Notion – Document Reimagined | Hacker News Reader

Notion – Document Reimagined

early-access.notion.so

190 pointsmef56 comments

I know they're slightly different, but this reminds me of Workflowy[1] which pretty much runs my entire life right now (todo, projects, journaling, brainstorming, informal databases, bookmarks). In looking at tools like this, it's hard to know where the line is between simple functions that you then use to create abstract features, and more complicated interfaces that define features explicitly. It's a nuanced thing. With Workflowy, the simple list and tag interface can do much of what Notion does (of course, minus the great design and multimedia support), but you really need a formal workflow and need to stick to it to make it function well. Whereas Notion kind of designs those patterns for you, but at the expense of some interface simplicity. I feel like Workflowy demands more of a unix philosophy to achieve Notions features. You'll need to chain web apps together. For example, you can use hyper links in Workflowy to link to files in dropbox, or host images on some other site and audio/video on another, where Notion puts in all in one spot. Very cool.

I can definitely see this as a great tool in the classroom for creating interactive discussions. Copy a template for each class and you can have everyone collaborate and focus on the discussion, not taking notes (or better still, take notes in the collaborative page itself, things that aren't originally there), and then after you have a record of everything which you can share across all students and with different classes.

[1] https://workflowy.com/

Workflowy reminds me a little bit of a desktop app called Zim, although Workflowy and Notion are prettier.

I looked at Zim[1] actually once upon a time. I eventually settled on WikidPad[2]. It had enough features to capture my ideas in the ways I wanted, but I really needed multiple device and cloud support. Ideas happen all over, not just at the desk. This was why Workflowy blew my mind when I discovered how to use it to fit my needs.

[1] http://zim-wiki.org/ [2] http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/

Every note taker I've found gets the building block unit wrong. The building block unit shouldn't be stylized text with media - it should be content that is digested and summarized. Quotes from books. Summarized web pages - either automatically or through a clean UI experience. Snippets of video. Wikipedia/dictionary snippets.

Stylized text marries content with design. Having the content be rich objects makes your primary work to summarize instead of stylize, which makes much more sense in research driven contexts (which is pretty much everywhere).

Ah, cool! Yes, I completely agree. I'm actually working on something a bit like this which puts blocks of content as the building block.

It's ideal in an educational authoring platform - since you can have some people crafting the content and others curating it by linking groups of content together. It's important to cater to both needs, I think.

Fantastic onboarding flow! The "wow"-ing feature gifs followed by your interactive tutorial sold me. Also beautiful use of web components.

I'm curious how far you think you can take contenteditable with all its cross-browser quirks.

PDF support?

It blows my mind how bad PDF support is in all of these notebook/data organizing apps (I'm looking at you OneNote) given how probably the vast majority of non-HTML digital documents are in PDF format.

I was just looking up how to insert PDFs into one note and was shocked at how terrible it was. You have to do some bullshit Print to OneNote, which just inserts each PDF as a page in your section.

Just awful.

Evernote has very good PDF support but you need a premium subscription to make it actually useful. I clip PDFs to Evernote and annotate them all the time.

It's not very good. Not that stable in my experience and none of the cross-linking/tagging tools OneNote has.

I've been thinking about this a bit today[1], because I fear that Evernote is dying. I love and pay for Evernote, but they've been stagnant for years now. They're slowly adding features, but absolutely nothing that I care about.

As far as I can tell, there's really no functional equivalent to what Evernote does: a bucket you can throw data into and search for it later. OneNote probably comes closest from a purely note-taking standpoint, but it's missing some of the key features. This makes me a little nervous, as I now realize how reliant I am on a tool that I have very little confidence in.

[1] https://twitter.com/larrywright/status/643495960480509952

What features do you find missing in OneNote? Genuinely interested, as I use it intensely but don't use Evernote.

It does basic note taking and checklists and things pretty well (better than Evernote in some ways), but a frequent use case is creating a notebook with stuff in it (a mix of clipped web pages, notes, maybe documents), and then sharing it with someone. Also, it needs to be searchable. It's that part that OneNote seems weaker at.

Apropos snipping data from PDFs:

Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables trapped inside PDF files (via a simple web interface) - source on github http://tabula.technology

previously discussed on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10021561

Absolutely gorgeous looking, though I suspect I'm not the target audience, and it seems like there is the slight danger of trying to do too much. Maybe I'm just not thinking big enough about what Notion is trying to accomplish/become.

Also - if anyone wants to use a great window manager, it's also named notion[0] these days.

[0]: http://notion.sf.net

Do they have a non-sourceforge link? Sourceforge is blocked at my place of work (probably rightly so)

Not that I know of, no. I wish they did move off of sourceforge after the recent shit they pulled.

https://github.com/raboof/notion is probably your best bet.

Is there a self-hosted option? I take it it's closed source?

Is there a more-or-less similar thing in Open Source? I'm looking for something like this for quite some time, but would need it to be self-hosted, and what would be even better, end-to-end encrypted (e.g. with shared secret).

If you just care about functionality, Leo Editor offers similar features, and adds in being scriptable in Python.

If you also care about usability and zero learning curve, I'm afraid I haven't seen anything similar which is open source, after being searching it for years. The closest thing might be one of several content managers/social networks a la MediaGoblin or Diaspora, or something more flexible you'll need to build your own workflow on some open wiki platform like Twiki or Zwiki.

