Notion Acquires Cron | Hacker News Reader

Notion Acquires Cron

notion.so

86 pointstalhof867 comments

I wondered what Cron is/does, and found the least useful landing page I have ever seen. The whole information content is "it's a calendar app". https://cron.com/

Did they run out of cash?

Why sell it so early? There isn't an app publicly available yet, or even pricing...

Ah, I'd really like to know what goes into trying to obtain a four letter domain like that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201022025721/https://martin.cr...

Interesting history in this case - a personal domain.

They probably emailed the owners with a good offer. Since this wasn't a domain broker, it was probably five figures instead of six or seven.

I've managed to do this a few times.

That's it tho, it is a calendar app.

It looks like the outlook calendar

What does Cron bring?

Their website[1] shows something that looks nearly identical to the MacOS default calendar app (edit: which is a good design to take inspiration from) but no list of features or much else of substance.

Edit: Their docs[2] contain some more info

1: https://cron.com/

2: https://cron.com/docs

It's super fast, works great across multiple calendars, is super fast. I would say it's what I wish Apple would make the default calendar. The only downside I have to date is no iOS app. It's one of my favorite apps, unfortunately I expect Notion will ruin it.

> It's super fast, works great across multiple calendars, is super fast.

But how fast is it?

Lol, fair, didn't reread and stream of conscious isn't the best. But yes, really damn fast ;)

Leaving original up intentionally.

It’s so fast you have extra time to talk about how fast it is .. twice! A glowing recommendation!

Haha just busting your chops.

You’ve convinced me to try it out!

I just assumed you were adding emphasis on how fast it was lol

Super

Super and also super.

definitely a 7 out of 9.

Yes, we are borg, we will adapt.

Goes to 11

Are people using calendar apps that are slow? I can't remember speed ever being a problem on any of mine.

Cron is running on Electron. I doubt it is fast.

I thought their first product photo was the macOS calendar app with spotlight up in front of it.

I discovered cron looking for a way to manage my "two DayJob calendars with 85% duplicate events but 15% unique events".

Specifically since I was annoyed at getting 2 notifications for every event that was duplicated on both calendars.

And cron actually solved that problem by automagically recognizing duplicate events and only notifying once. I turned off all notifications in calendar.app.

The only other differentiating feature I am aware of is how configurable the menu bar app is.

Thankfully, I no longer have the original problem + I don't like things in my menu bar so I'm probably switching back to the built in app.

Doesn't look like it adds much of anything to the Apple calendar, which itself is a pretty minimal implementation. I actually found it worthwhile to pay $50 for Busycal which has a lot of features important to me (presumably not to most people). Fantastical also has a following at around the same price point, though it didn't do it for me.

I wish notion supported the mac, but they just have a lame web view which isn't any better than using a web browser. Doesn't act at all like a native app.

> Doesn't look like it adds much of anything to the Apple calendar

Cron also runs on Windows. No idea if Windows comes with a calendar.

> No idea if Windows comes with a calendar.

Windows does come with a calendar, but it's not great.

Step #1 to being acquired by Notion, host your documentation on Notion.

Their availability sharing is top notch, too.

Incredibly bizarre to me that the press release doesn't include a link to the product. Especially considering that Cron is already a ubiquitous name for something else entirely.

Been a long time user of Cron. Hope Notion lets them run it as a separate app.

I found Notion launched amazing out of the gate and has gotten progressively slower over time. I hope they don't do that to Cron :(

Yes, au contraire — we want to help in making Notion as snappy as Cron!

> amazing out of the gate and has gotten progressively slower over time

Feel the same.

This is one scenario where the founders who originally built the app turn their attention to fundraising and add a bunch more engineers

Notion went from one of my critical apps to an app I try to avoid using because of this. Also their apps are genuinely terrible, which hurts.

Exciting news. Sounds like Cron will remain separate while they work out a way to integrate into Notion.

Off topic: Does anyone else have trouble using Notion because of the .so domain? We've had a number of corporate firewalls wholesale block the .so TLD and Notion is a casualty. Hopefully they switch over to .com soon.

You aren't the only one, and they were planning to switch to .com "as soon as their engineering team has the bandwidth", but that was two years ago so who knows

https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_d...

i often times wonder if it's still "too early" to use an uncommon TLD.

i guess Notion's success is evidence .com's may be overrated. (sure, an alternate reading is that they're successful despite the TLD).

> We've had a number of corporate firewalls wholesale block the .so TLD

Your firewall is incorrect.

Is Notion based in Somolia?

No, it's based in SF.

> Cron and Notion have a lot in common. We share a sense of craft and an overlapping base of passionate users.

I’ve never used Notion and been impressed by the craftsmanship of the product. It works, sort of, 90% of the time, but it isn’t delightful, fast, or any other quality I’d associate with the craft / handsmade movement. Maybe I just misunderstand the word.

Notion has genuinely great UX, it packs a lot of complexity into a very easy-to-grok interface.

Performance could be better, but that's a different dimension of craft. Kind of like a formula 1 racecar versus a classic corvette.

