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

Notion for everyone

notion.so

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 468 posts

Re: Notion for everyone

#261

Post by jerrygoyal »

pcx wrote: post #49

I love using Notion, but I think the general discussion about it does not talk enough about how it's flexibility is also a problem many times. 1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello 2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issu…

long time notion user here. I was using notion for my personal life and it was serving the purpose but when I started using it as a project management tool for my dev team I realised how crippled it is (no dependent tasks, gantt view etc). maybe I'm wrong and notion is not built for this but then again why would i use it just for wiki? recently started looking for task management+wiki tool.. reviewed more than 10+ tools and finally picked an extremely powerful but a less known tool clickup.com

Re: Notion for everyone

#262

Post by anchpop »

rockostrich wrote: post #234
fastball wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you see this as a "dark pattern"? I see it as more of a reasonable compromise. If you visit my site, I think it's reasonable for me to understand how you're using it. If you don't want to participate in that, you are given a choice. That choice is between being tracked and having a mildly distracting banner at the bottom of a landing page. This doesn't seem like a betrayal of trust in any way. The implicit tru…

It's a UX dark pattern because (besides deleting the html element) there's no way to dismiss a call to action, you can only ignore it.

Just because it's annoying doesn't mean it's a dark pattern in the typical sense of the word. Here's darkpatterns.org's definition:

> Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something.

And here is the one used by the verge [0]:

> A dark pattern is a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills

Here there's no trickery and no chance that a user would unintentionally agree to cookies when they didn't mean to. It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until you do what they want. It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you shouldn't use their site.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-ins...

Re: Notion for everyone

#263

Post by dmode »

I have to admit, SV has really cracked and disrupted the note taking industry. Evernote, OneNote, Asana, Trello, JIRA, ToDoist, and now Notion. I tried most of it and just gave up and started to capture my notes in Google docs and Todos in spreadsheet. Now that we have disrupted this space, we will soon move on to flying cars

Re: Notion for everyone

#264

Post by arnvald »

pier25 wrote: post #252

I've never used Notion before. So I signed up and after looking around for a minute or two I still have no idea what Notion is. It seems to be a way to create lists of rich to do items with dates? Can someone ELI5 Notion to me?

Hi! Initially I had the same impression and my team had a hard time convincing me to give it a try. Since then I really started enjoying Notion though.

So, what is notion? I'd call it a flexible on-line data organizer. Notion gives you a concept of pages (which then can have subpages) and blocks. A block can be a text, a table, a todo list, a calendar, an embedded Tweet etc.

I think a good way to see what you can do with it is to use the templates - they are example pages that allow you to see what are Notion's capabilities.

A few examples of what I've used Notion for:

* tracking my job applications when I was looking for a new position

* notes on resources I'm using for an online course I'm working on (I have a plan for lessons, each lesson has attached resources)

* planning my holidays trip - it was a combination of todo list, map with our stops, list of hotels I booked etc.

* todo list when moving to another country

I've also seen it used as a team handbook, here's a public example by Blendle: https://www.notion.so/Blendle-s-Employee-Handbook-7692ffe24f...

Re: Notion for everyone

#265

Post by tommoor »

abuehrle wrote: post #97
_fzslm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the only thing that stops me from using Notion, too. just downloaded it and it looks like it would change my life... except i don't own the data. right now i'm trying out Outline [1] which has an option for self hosting. [1] https://github.com/outline/outline

I just checked out Outline. It seems strange that the landing page example is lifted straight from Stripe's docs[1] with "Stripe" replaced by "Acme". [1] https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks#what-are-webhooks

Good spot! I guess that was a little cheeky in hindsight…

Re: Notion for everyone

#266

Post by pickdenis »

prennert wrote: post #87
Scarbutt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the curse of Emacs.

I just started using orgmode to compliment notion. So far it feels to me as Notion is a bit like emacs / orgmode without API, and orgmode is a bit like notion without collaboration.

> orgmode is a bit like notion without collaboration

Emacs has a number of collaborative editing solutions: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing

The nice thing about org-mode is that it automatically gets all the cool stuff that emacs has. (Although, I have never tried any of the solutions listed in that wiki page and I suspect even the "working" ones have issues).

Re: Notion for everyone

#267

Post by 1cvmask »

drcongo wrote: post #93
jdhornby wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had a similar experience with Notion. “Jack of all trades and master of none” resonates strongly with me. This lead me to my latest startup https://froosthq.com/ which is Notion inspired and aimed solely at software teams.

That looks pretty nice. I've put my email in your signup as this is something that I've built half of about 5 times now.

What are the five apps called?

Re: Notion for everyone

#268

Post by criddell »

awill wrote: post #89

After Evernote started going downhill, I moved to plain markdown inside a Google Drive folder. I use the best, native app for each platform and have zero risk of being affected by a single company cancelling, closing,, increasing the price etc.. Notion does seem pretty interesting, but if they ever shut, stop innovating, or are outshined by a competitor, I don't fancy the idea of moving everything

How is Evernote going downhill?

I'm not in love with it, but it works and I have a client everywhere I need one. It's text recognition in images is one of the killer features (I save snapshots of whiteboards), the other is searching metadata.

Re: Notion for everyone

#269

Post by tinodotim »

ericax wrote: post #245
rtisdale wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nifty! I just placed in a beta request. A business partner and I heavily prefer to utilize markdown for note taking (we generally use Typora) but this poses problems when we are trying to colaborate on a document together. Does Obsidian support real time collaborative editing?

Thanks for the interest! Not yet, currently most of our users bring their own sync (Dropbox etc.), so if you edit the same document in real time that might create conflict copies. We're working on a sync service with end-to-end encryption (for convenience, completely optional), and we might improve it to support real-time collaboration in the future.

Will there also be an option for client-side encryption without using your sync service?

Re: Notion for everyone

#270

Post by riezebos »

nojito wrote: post #134
csallen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notion's just a tool, like a pen and a pad. If you decide to use it for nothing but busy work, that's an option I suppose. But I get a lot of real work done using Notion.

The act of using Notion is in of itself busy work which distracts from productivity. Not that you are using it for busy work. It's a strategy used by productivity "gurus" for 100+ years to keep the $$ trickling in. Just a few years ago it was todist...before that it was Omni. Once notion peaks we will all move on to the next one.

According to this description I believe you could also say writing tests or using git is just busy work. Nevertheless, a lot of people use tools like git and notepad (or notion) to organize their work.
Post reply on HN