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Messages - Dormouse [ switch to compact view ]

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151
amplenote 'works' for me. It's the only one of these 'networked notetakers' that:
is fast
has mobile
is not buggy
you can live-edit with a collaborator
you can add comments to the text (call it footnote, rich or not)
has versioning
has no investors behind and aligns with user needs
Not buggy is good, and pretty rare in the this field. Though I suspect that's related to a limited feature set and speed of development
Mobile is good, but it doesn't have immobile - and I work at my desk most of the time. Most of the apps on the list have mobile too.
Collaboration. Most apps are into that market, though Obsidian isn't.
I'd see Amplenote as targeting itself at a certain group of 'productivity' users who value speed, reliability and maybe collaboration. I doubt there will be much uptake in the academic or creative communities.
Whereas Obsidian is a swiss army knife with the developer community adding a plethora of attachments and a community of users in constant search for shiny new things. And I worry about what will be left when the glitterati move on.

152
There are people writing on the value of hierarchies (book TOC) and networks (3rd generation notetaking) for years. The answer seems to be you can have both.
I personally believe that both models are wrong. Potentially there are hierarchies; potentially there are networks. But the essence of the state of play is ignorance. So software needs to promote flexibility and many possibilities. Entirely disconnected notes living as their own islands are bad, but so is anything that fits them into a given structure, weather that be hierarchy or network. That's a problem with Obsidian notes - there's usually a rigid structure of some sort. One of the advantages of outliners is that things can be moved around quickly and easily and endlessly duplicated - it's not the outline that's valuable, it's the ease of switching models.

153
How you go from the network to a finished 'big work' (a giant blog post, a book) is an exercise for the reader. An easy way: just concatenate notes. One per heading. This is also what scriverner does. Scrivener (and for documentation Archbee, gitbook etc) have the concept of 'book', these notetakers don't.
Always struggled to get on with Scrivener. It's too rigid. Too focused on very small links; the intention is that a very big chain of links will be produced, but it has few features than concentrate on the chain.

154
Dormouse, it looks like your usecase is a very long file, like a paper. That's better written in an outliner. These notetaking apps believe in splitting ideas in 'atomic' chunks that you can link to each other.
No. I've always liked atomic notes (and more recently zettels) and disliked outliners. And that hasn't changed. But you need ways of searching and accessing atomic notes. I very much like using links and backlinks, and what I call fuzzy tags. But you still need a way to store them, and after trying a variety of approaches, I've decided that long files work best - there's no reason why the contents can't be disparate atomic notes; search is faster and more easily managed in one file than many.

PS
I like Workflowy for two reasons: its wikilinks and mirror systems are completely effective even without being part of an outline structure.
And because it also contains such a structure, it is very suitable for producing an output that is intrinsically linear.

155
Also interesting on that site:
First-generation apps (2000-2010): OneNote (2003), Evernote (2008), Workflowy (2010)

Second-generation apps (2010-2018): Paper (2015), Bear (2016), Notion (2016), NoteJoy (2017)

Third-generation apps (2019-present): Amplenote (2019), Roam (2019), Obsidian (2019)

The first-generation apps tend to be weaker on mobile, but two of the three have immense overall feature sets at this point. In the case of Evernote, the breadth of its feature set was arguably a direct cause of its decline.

The second-generation apps are (mostly) the ones that people are excited about today. Notion has been the runaway success of the bunch thus far, given the breadth of possibilities afforded by their embedded, data-type-aware tables.
I'm not sure about the conclusion. Notion has clearly done very well.
Bear appears to be waning. There's a lot of excitement about Obsidian right now, Roam is looking a bit "Soo last year", but still has a chance to get its act together again. OneNote seems stable enough, Evernote in presumably terminal decline. I see far more excitement about Logseqa and Athens than I do about Amplenote. Compare reddit group memberships.

Workflowy has turned round. Been in maintenance mode for a long time, but rewritten from the ground up and now going forward strongly. Kanban, mirrors, wikilinks, colour. At the moment, it's working better for me than any of the other apps.

156
Interesting performance comparison:
https://www.noteapps..._app_considerations_
Note count: 2000
I simply have trouble believing results funded by Amplenote. Especially as the testing is not clearly defined.
And you have the independent third party Gödel's pkm performance tests. Many reasons not to put to much weight on those either, but at least it is easy to say why.

Roam is supposed to have become much faster. Were these tests before or after?

157
I'd say reevaluate amplenote.
OK. I signed up - since they have opened a Free tier in an attempt to move out of loss-making.
But, tbh, it just looks like a better Evernote, (and the better is an assumption based on the extent of Evernote's decline). Four icons on the left - Calendar, Tasks, Jots (like Daily Notes) and Notes: for me that puts it solidly in productivity territory as does the email they sent me today publicising Shu Omi's video.
All of which makes me feel that it's not a good fit for me, and any comments I make are likely to be a result of bias and not investigating in depth rather than a reflection of a normal users' reality.

