Comment by mcky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcky | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about a similar home for managing “everything”. I find a tool like notion is just too generalised and I’m missing the UX of purpose made tools though, but I still want some kind of ownership and control over my own data

The dream is to have interop between services, but I control the data and can easily make my own views onto it / tools to manage it. I think this is what the MIT solid project is all about, but I'm a bit lost with the RDF and pods stuff.

I often begin tracking something in a text file, then notion or a spreadsheet, but eventually run into issues with the flow and UX, where custom made apps win out, e.g. Todoist has a better task management UX than notion, my habit tracker sends me timely reminders and has a better UX again, and all the other services which are basically CRUD apps with some extra UI/integrations (bookmarking, Goodreads)

I’m currently trying to make Obsidian my storage layer for all these things, since notion is completely closed source & non extensible. The current set of tools I'm working on are - A sync engine to pull 3rd party api data into my obsidian vault - A SQLite vtable/Postgres fdw to expose it as sql so other apps can interop - A notion/obsidian "quick add" app for on the go, like the "intake" part of the OP

If anyone else has a similar itch to scratch, or experience in the area I'd love to hear more (email in profile)

I'd like to offer you a different view of how to solve your problem. So let's say your problem is:

> a similar home for managing "everything". Notion is just too generalised and I'm missing the UX of purpose made tools though, but I still want some kind of ownership and control over my own data.

What you're doing is looking at your tools, or rather solutions, available completely wrong. What you're looking for is a dedicated software solution but I suggest looking at your computer as the true solution. I know it's very convenient to contain everything within apps like Notion and Obsidian but I think you're better off looking at your computer's OS as the solution. You can do everything you've noted plus you have the bonus of compatibility and portability if you're already using Apple devices. You can definitely control and create your own views+tools this way plus you have the technical choice with various programming languages

How would that look to you?

I might’ve given the wrong impression - the obsidian part is really just a load of files with some metadata (a collection of flat file system databases), exactly for the same portability reasons/tooling reasons you mentioned

I think what you want to do is entirely accomplished with what the Personal Computer is. You have a plethora of options with the many types of operating systems available. You already have a lot of functionality built-in. Like you noted you have trouble with the flow and UX but really you're using apps that aren't meant to work with one another. Why not move the abstraction up a level? Instead of containment in apps use your OS

> I find a tool like notion is just too generalised

This was the reason I stopped using Notion several years ago; it was OK at everything and great at nothing.

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