Notion Timeline View
notion.so
notion.so
Unfortunately, it's too slow, at least for me. For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible, and Notion (for me!) is just a bit too annoying for me to put up with after extended usage.
If you value features over snappiness, Notion may be great for you though. It's an amazing concept! And I certainly understand why they'd choose the tech stack they did...
...but I'll stick with Joplin. :)
EDIT: apparently not, according to [ https://joplinapp.org/conflict/ ] -- that's a bummer, it rules it out for my use cases :/ I really don't think a filesystem-based sync mechanism works great for a collaborative tool, which is much of the value of Notion to me. It seems really cool for single-user, never-shared stuff, though.
Speed and snappiness don’t always come together, but when they do, there is no going back to something even a little slower or less reactive.
That’s why I don’t test nor try new hardware until I actually need more than what I have. It’s too strong to resist ;)
In a text editor, you would just have multiple windows, panes, splits ... and it’s just fast to jump, reference, copy/paste, etc. On trello, you need to reload the full board in another tab or lose context.
Decided to build an app where it's fast to start writing but is also set up to keep your notes sane over time. The app has a built in scratchpad where you capture notes in small chunks, like texting yourself. Then you triage the notes into categories later. https://youtu.be/xRxn4iiWZUM
Would love the community's feedback.
Basically, I want an app I can run on my desktop and phone, I can shovel every random thought, link, idea, code snippet, etc. into it, and I can find it quickly.
Joplin does this. Notion does this. Notion also has a lot of other features Joplin does not, true, I just didn't care about any of them. :)
I think that the wiki in Teams is not intended to be used but is rather there to tell someone in a position to buy who wants a wiki, but doesn’t use them, that the product has a wiki.
I tried using it and just basic stuff like linking to the wiki from various places is so difficult. I think the (incorrect) assumption Teams makes is that users are super stupid and only use Teams and nothing else, and only use what they are explicitly trained to use.
But, everything is slow these days. Aside from Roam, HN and maybe a handful of native iOS apps, I can't really name any app/site that I use on daily basis that isn't painfully slow.
Seems like a very different app to Notion.
Notion is much better for businesses IMO. Like I said above, I use it for my startup. Specifically for task management, and even for our public docs site, ex: https://docs.haekka.com/
Notion mobile apps are quite good, so I never have to tell myself I'll do something when I go to my desktop.
This is way so many just try to fit their the note/task/wiki/etc.. flows to their text editors(vscode,emacs,vim)
And you can't load multiple pages at once, it has to be in focus!
Is that a new thing? I just noticed that bit yesterday. I often have to load multiple pages and this is such a flow breaker...
"Come use a version of our website where you can't tabbed-browse!"
Yeah, that's a hard no from me...
...but the deeply ambiguous licensing info makes it a non-option for a lot of people.
But Obsidian has more points speaking for it. It works on local files/folders with well known types. No special formats involved which lock you in. Recently it started development of it's plugin-API which already started gaining some useful plugins from the community. And overall it's quite polished and userfriendly, not many quirks and corners which stay in the users way.
When writing longer things on either, I find myself firing up vim to copy paste afterwards, just because it's impossible to get into any kind of flow in these apps.
VS code also falls into this category by the way, albeit less severe.
For notion specifically, the total lack of keyboard navigation within a page (PgUp/PgDown, Space, Shift+Space, nothing works!) as well as the fact that wherever I click I will make immediate changes to the document (even if I just want to deselect some text or so) just makes the editing hugely frustrating, slow, and anxiety-inducing.
Seriously, if one day I wake up and write my boss that I'm outta here, notion and slack (and asana...) are way up there on the list of reasons.
I had forgotten how nice it was to quickly go through email and remember how quick gmail was when it launched. A colleague said “it’s just five seconds to open and load an email, that’s not a lot of time.” But that adds up.
That’s an extreme amount of time… GMail and Outlook are both horribly slow and I can’t understand how anyone wants to use them. Outlook even manages to be slow with their desktop app. Not as slow as either web app, but still a noticeable delay.
Fastmail at least is true to it’s name and fast.
I guess that is why people dont understand I am annoyed as I will only give a time budget of 500ms to open and load an Email on the Web.
If that is the case, I advise you check what's taking so long, I get nothing like it with my thunderbird setup.