But, here we go:
  • It's not rich text - doesn't do colour
  • It's not markdown - doesn't understand HTML or headers 4, 5 and 6.
  • The note pane isn't one I'd write in. (I know I don't usually write in Obsidian, but that feels like a choice).
  • I'll be honest, it seems underpowered and not that intuitive.
  • And web only.

They 'invented' rich footnotes
I'm very happy with the feature
Aren't these just a link with a location?
Seems to me a bit like a sub-bullet in an outliner, but less intuitive to trigger and much more clunky/rigid in accepting files - instead of drag or paste it insists on file selection through an explorer pane. I suppose sub-bullets are a bit like footnotes.
Probably my reaction is just bias and dislike of the design. I find it hard to motivate myself to look deeper because of that.

I probably ought to maintain a closer watch on Logseq when I have the time.

158
I have disliked word processors for a very long time
But, hey, things change.
Docx converts back and forth to opml as well as markdown does.
Word outlining is much improved - 9 levels now. Behind org-mode but ahead of markdown.
I can't imagine doing more in Word than necessary, but word processors are a perfectly functional option in general.

159
Hadn't really finished my Obsidian comments:

Despite being very keen for the mobile apps, I find that I haven't used them at all. I use the vaults, but I haven't used Obsidian to do it when I'm on mobile.

I think most users who don't need WYSIWYG (like me) will reduce their friction level by avoiding it and sticking to legacy editor. The new editor is a requirement for some plugins to work on mobile, but has substantially increased noise and friction. There are bugs, and some iffy design decisions, some from CM6, some from Obsidian. I personally encountered a short-lived one when insider Obsidian was updated to Electron 17 (quickly pulled because it was buggy). And the noise from plugins not working, changed ways of working doesn't seem to have reduced yet. I substantially switched to LP (more future proofed), but not for important workflow areas. But the noise from it all on forum and Discord is overwhelming.

I'm still attached to my OPML & md system. The plaintext large md files, should be accessible by a large number of programs well into the future; and their structure, and links are embedded within. But I've stopped regarding the md version as the day-to-day canonical version. Sometimes they might be, but only when I have good reasons for using them rather than an outliner. The one area where the markdown file will have it is in areas requiring privacy and security that I won't put on line.

Which leaves me with a docx unknown. Most files sent to me are in docx or PDF formats. Most of my destinations are happiest with docx and PDF. I like using colour when editing. Using HTML in markdown has always been a bodge from design onwards. The whole review, comment and version change system in Word etc is infinitely better than anything I have seen anywhere in markdown. Which leaves me thinking that markdown is maybe fine for notes, but simply not functional enough for actual documents in progress. And Obsidian's insistence on .md rather than .txt gives it a very low place in the interoperable league. Makes me feel a bit heretical since I have disliked word processors for a very long time.

160
good 'ole Keynote
Interesting to see that the format is still being read, though I'm not sure for how much longer. I'm not sure if I still have any files anywhere. And stopped using RightNote quite some time ago. Such a great program in its day.

161
My personal experience isn’t that things that don’t work, but that the experience of using Obsidian is rougher than it was when my expectation had been that it would become smoother as little issues were addressed.
I have come to realise that Obsidian is a high friction program, and is likely to remain one for some considerable time, unless you have a straightforward workflow and rarely venture far from it. There seems to be a permanent race between features being added, usually through plugins,  and enabling easier usage - again mostly plugins but also core. There's also a substantial time cost to investigating new or expanded features. This can be considered good (massive expansion of features) or bad (irritation and time consumed). I have no idea whether a point of balance will be found at any point in the next few years. The open API abrogates control.

There's actually no good information or note management. Using small notes produces an immense number of files, and create a dependency on Obsidian to manage them. It has some features to manage large files, but they're limited and clunky. My interest in plaintext, such as it is, relies on an assumption of long-term accessibility. But the system here seems very based on Obsidian as a program. I noticed BGM'sz post drawwing attention to Keynote NF which can still read the original databases (though I'm not sure for how much longer that will be, although RightNote can apaprently read them too - mostly). I think the big files will work well enough long-term - but Obsidian isn't the best short-term manager for those.

Internal features such as search are useful and effective - but less powerful than file utilities like grep.

As I'd already given up writing directly into Obsidian, I'm left with the question of what I should use Obsidian for now. The linking remains a strength (though I haven't tested what happens to block links if the database is deleted - I have a feeling that they can't be reconstructed automatically and rely on the database; and, of course, the block link format is understood only by Obsidian). In a few years, it may be super-great, but I need to avoid that friction now. I think it comes back to the linking on a base of local files. Workflowy is as good at linking, but that's only while the database is up and running. Overall Workflowy is a better front end and a better manager of large files (even if I need to use OPML conversion to access it).