This is the Mother All Demos... Congrats to the team, this is amazingly done!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

Does anyone know if there is a JS editor that acts similar to how notion works? I've seen a similar pattern with readme.io, and would love to be able to use it for internal tools.

The closest is ckeditor, I think. But that's still a long shot away.

Notion is actually really well constructed (as somebody who's been in the space building tools kinda like it for a while, it's quite impressive). But I agree, the space needs an open source notion...

Seen ProseMirror? http://prosemirror.net/index.html

Yes, but it's currently just a rich text editor, it lacks the outlining capabilities (i.e. creating separate hierarchical pages, and tagging). These should be relatively easy to add, though.

Hey! ReadMe.io founder here. We custom built ours, because we couldn't find anything else on the market that worked the way we wanted.

The closest I've found otherwise is ContendBuilder.js:

http://www.innovastudio.com/content-builder.aspx

SirTrevor is similar, but without drag+drop:

http://madebymany.github.io/sir-trevor-js/example.html

For us, it was built using two linked jQuery Sortable lists (the sidebar, and the actual content). It's easier than it sounds, especially with Angular :)

For "WYSIWYG" content editing, ProseMirror looks like the best implementation so far [1]. Pure JS editor without the buggy contenteditable stuff. I'm sure that it can be extended to support other "rich" objects such as todo lists.

[1] http://prosemirror.net/index.html

Substance http://substance.io/ is well worth taking a look at.

Looks nice, but so far there's limited platform support:

>Support for your browser is coming soon. Check out Notion on Google Chrome desktop, Safari, or iPhone.

>Copy and paste this link into a supported browser to continue:

>https://www.notion.so/tutorial

I'll try it again once Android support is in.

I'm not kidding, this is one of the best things I've seen lately. I basically write for a living and this looks like a real gamechanger.

If you can keep up this quality and fulfill all the promises, I'll be willing to pay a good deal of money for it.

I just got the 'unsupported browser' notice on Chromium. Surely it should work the same here as it does on Chrome?

Gorgeous looking product. Site runs a little slow on my older machine but I suppose that's to be expected with the fancy GIFs.

Looks really cool - love the inset video - but I'm struggling to imagine what I'd actually use it for.

Site doesn't seem to say how saving/exporting works - anyone know?

I registered, you can currently only export as HTML.

That's pretty good though! I worried it might either save something proprietary, lossy conversion (e.g. markdown), or irrecoverable (e.g. PDF) only.

(Of course, you could always use browser-save HTML, but you'd have to manually strip anything like the video)

Make this able to be self hosted, whip up a price plan for enterprise and add a half-decent API then you've got yourself a lot of customers. Awesome looking product

This is one of the most gorgeous things I've seen in a while. I'm a little saddened that the homepage doesn't work on Firefox yet.

What's broken? I see it just fine in FF40

(With Firefox 40.0.3) Support for your browser is coming soon. Check out Notion on Google Chrome desktop, Safari, or iPhone.

Copy and paste this link into a supported browser to continue:

https://www.notion.so/

Right, didn't realise the link here is for early-access (works), not homepage (doesn't).

I should of clarified I was referring to the homepage showing that.

Firefox 41.0b9: "Support for your browser is coming soon. Check out Notion on Google Chrome desktop, Safari, or iPhone. "

It also doesn't run on Chromium, which I find suspicious.

That said:

  Support for your browser is coming soon.
  Check out Notion on Google Chrome desktop, Safari, or iPhone.

  Copy and paste this link into a supported browser to continue:

  https://www.notion.so/tutorial

This is a whole lot better than a few other (ehem, Google. And, yes, MS, 15 years ago.)

This reminds me of hypercard!

True, though this is closer to OpenDoc which was document-centric: a document would contain widgets from a variety of components, in contrast to an app being a silo for data it created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

Sounds like this is an early revision:

> You are looking at Notion 0.5. We are working hard on the 1.0 that would have a lot more ideas flushed out. Stay tuned, and thank you for your feedback.

http://www.producthunt.com/tech/notion-4#comment-147200

> ideas flushed out.

So there are too many ideas as it is?

Yes, thank you! I can't try this yet since I only have Firefox at this machine, but alternative note-taking and rethinking computer documents is something I've long waited for.

If anyone knows of any similarly "different" projects, please tell me!

This looks amazing and the onboarding process is really good.

I wanted to have a block based editor for a project but it felt a bit daunting as this was not the main part of that project.

Did you use anything for the wysiwyg or are you just using execCommand?

Obligatory reference to Xandu and Ted Nelson has to be dropped here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

Very pretty

I think web content creation tools are converging towards the classic notions of hypertext, just like modern programming languages are converging towards what was possible in LISP (but with better^H^H^H^H^H^H syntax) ;-)

These tools are lacking in end-user scriptability though. Something like kimonolabs.com or transformy.io, combined with a WYSIWYM outliner like this, could be the next HyperCards, yet no one (else) has made that connection - yet.

I have ideas on how it should work and put to good use, but I don't have the chops to build it myself.

I love it.

This is what Dropbox notes should have been, but failed to realize.

Has notes been released?

Nope, but I have access to the beta.

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