Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

notion.so

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 489 posts

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#181

Post by WalterSear »

andruby wrote: post #164
WalterSear wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't figured out. My current plan is to open source the layer that allows users to access their own raw data, to ensure portability. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to maintain the project if it doesn't bring in revenue.

I've been looking for a Personal Knowledge Manager for a while (and been thinking about creating one). Feel free to message me if you're considering open sourcing or releasing it.

I'll let you know when I make the initial public release.

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#182

Post by kjksf »

creativityland wrote: post #115

Some good alternatives - Quip ( https://quip.com ) - Airtable ( https://airtable.com ) - Taskade ( https://taskade.com )

Those are different products.

Notion is primarily hierarchical note taker/wiki.

The closest product is Quip but Quip is like Google docs - each page is its own thing. It's not hierarchical.

Airtable is a database. Notion has similar functionality, but not as rich and their tables can be just part of the page, like a picture.

Taskade is a task tracker. I use Notion for a similar purpose but it's not the primary functionality of Notion.

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#183

Post by akothari »

atombender wrote: post #122
mxwsn wrote: post #39

For me, Notion replaced Evernote and I haven't looked back. Three features that have been particularly useful for personal productivity are 1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management 2) collapsible blocks 3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale m…

How good is the offline support? Edit: After testing, seems not too bad. Reconciles non-conflicting edits just fine. But apparently, in the iOS app, search doesn't work in offline mode! Edit 2: It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.

Akshay from Notion here. Better offline support is included in the next release. Coming very soon!

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#184

Post by kjksf »

mjulian wrote: post #51

I love the product, but the login workflow is awful. Why innovate on logins? We've solved that problem. Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device sinc…

They also have a OAUTH login with google, which is the one I use.

But on the merits: not storing the password is safer than storing it so it's a valid claim.

And it is a 2fa mechanism to a tee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication)

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#185

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway382 wrote: post #138
nirv wrote: post #56

I'm concerned about the privacy of this service. Do company employees have (or are able to get) access to users' private data? Is there any data mining in use?

They use FullStory, which probably means all employees can see your data if they wanted to. There's no option to remove it, as far as I can tell.

[deleted]

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#186

Post by criddell »

coldtea wrote: post #127
criddell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're pointing out that there seems to be this unmet demand for a self-hosted markdown based product. Rather than wonder why people keep asking for that, maybe you should include those features in whatever it is that you are building.

Maybe the demand is from the worst kind of users a business would want, those that would never convert to actual customers but want something for to tinker and install for free...

Who said anything about free? I pay for all kinds of software that I install locally.

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#187

Post by lstamour »

mjulian wrote: post #51

I love the product, but the login workflow is awful. Why innovate on logins? We've solved that problem. Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device sinc…

They imply that the login is 2FA-protected because your email or Google account can be 2FA-protected, and they're piggybacking off that...

Having passwords means storing them correctly and still implementing some form of reset -- and if email is a weak point, they would have to 2FA prompt you to reset your password, or not use magic links, or handle such issues out-of-band. They're probably trying to avoid auth/password support by outsourcing this function to Google for the time being.

I agree though, the user experience that is hardest-hit by this is mobile, where iOS now supports much better integration with password managers than was allowed previously...

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#188

Post by rstupek »

aerovistae wrote: post #142
louis-paul wrote: post #47

There is something about Notion that makes it feel very well-made and coherent. It’s one of the few apps I use with this inherent feeling of quality (off the top of my head Sublime Text/Merge, Beyond Compare, Things fall into this category of intangible greatness). Every interaction is delightful, and the app scales really well from basic note-taking to decently complex databases with grouping, filters, relations, te…

The "quality" feeling of sublime app for me is majorly undermined by the constant nagging popups to pay for it. so many other services I happily pay for and somehow sublime has made me not want to pay for their services.

So pay for it? Seems like you probably have gotten your worth out of it

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#189

Post by kjksf »

Spivak wrote: post #119
PKop wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they're trying to run a business, so why ask the question as if it's surprising?

It's surprising that I (for personal use) and my company (commercial use) would be willing to pay good money for the ability to run this app on-prem? Personal data notwithstanding we have data we put in our company wiki that is simply not allowed to be hosted on cloud services without lots of red tape and compliance certifications. Offering a on-prem option, at least for us, pushes all that responsibility onto our op…

The problem is that what you consider "good money" is probably not even close to making such a product a viable business.

Their personal plan is $4/month.

Maybe one in a few hundred people (let's say 500 for easy math) would want self-hosted version.

Are you willing to pay $2000/month for a note-taking application? I doubt it.

Not to mention the support burden of trying to figure out why something doesn't work on your self-hosted installation.

That economic reality is why on-prem, self-hosted software is almost exclusively a very expensive, enterprise software.

Companies can justify paying a few thousand a year for installation and a salary of an in-house employee to manage and maintain it.

Individuals can't.

Re: Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

#190

Post by tzhong »

I use Notion for everything now - work and personal. The blocks are super smart.

I crowdsourced a bunch of workflows and product suggestions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TZhongg/status/1067234359915163648

all I do is talk about Notion with my friends tbh. if anyone wants free $10 credit, here ya go: https://www.notion.so/?r=02c3100209a54c48b22e19771ba4c916

Post reply on HN