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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

A better whiteboard/notes/mindmap app. (for windows)

I can't be the only person who uses graphs, flow charts and images as a primary mental model for idea representation. This a domain I have been obsessed with for ages. The tech seems to be there. Ocr, shape recognition, pen technology is all there. New devices increasingly have the ML hardware to support it.

Why isn't it here yet? We are living in the midst of a remote collaboration revolution, with notion, airtable, teams and slack becoming the norm, but this one thing seems to be completely sidelined.

I would have blindly jumped headfirst into making such an app if I did not have serious visa related causes holding me down. I can see it, but it just isn't there yet.

p.s: I have spent days finding a good app. (onenote is my begrudging compromise for now). Send me a good one if you can. There isn't much on apple either, but I care more about the windows ecosystem.

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Strongly agreed. Ever since I bought a 2-in-1 device with a pen, I lament at the dearth of applications that make good use of pens/styluses. It's a really powerful mode of input, but you can't treat it as just a funny mouse.

Also strongly seconding the graph point. Over the past few years, I've learned to see directed graphs everywhere (particularly in task/project management, something I rant on every now and then). It's a truly powerful mental model, it's a natural model for representing quite a lot of things, and yet it's also terribly underutilized on the UI/UX side.

Currently, I'm thinking about writing my own todo app ( :) ) with a strong graph twist. I've already switched from org-mode and all the Trellos/planners to Microsoft Project, of all things, precisely because it understands that tasks form a graph and not a shallow tree. But MS Project's UX is quite clunky if you want to use it as a day-to-day task management tool. I think there's a lot of space for improvement here.

(A nice side effect for using MS Project to break down my own work is that when my PM asks me about my progress during our 1:1s, I just show her the GANTT chart, which cleanly communicates my plan, the order of things, their interdependencies, and estimated delivery date. I've learned to appreciate GANTT charts myself, too.)

While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/

It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too.

Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid.

[0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

Even just as a desktop markdown editor, Obsidian definitely delivers. You point to a folder with your files and that's it.

I will be following obsidian's development with great interest. It isn't exactly what I am looking for, but with it might just be enough to convince me to move away from onenote.

I once prototyped this [1], if my job search fails, I'm going to work on that full-time for at least a month. I've had several moments where I mentioned it on HN but it never caught on.

To what extent is this what you're looking for? I focused on: collaborative, stylus first, multi-device and pressure sensitivity.

If this is what you're looking for, feel free to chat about it! (my email is in my profile description)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhrNl-fRrC8&

Note: doodledocs.com is currently offline, so that's why I'm showing the video. It worked on a Wacom, iPad and MS Surface.

Not quite what you're looking for I think, but Milton[0] makes a pretty great whiteboard with its infinite canvas, infinite detail, and infinite undo.

[0] https://milton.handmade.network/

I use InkDrop exclusively. It's a paid app, but it's a fancy Markdown editor that has plugin support and various organization systems (tags, notebooks, statuses like "in progress," "completed," etc). I use the Mermaid plugin which allows me to write out some fairly complex charts, but there's some other charting ones as well.

have you tried https://roamresearch.com/

No, but this does sound interesting. The graph overview is lovely.

I am hoping for something that treats pen input/ white boards as first party and have text take a back seat.

Honestly, because most "mind maps" convey a loosely connected set of ideas that provide information only to the author. This is not a collaborative tool.

Whiteboarding, there's a dozen existing apps, but none are like IPO worthy IMO. If you think there's something missing, I'm not sure you need a visa to pursue it (unless I suppose if you are already living somewhere on a work visa and need to continue that work).

I currently use Notion. It isn’t perfect but it is getting better.

I hope their API opens a lot of possibilities.

An alternative to roamresearch: just use `org-roam` with `org` :). Will support zettelkasten style note taking for free.

I'm working on something related in VR. I live in Evernote, Anki, and PDFs.

miro.com does a good job at this

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