Show HN: Omniflow – Structure for your thoughts | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Omniflow – Structure for your thoughts

omniflow.io

27 pointsericax18 comments

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I like the application.

- The demonstration video is very helpful and aesthetically pleasing

- Tabbing to indent is awesome

- Easy learning curve

This would be excellent for:

- Meeting notes (as demonstrated)

- Many little busywork tasks or shopping lists

- General tree structures

These tools help you remember a bunch of small things.

However, that is generally not my problem. I need to focus substantial brain power toward solving a handful of problems. In that case, I find todo lists useless. I often realise I've chosen too many tasks; many of them stupid, unachievable or now irrelevant given new information. Furthermore, having lots of tasks written down is a red flag for me. Lots of tasks means I need to invest more time into problem discovery. If I just pull a list of tasks off the top of my head and get to work, I make a serious mess.

I have lately taken to reflective practice while programming. I enter a task and a time estimate into a Google sheet. Later I return and the sheet calculates the actual time and estimation error. Then I write a reflective comment. Sometimes I realise the task was too large, not well-defined, my own bad design made an easy task hard, etc... I think reflection generates insight and improvement. This is infinitely more useful to my everyday life than a todo list.

Google sheets works for this, but it just works; it’s not nice and it’s overkill really. Consequently, I think an expertly crafted, reflective todo list could constitute a worthwhile productivity application for problem solving.

We have had so, so many todo list apps over the years. I've tried and ditched more than I can count, because the process of mere todo listing has very limited usefulness in my life.

This seems nice. I'm a fan of outliners.

I like your font and the general feel of the application. It does feel like Workflowy.

It's missing some of the features of https://checkvist.com which is a more fully functional outliner tool then Workflowy. Checkvist is also focused on being 100% keyboard driven.

Also checkout http://www.moo.do/. It's a more innovate approach then the other solutions.

I'd recommend adding some inline help for the keyboard shortcuts.

moo.do is cool, never heard of them. I agree it's more innovative, and it would be even more powerful when Gmail integration arrives.

By inline help do you mean a shortcut cheatsheet like the one Workflowy has? Or a tooltip-like bubbles that appear next to the note?

You're really a fan of outliners. Which one do you use?

I love Workflowy and this looks like a direct copy. The keyboard shortcuts do feel a little cleaner on Omniflow though. I especially like the Control Enter to mark an item as completed.

We like Workflowy too, and we started out wanting to build a Workflowy for ourselves with the features we want, and this is the first iteration.

For example, we want to have a high-level structure that's easy to search, i.e. folders and documents. We also have a bunch of other ideas, like interconnected nodes, formatting, math equations, etc. We're trying to validate the idea and see which way to go further.

I don't like it. First, you had titled this Show HN "structure for your thoughts", and I was expecting exactly that. Instead of what I had expected, I have just seen another linear TODO list which I can use maybe for shopping list, at most.

Second, honestly, how is it better than Google Docs or any other collaborative text-editing tool?

It's better than Google Docs when you have 10 levels of things, which would be unmanageable with most text editors.

Also it's not linear, as you can close/open items and zoom in on an item, so that you're looking at the right context, which I personally find really helpful.

Well, it is "spatially linear". Maybe if you could reference one part of text in some other parts it would be better. What I mean is that context you are saying about is linear, which doesn't happen often in thoughts. If you have several deep bullet hierarchies and your context happens to contain some items in their leaves, there is nothing that will help you see this context at once without destroying current structure...

Ah, I got what you mean. We've thought about the idea of linking a list item to another and may implement it in the future.

Another way to solve this problem is to have tags, like #project, and when you click on the tag all list items that don't contain this tag will be filtered out.

Yep, but it is not easy problem, I don't know any existing app that does it well. The thing is that really useful tool would implement several types of referencing, because there are several equally important ways for doing it, i.e. sometimes I need to have just an arrow pointing from reference to destination, sometimes I want a tag, which after clicking on will embed destination in reference place, sometimes I want just some kind of preview.

Looks nice and might, going to try it now

API! We need an API!

Fantastic!

Sockpuppet votes and comments aren't allowed on HN. We're turning the penalty down because we hate to see new work get penalized, but really please don't do that—it's bad for HN and gets accounts flagged and/or banned.

As one of the first users, all I can say about Omniflow is AMAZING. I believe that most of us who frequently use our computers to take notes were forced to adjust our tastes and habits to the weird sometime-large-some-time-small bullets style in MS word and the tedious/complicated process of creating tree structures. Omniflow saved us, it is incredibly user friendly, with a simple TAB, now I can organize my thoughts in a few seconds. TAB when a subset is needed, shift+TAB when I need to go to the upper level. I'm still using Omniflow on a daily basis whenever I need to take notes during a meeting and this simple tool made my life much easier.

PROTIP: Include some minor criticism and tone down the praise next time.

As a developer, and the most importantly, as a user of this website, I see no reason why my 1 point was taken off. We all know that kind of feeling when we can call a taxi within just a few touches with Uber, or Share all of the great moments with Instagram. This is why we are pulling all nighters just to develop a free website that doesn't seem like it is gonna make us millionaires in a few months. Please go ahead and try one of these websites here and let me know if I said anything wrong in my comment about this Omniflow. And please remember to give the 1 point back to the developers of this great website. Thank you.

Of course outliners are better tools for making indented lists and trees than are word processors.

But could you explain in what ways Omniflow improves on the many existing outliners, such as those listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner#Browser-based_outline...

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