Given, I disable html formatting where I can, that might make a difference. But even on my 2009 i5 desktop with hdd storage it doesn't take that long to load the actual email.
opening an email is always longer than 500ms, rendering it isn't in any system i use. hence i am not sure what we are talking here. if we are talking opening, then the 3seconds initial bootup of gmail isn't worth talking about imo.
the bottleneck for me at least is always finding the email and thunderbird is by far the worst unfortunately.
The email standard(s) are great. Powerful, decentralized, and damn near universal. It's just that we live in a world where a Duopoly has taken over most of what we consider to be email.
If this comment resonated with you, I am working on something you might be interested in. Feel free to DM me for details.
E-Mail is just a transport-protocol, poor in ability compared do other solutions and rather complicated, especially when it should be made safe.
Not that I don't believe you, I know this is real stuff that bothers people!
But it's so nice that this stuff never gets to steal brain cycles or cause me stress
Writing code in a heavy editor over VNC from the dog park wifi where I can type out my statement and pet my dog before it finishes? No problem!
Powerful IDE with everything including the kitchen sink but in some Faustian bargain it chugs at basic text editing? Let's try it!
Cool new editor doesn't have Vim bindings and a ton of mouse movement required? No problem!
It feels like I'm unencumbered by so much that some of my colleagues are always obsessing over, and yet we're all capable of the same output
I'm sure you have some efficiency built into your life that makes you more fragile.
(I don't use vim/emacs etc.) But you're saying that running water is a not a good idea because what if you have to go and get water from the well every day when the water stops running. You'd be so annoyed...
That reminds me of this blogpost [1]. It's definitely possible to optimize the input latency of rich text editors in the browser: they just have to be close to the metal of the 'contenteditable' browser api.
[1] https://juretriglav.si/what-happens-when-you-type-a-single-l...
No wonder these things are so unusable. But I guess slack know who they're targeting? People who won't notice the latency because when the pixels show up they're still busy finding the next key to press, or trying to find the right button for the text formatting... /s
Maybe I should avoid anything faster than Notion so I don’t get spoiled.
- crazy fast
- saves to plain text
- renders to html with links between pages
- one keypress to turn a word into a link to a page with that name and create the page
Try Vimwiki!
I can't be the only one who believes this...writing in a 2 panel markdown+preview side-by-side view is just horrible and backwards.
And I like the idea of markdown! Of course I want the ability to export to markdown for portability to the web. But for the love of god, don't make me surround my words in 4 character markup to make them bold, and then show me a second panel next to it so I can "preview" what bold looks like. Didn't we already solve this with 1980s word processors?
Hell, why don't we create a 3 panel writing view? On the left you can write in binary, in the middle you can see live base64, and on the right you can preview what it will look like to actual humans. Awesome!
The only good implementation of writing in markdown I've seen is Typora or Bear, which abstracts/fades away the markup after you type in a single view.
Notion also solves this by only allowing you to select from semantic HTML styles (ie. H1, H2, H3, etc) but you see what the final text will look like in one view. When you export, generating markdown is trivial since you're already using a markdown-esque set of options to style your text.
The whole point of Markdown (in my opinion) is that the formatting is a function of text that you can see and edit. The entire state of the document is visible, and there are no formatting operations you have to learn, just regular text editing operations like backspace, copy, paste, and so on. For example, if you press backspace, you always know exactly what the result will be: it will delete the character to the left of the cursor.
This is not so in rich text editors; when you press backspace, it changes both the document and invisible internal state, and you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen; you need to be aware of the invisible formatting structure, or perhaps a recent history of things you did, or it might be entirely impossible to tell because it depends on some invisible state that was created weeks ago and saved in the document file.
For this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power (you can only do a limited set of things like headings, lists, bold, and italic).
That's why Markdown tools that hide the markup are, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds: you sacrifice formatting power, and you sacrifice editor predictability. After the markup is gone, how do you edit it? How do you unbold something, or change the indentation of a list? If there are separate commands for all that, then there was no point in using Markdown.
I see it as the opposite. If you give a 2 panel markdown editor to any non-developer human they will be baffled at how to do any formatting with it. Rich text editors are intuitive, that's why they've dominated computing for the last 30-40 years.
> you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen
Huh? In rich text you see what everybody else will see. In 2-panel markdown you need the second panel to see how your final text will look to the rest of the world because you can't predict that easily when writing in an esoteric markup.
> For this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power
I wouldn't call requiring a second panel to preview how the actual text will look predictable or simple. It's a rube goldberg machine. On the other hand, I think the best thing about markdown is the restrictions to formatting. It forces you to write in semantic HTML.
