stack with no customers, I’ll take the debt.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#74> Start building with the Notion API BETA Okay, but what does it do and why do I want it? Why do sooooo many businesses insist on homepages that tell me literally nothing about the product they provide?
really, the notion homepage tells you literally nothing about the product? https://www.notion.so/
but the product is great but it is underrated for some reasons. I think it is underrated because it is a small company compare to its competitor microsoft and google and getting use to notion is also little bit tricky.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#75I currently use a 1-person Slack workspace instead of Notion because I can write bots to help me with various things. I'll have to see if this API is complete enough to do what I want with Notion.
This sounds really interesting to me. Care to explain how you use it (the slack workspace/bots)?
I just use Slack as a universal command line interface for everything.
Slack's bot extensibility make it great for:
- As a universal notification system (calendar events, github notifications, sms for the idiot apps that insist on it -- all sms go to my slack instead of my phone, alerts about my 3D printer e.g. print complete, alerts about low battery on any of my devices or robots, automatic google maps links of businesses I have visited, just about everything really)
- Expanding upon references to things, e.g. if I tag a bot and type the name of a hiking trail it can fetch the alltrails page for it and link it; if I tag a bot and type the name of a restaurant it can fetch the yelp page and link it
- If I paste code it can run it in a sandboxed environment and show the results much like a Jupyter notebook
- As a text interface to Google Assistant (the implementation is convoluted; I have to TTS the text and feed the audio result into Google's ConverseRequest endpoint. I couldn't figure out a way to feed text directly to Google)
- I have all my IOT devices linked to Slack, I can turn on/off lights, set thermostat, pause/unpause my 3D printer, request a snapshot from any camera in my house, everything right from Slack
- Slack is also great because I can upload arbitrary files, pictures, videos, sounds with ease.
The best part is that it is available on all my devices with data synced through the cloud and native mobile apps so it makes all of the above conveniently available on my phone and e-reader.
The biggest downsides are Slack's sucky search, and editing prior messages isn't the best experience.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn’t really matter since the underlying data (markdown files) is what obsidian uses (vs hosting the data on their cloud). So in the event that they don’t survive or enact policies I disagree with, nothing changes for me
Their markdown is not standard, so stuff might still change for you.
It's not standard, but that's not a surprise, as Markdown is a pretty barebones format. Most of what they extended it with is pretty simple, like [[wikilinks]]. There are also other tools being developed that can work with the custom syntaxt extensions.
Also, at the end of the day, it's still just plain text. You won't lose any of your data if you no longer use Obsidian.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#77For anyone looking for a open source notes app that let's you keep control of your data, have a look at https://joplinapp.org/ .
I really like zim (a desktop wiki) together with some filesync software
Re: Notion API – public beta
#78Big fan of notion. Not a fan of the data lock-in or haphazard security. For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. So I’m willing to forego the open source alternatives. But I really wish Notion gave me more options for how to host my data. AFAICT they offer no “dedicated storage” or “on premise” plan, even if you want to pay for it. In fact I…
Apart from the HN growd + a few more, I think more users likely just don't care about options to host data.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many other applications out there that don’t hold your data hostage like Notion. I learned after spending an hour to transfer notes that they have a “limit” on the number of “blocks” (aka notes) that I can have. Absolutely terrible user experience and turned me off from ever using Notion. I ended up going open source with vimwiki (and obsidian as a visualization layer, although as comments pointed out it’s not ope…
Obsidian isn't as bad as Notion, but it's also proprietary. Unfortunately, there is no good company in this space.
> there is no good company in this space
That's a bold statement.
Re: Notion API – public beta
#80For anyone looking for a open source notes app that let's you keep control of your data, have a look at https://joplinapp.org/ .
I really like zim (a desktop wiki) together with some filesync software
What I like about Joplin is that it lets me sync with my phone without much hassle via e.g. Dropbox