> Notion has genuinely great UX

That’s definitely in the eye of the beholder. For something so text-oriented it doesn’t use the native text primitives so lots of muscle memory doesn’t work. I have to keep resorting to the mouse to do anything.

Exactly. I find I fight with what it wants to do more often than not when text editing. The table component is a mess. I wish it'd just drop me down to pure markdown. Searching is hit or miss for a product built around knowledge search.

It's something often forced on me by others, and not something I'd reach for myself.

Three things I love about cron: - hot keys/command palette for everything - great functions to view and schedule across my team - an app (yes, electron…) not a website

It also does lots of other nifty things like creating individual calendly-style links for a specific meeting.

Also the team is super responsive to feedback.

I'm interested to see what Notion does with it. Seems Notion + Calendar seems to target the area that Sunsama (https://sunsama.com/) is playing in.

Recently started using Cron, happy to hear they plan to continue to develop it as a separate app + excited to see Notion take on more of the traditional office suite.

I dislike the Notion UI [0] so much that any page became unreadable for me. They could at least add easy customisation of the CSS like GitHub pages.

[0] https://cronhq.notion.site/cronhq/Cron-Calendar-5625be54feac...

I've really enjoyed Cron. Great product, high feature velocity, building the right stuff for users. Happy for them!

FWIW - here's the referenced Business Insider article on the story (https://www.businessinsider.com/notion-acquires-cron-calenda...) (requires a subscription)

I struggle to understand this move.

Will Notion gains new paying user thanks to Cron ? probably not

Will it helps Notion improve its product ? Yeah probably on the calendar part, but that's only usefull for B2C, and notion focus a lot on B2B no (They even mention the workplace of the future) ?

Is it a acqui-hire ? Then why keep the products separate ?

Every B2B app I've ever worked on eventually needs some type of calendar view / integration.

Here's the related announcement post on Cron's side: https://cron.com/blog/2022-06-09-cron+notion

Has anyone here used cron? What makes it "next generation"? What are the platforms it supports, what's the business model? The website doesn't tell much.

It’s marginally better than the macOS stock calendar app, but pretty similar. Amongst people I know, windows users who have been used to google’s web calendar are the ones who have gotten most excited about it because having a dedicated calendar app has its advantages.

I find it less useful than the macOS calendar.app because it doesn’t let me view my iCloud calendar which I use for personal events or birthdays from the iCloud contact database.

The ui and interface is pretty snappy, and if notion is bringing on the team to speed up their client software it will be welcome.

Everyone here talking about super fast, but that's one thing I haven't complained about my stock calendar app. Wish there were more screenshots.

It’s if Superhuman made a calendar app to go along with email. It’s super fast and has good keyboard shortcuts, and implements advanced features like sharing availability Calendly-style.

I have to ask because people here keep talking about cron’s speed:

What functionality of a calendar is speed dependent? Genuine ask and not trying to be snarky, speed just hasn’t ever been something I’ve ever had to worry about with a calendar tool so the notion (pun not intended) is merely a foreign to me personally.

Is it opening events? Creating a new calendar item? Syncing, or something else?

Where is the speed gained in from compared to Calendar.app?

If it's anywhere close to the speed of Calendar.app it's super fast compared to Google calendar, maybe that's what people are comparing it with. Remember that the Windows software ecosystem for basic tools is terrible, so maybe its users are the most excited.

Ok but what is being measured? What functions of the calendar app are being proclaimed faster than…?

That’s the thing I’m not growing here and sorry but the answer above doesn’t tell me this

These are all nice features, but hardly deserve the qualification "next generation".

Do you disagree with Coca Cola calling coke “the real thing”, too?

It’s marketing. Read the qualification as “good”, and trust it as much as any marketing.

>Do you disagree with Coca Cola calling coke “the real thing”, too?

Yes.

Yeah, I'm having troubles imagining what could possibly be "next-gen" about a calendar app.

No clear communication of what the plan is, meanwhile notion calendar integration is non-existent

I thought this was about Unix cron and was quite puzzled for a few seconds.

I did a search, and apparently they also hold a trademark on "cron" within the domain of scientific and technical services [0]. That it was granted at all is absolutely ridiculous, given the history and omnipresence of "cron" as referring to Unix cron. Similar to the debacle about "Python" a decade ago [1], this raises a lot of red flags. When somebody picks a name that is already widely known in their field, I assume that they are either inexperienced enough not to know the term, or deceitful enough to try to profit from it.

[0] https://trademarks.justia.com/900/03/cron-90003841.html

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/pytho...

Your link 0 there indicates the trademark was suspended or is in the process of being suspended. Their other attempt at registering a trademark [0] also seems to have failed (status "Final Refusal - Mailed")

[0] https://trademarks.justia.com/900/03/it-s-about-90003004.htm...

Whoops, thank you and I stand corrected. This increaaes my opinion of the trademark registration process, as it was rightfully rejected. My opinion of the applicant is lower with the correction, because it means that they kept the same name for two years after being rejected, removing ignorance as an explanation and making me think that it is intentional deceit.

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