IMO, Notion, for all its sluggishness, nails this part. They provide the intuitiveness of a rich text editor, while restricting the amount of styling to a markdown-esque set of properties so what you write will be easily portable to the web.
Rich wysiwyg editors also seems to have issues where the visible editing and internal formatting state breaks or behaves in weird ways. Like when you insert links and it automatically formats it as a link in some cases, and not in others.
Edit: Personally I always though the split view was okay as long as the compile times weren't too bad. Having a markup editor and then a view of the result is what I do for coding, so why not when writing stuff as well.
Both tools do it differently. Typora shows it when your cursor is there, but otherwise hides the Markdown. Bear always shows the Markdown but applies the corresponding style to it.
The point of markdown is literally that things don't hide. Wanna know if that semicolon is included in the italic styling? You will see it right away. Wanna know if a link has an old URL or is pointing to a weird domain? You see it.
This alone makes it worth it. Forcing the whole thing back into a WYSIWYG-editor will just mean that markdown becomes unreadable. A bit like when people used MS Word to write HTML.
It's called markup and a matter of efficiency. With richtext I need to mark the Text and click some button/menu-item OR learn a gazillion shortcuts for every little syntax-function. With Markup I use the same keys that I use for writting text, because the syntax is internal to the text, not some hidden external thing.
Of course it's possible to make a hybrid, something that displays richtext instantly while still working with syntax. But this is hard and cumbersome. Nonthless, Obsidian has it on their list as a longterm-goal, so maybe in some years we will see it.
Cmd-B for bold is exactly the same number of keystrokes as shift-8, and is exactly the same amount of cognitive load to learn. (You can also apply styling both on selected text and for text about to be typed, unlike plain text environments like this textfield I'm using now where you can't do shift-8 on selected text.)
When you get into the more esoteric syntax, it's still a tie: look how often even Gruber gets the Markdown link syntax wrong, and he designed it.
Joplin also has a beta single pane WYSIWG view which is like, I believe, Typora or Bear (markdown in the backend, but you type in what is effectively the preview window). I haven't really tried it out yet though. If it works well though, it might solve your concern though.
Is no-where close to the completeness (and complexity) of Notion, it works as WYSIWYG editor, no Markdown.
But it is very fast (hosted in Europe but underneath does basically nothing), with search, free if you don't want to pay, and it will stay since I host my personal notes on it.
Nothing beats the writing experience of iAWriter for macOS users.
Friction can be at different levels. All text editors especially the ones we are used to are friction less when we want to quickly open a new file and jot down something. But then, many higher levels things you want to do with chunks of text are not straight forward. You'll have to use plugins or write your extensions which sort of do what's required, but then they become clunky.
Doing the following things in a text editor is very clunky 1. Drop files from a file browser 2. A wiki that you'll stick to and not want to switch every month. 3. Write reasonably large documents that you'd actually also read in a text editor. 4. Have the same experience on all devices 5. Tables that are pleasing to the eye. 6. Visuals cues that enhance understanding of the content. 7. Select a bunch of text and convert them into pages or todos or tickets.
A real shame as I really need something like this in my life - both personal and professional.
Hopefully open source soon!
The reason for e2ee is so you don't have to trust the provider. If you're hosting stuff yourself why wouldn't you trust your own infra? As long as you've got a TLS connection to and from your servers + encryption at rest, client side encryption gives no particular benefits.
Am also keeping an eye on https://anytype.io but I still haven't been drawn for their closed alpha grrrr
My company is evaluating Notion as a replacement for Confluence mostly, though we are looking at it's Kanban features also.
We've just launched our Documents feature, aiming to be a G Docs/Confluence alternative. Still early days though!
On top of that there's so much tracking going on that even Facebook would be jealous.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Check out their T&C and Privacy Policy:
https://www.notion.so/Terms-Conditions-4e1c5dd3e3de45dfa4a8e...
https://www.notion.so/Privacy-Policy-3468d120cf614d4c9014c09...
At least on Dropbox, S3, OneDrive, etc. we can encrypt our own data (which I actually do). There is no such option in Notion.
I'd be interested to see examples/arguments where it works though.
All they could access was a service logs.
We’re too deep in Notion internally to jump to something else now, but if was going to try anything else, given the Linear.app team’s track record, this would definitely be my first evaluation.
Having said all that, as a user of Notion I've been incredibly impressed. Their support staff seem friendly and responsive and they keep making the product better and better.
