Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

I like this, because it's a tree style note system, which I go a bit crazy for, as I haven't found a truly great one yet (my dream is Dynalist, but faster on mobile and self-hostable FOSS). The features of this seem pretty insane as it looks like it allows stuff like drawing something for a bullet point, which would be perfect for some uni modules (I currently just do full hand writing for those, mostly in bullet point lists, which is still pretty much how I think, but a lot of the advantages are obviously lost).

Convinced you'd be able to sustain the project that way, would you consider opening up the project's source? My motivation for wanting this ties a bit into:

> I will not disappear. Moving forward, LearnObit will only improve with new features and polished programming. I promise.

Your promise isn't worth much. You will most certainly disappear at some point (when you die, which might be today [this is not a threat]) and will likely lose interest far, far sooner.

If I made a comprehensive knowledge base I'd want everyone to be able to access it, not just people with a subscription to a SaaS product, which will quite certainly become disfunct within 100 years.

I'd also want to be able to extend it with my own scripts and features. All these problems could be solved relatively easily (but perhaps not as profit-deliveringly as you wish).

Okay, that's the free software preaching.

Conceptually I like the idea of this app, an important part of my bullet point list consists of knowledge base stuff. Other key components are thoughts that need to be noted somehow and planning of things (which might be a great addition to your product, as you are already creating to do-items in a way). Keeping all of these things in one app would be something between good and essential for me, as I think I would like some portability between the use cases.

I haven't even looked at LearnOrbit yet in detail, but the thought of a newcomer in the outliner-niche and your novel concept definitely excite me.

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!

1) I agree with the advantages of open source, but this project is commercial, so I have to find a way to make money. :(

2) Right. If I die, I will disappear. It wasn't rigid enough.

3) Gathering all the features in this app is not the goal. As for Todolist, it was not intended to be for general planning, but rather to assist in organizing knowledge. In context, one of the app's goals is to create specialized tools for organizing knowledge. Other tree-structured apps (e.g. Workflowy, Dynalist) are not specialized for organizing knowledge; instead they have a general purpose that can be used everywhere. I think this limits their functionality. LearnObit will implement specialized functions for organizing knowledge, not for general purposes.

4) I am thinking about the structure of knowledge that is not the tree structure. What I'm now going to implement further is for 1:1 pairs, which fit conventional SRSs like Anki. The app will deal with this by implementing a spreadsheet-like interface. I also understand that there is knowledge with graph structures, as you say. But I don't have an idea yet about what interface to deal with. Perhaps I will come up with ideas later.

5) For the tool you want, https://roamresearch.com/ might be good. This is a tool that combines Workflowy and Wiki.

Here's another thing about tree style note taking and the structure of knowledge that maybe bugs me a bit more than it maybe should:

Yes, for about 95% or (much) more of nodes the structure is hierarchical, but there's still a somewhat significant amount of nodes for which the conceptual structure would actually be a directed graph (here's an extreme but common example: You want to make a list of cars. Do you group them by manufacturer, type, price ...? Not at all? That'd be extremely hard to navigate. You'd also want to be able to easily change it, right? Another example would be general cross-linking).

Have you thought about this before? Would it be feasible to implement something like this in your app?

Does anyone else know whether there are tools out there for this already? I wouldn't be mad about a mind map view (that is not absolute garbage because it's a swing app that's ugly and only available on desktop linux or offers per node styling options [I see how it's good for presentation, but it's just terrible for pure structure keeping] ...), but I'd prefer the main view to be tree-based as it's by far the best representation (I have found so far) for the by far most cases.

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