My only gripes are the weird password email confirmation of the mobile app login, and that I can't use it as a Zettelkasten.
Other than that, it really is fantastic. The Kanban and other features meant that it's replaced other apps I was using for both work and personal. It really is worth a try.
Other than that and the terrible performance I love Notion and I really hope they get this sorted. I'll even keep paying for my personal account (drop in the bucket, I know) in the hopes that they will.
The only other option would be for me to create my own solution, and while I could do that, I don't have the time or the desire to do it.
I think you got to be careful and read the TOS and know what you're in for. For example, I stopped using the free version of Grammarly after I found out they weren't GDPR compliant and their support wouldn't confirm if they were going to be GDPR compliant. A year later I evaluated Grammarly again and they were, so I subscribed to Grammarly premium.
However some companies are so egregious in their lack of respect of privacy that I will never trust them again, for example Facebook. Others are so impossible to get away from, like Google, that I limit my exposure as much as possible.
Bottom line is be aware of how your privacy will be handled and make sure you're conscious of the trade off decisions you're making.
In the case of business data governance, though, the legal requirements for storage, security, and privacy go far beyond GDPR. The difficulty there is that even small things such as contact info, appointment locations and dates, timelines, etc. are covered by those contracts.
Beyond that, I use Syncthing (highly recommend if you're on Android) and I sync my Joplin notes between my PC, laptop, and Android. It works flawlessly.
That being said, the fact that it's electron-based means it's not always as snappy as I'd like it to be when I want to quickly capture a thought -- sometimes the "page" has to reload, even when I'm using the desktop app. I also notice that like slack, it suffers from the same in-line text formatting woes, which can be infuriating if you're trying to escape out of a code block or something.
Still, it's a good tool, and this is a neat feature I'm excited to try.
Is there really a right and wrong yet? There are so many note taking and project management apps, it’s unclear there is yet a dominating leader in usage or tech design.
Moreover, native seems to be losing some traction on the desktop, but on mobile?
Most apps today are so bloody slow they are unworkable. Remember your program absolutely positively have to respond in under 100 milliseconds or won't be perceived as instant and will thus be a hindrance to thought, rather than a benefit to it.
Google Mail (Gmail) is very successful despite not having an official desktop application, even though Electron and other web wrappers exist. I am confident that Slack, Discord, Messenger, WhatsApp, Notion, among other web applications, would exist without Electron, and the features would be the same.
If you are a macOS user and want to have a better experience with hybrid web applications, I highly recommend Fluid [1] or Unite [2]. They both create wrappers for web applications using WebKit, which performs several times better than Chromium on macOS.
I’ve been using Notion _hard_ for the last couple of months and only just realised people use it outside of the browser, so I’m not going to agree with that
At my current job, management jumped into the Notion wagon some time ago, then told IT to force-install the desktop web application in every computer. The moment I realized it was an Electron app, I stopped using it. Nowadays, I sporadically open the web application, which is one click away from my browser bookmarks.
Safari executes JavaScript code much faster on my computer than Chromium, so the experience of typing and navigating Notion is much better on the web (native browser) than on the other web (hybrid Electron). The same thing with Slack. It is much more reliable in the native-web than in the hybrid-web/desktop Electron wrapper, which continuously restarts and consumes an unnecessary amount of memory that other more essential applications (Docker, IDE, debugger) could use.
Would the apps be just as fast if they used a cocoa web view, or is Safari faster?
You can also embed an actual safari view, but it doesn't let your control things, so it'd have to be more strictly a "dumb shell": https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=trjs0tcd
Of course, I'm not sure how either compares to electron, and I'm sure it depends on the app.
With notion it's probably the app. Not electron's fault.
source: me... developer and worked with the Electron platform for 2+ years
No one is getting a 100 MB of ram extra for anything.
But yeah I don't blame electron here. Have build electron apps and apart from the initial load time everything is mostly under devs control.
* Todo list / task manager / long-term planner
* Blogging/publishing platform
* Internal wiki
* Note-taking app
With all that said, I'm a happy notion user, so maybe they're onto something...
I wonder if internally they have that sense of direction (e.g. they want to compete head-on with Monday) and, if so, how scoped it is (e.g. do they want to replace ALL internal tools / do they think that's tractable)?
Granted, for selling out to VC they've still done a good job with design and product. But they have one path through their self-imposed blizzard and the footprints leading the way are clearly marked "Evernote".
Then again who knows, surveymonkey is an example of a company that nobody thought would "get there" and yet they did.
For one, I can’t stand their frivolous design - emojis everywhere.
I spent ages trying to build out a To Do list, added different views, filters, an inbox for it, categories etc. then ended up giving up and just using their out of the box kanban style board in exactly the same way I'd use Trello.
I suppose it's on me, the user, to learn how to use all these different features properly but then that's more investment than I have time for, for a To Do app.
Similarly with say Tasker for example on Android, you can literally automate anything on your phone yet I rarely use it for anything. I don't think I would outright say too many features are a bad thing... but are they?
Evernote is one of those tools that I really wanted to like, but actually using it was an endless stream of disappointments. They're always reaching so far to implement grand features that the core functionality was constantly buggy. I'm sure they've improved since I last used it years ago, but I gave up before they could stabilize it.
Dropbox is another example of a tool that started out nearly perfect in its simplicity and laser-like focus on doing a few things well, but continues to get worse and worse with each additional layer of features. I was so much happier with Dropbox when it integrated transparently into my filesystem instead of trying to force their UI into everything. Now, even clicking the button to open the Dropbox folder launches a customized Dropbox file browser UI instead of just taking me to my Dropbox folder.
Just use your regular filemanager? All the new features are just additional, on top of the core-functionality, which BTW is still top-notch and stable as ever. As long as this does not change, who cares with what they attract new customers.
There are no good and free JS gantt libraries, but many, many paid ones. I've been trying to find a good one for Portabella (https://portabella.io) as they're an essential part of project management platforms, but no luck yet.
I know, because I helped build a product (https://peachyplan.com) much like Notion's timeline view :)
The notion team did a phenomenal job. This is one of the best timeline views I've seen, and I've looked at hundreds.
Did you evaluate them and consider all of them to be bad? I ended up building my own because everything looked too flexible for my use case. I only needed basic layout/time tick marks and zoom/pan.
Now if only Notion could add the option on adding requirements/logic to parameters I will have very little I feel I can’t do in Notion.
I made a server called Diary, accessible only by me, and I have a few different channels like work-log, life-log, d&d session notes, joke ideas, etc. I also feed all screenshots I take into a channel, and set up a chrome extension that sends whatever page I'm on to the web-log channel as a link.
What I like about discord is the full text search - its super fast. Is your chrome extension public, really interested in it.
You just set up a bot on your server, and give the extension the URL the first time you activate/click it.
Edit: To be clear, it activates on user action, i.e. it doesn't send all my history to the channel. I did try that for a while but it just made a lot of noise that I never combed through. This one suits me much better; just right click and send to discord.
just like any new Notion features, there are bells and whistles so, i went ahead and carefully broke them down in today's blog post: https://optemization.com/timeline-view-notion
The app design and functionality are really good, but the performance issues are killing the product.
And I just can't keep up with the poor file uploading system, every time I move a file position in a document I just end up loosing the file.
Any suggestions for a good note taking app other than notion?
1. No vendor lock in. I can’t lose access to my notes because of random account bans or the company going under or w/e. Also plain markdown, no nonsense proprietary formats.
2. Platform independence, I work across mac/windows/ios on home and work.
So I ended up using a git repo with markdown files. I use Noteable and Typora on mac/win. No need to import/export anything they both work with plain markdown files on the fs with tags as markdown front matter (I sync manually with git). For mobile I use GitJournal which basically has the same features and it can automatically sync with a git repo.
It features fast search and a very fast interface.
It is going to stay forever up because it contains my own notes.
Export to HTML or Markdown is coming.
You can support the application through patreon if you like or use it for free.
Open to any kind of feedback.
My major wish, and this has been on their roadmap for a while now: an API.
Question: how many of y’all use Notion in the desktop client version (which seems a bit faster) vs. in the browser where you can have multiple tabd open?
I initially thought i would prefer tabs, but I find it faster to alt-tab between the browser and the desktop client when working with both, so its unfortunate that it's laggy sometimes.
We have a field called related tasks. We would like to filter related based on status field (Done/Todo).
Without creating additional linked database views inside a page
Timeline graphs are one of those things that look pretty in presos, loved by some execs and completely inaccurate the second they're created.
https://presstige.io/ is an IRL implementation of the idea.
Notion is amazing, but lack of security/privacy options for me
A "new type of database" means that they've added another type of database layer to Notion. It is a perfectly reasonable way to phrase it.
Congrats to the Notion team, you've made a phenomenal product! There's some incredible product sense inside your company.