162
This is it:
https://www.amplenot...ng_depth_write_in_3d

Thanks. I'm afraid I get very turned off when developers start to talk about brains. They clearly don't have the remotest idea about how the human brain functions and my ability to attend to what they are trying to say disappears.

I will look at the footnotes bit sometime. But, from what I read, it seems as if it only works when published on the web. I don't do that, so as a Utilitarian, it wouldn't be of immediate interest to me. I also have a feeling that their thinking about it is wrong. Just from the way they talk. But I will get there and look.

164
The PIM aspects of TreeDBNotes were never fully worked out, I think.  I only ever use the notes part, but I love it.
Agreed. x2.
You can output to epub or html, really, that's sort of it.
Wow! Really? I hadn't remembered it being that limited.
I suppose you can do quite a lot with both of them. I remember writing letters and documents with it at one time.
iirc another program claimed to be able to import from TreeDBNotes (AllMyNotes?) but I have no idea what its export options were.

It's a pity it was abandoned. The notes component anyway (though my preference has shifted away from that two pane outliner design). It a lot of features that made it comfo9rtable to work with. You certainly seem to have been making the most of it.

165
I use TreeDBNotes - and I've not seen anyone discuss this
I always liked TreeDBNotes. And I'd agree that it is still performs better than many newer alternatives.
I haven't mentioned it at all because it's a database, which was against the thrust of what I have been trying to do.

I stopped using it, partly because of that (I can't remember now what export options it has), but also the closure of the forums and then development stopping. I don't mind development ending, but I like to believe that the developer still cares enough to keep it working. iirc, when he was still communicating, he was also wanting to take it in a direction that didn't suit me - a PIM rather than an editor). I know some people reported data loss (when the forum was still open), but that wasn't a problem I ever experienced myself.
Windows only as well iirc

166
The one thing on my Android that I tried to avoid was having to sign in to anything ever just to record my thoughts.
Makes sense. I very rarely want to dictate quick notes now, so I don't have a workflow for this at all, but I'd agree that easy and fast are the key elements. Not that dictation is ever that easy for the program.

167
exports version history https://www.noteapps...port#compare-preface
* moving fast, not buggy
* Decent collaboration: https://www.noteapps...tion#compare-preface but not real time nor comments on text in a note
* offline: https://www.noteapps...line#compare-preface
I find the noteapps comparisons very interesting, but don't completely trust them as they are funded by Amplenote.

168
I found a product I really like: amplenote.
I had Amplenote in my slightly interesting group.

Cons for me were:
  • Not based on local notes
  • Cost (as I only expected to be having a look at it)
  • Emphasis on productivity
  • No Header folding
  • Only 3 header levels?

If you continue to like it, I'll have a look myself


I find I'm liking Workflowy more, the more I work with it.

169
General Software Discussion / Hoisting
« on: February 06, 2022, 07:01 PM »
I find it hard to understand why hoisting is such a rare feature in multi-level editors, because it makes writing so much easier.

afaicr, RightNote has it. So, sort of, does Scrivener. Dynalist and WorkFlowy have it  - I assume all outliners do as multiple levels are such a core feature. WriteMonkey is very good and also has Focus Mode. FocusWriter doesn't but it's not designed for markdown (though it does understand # Headers) and it does have a  very good Focus Mode.

170
General Software Discussion / Obsidian Commmunity
« on: February 06, 2022, 06:33 PM »
Students, Computer Science/Programmers, TTRPG players. I’d hoped that the WYSIWYG development of Live Preview would be used to attract a wider range of users, but it seems there’s little interest in doing that.
There's a very heavy tech bias in the community, and although it seems to have a reputation for friendliness, my impression is that it's becoming less friendly for the non-tech.

For instance this Discord response to a self-admitted non-techie user who was wondering if there was access to some paid support after getting nowhere using the Obsidian documentation :
Most stuff there are, as a matter of fact, "how-to(s)". Any other steps that aren't outlined are usually highly repetitive, general questions that can be Googled easily ...
Safe to say, Google-fu is an essential skill for everyone interacting with tech, and not just developers. The sooner you get used to it, the better

A pity. I believe that Obsidian had a very big opportunity open to it, but it feels as if it is slipping into a tech oriented cul-de-sac. Notion didn't get to the size it is by doing that even though many things are trickier to achieve in Notion than they actually are in Obsidian. Other PKM apps are targeting the wider market and they must have a chance of getting it, despite starting with a much poorer product.

It's a long time now since I recommended Obsidian to anyone. Even someone who builds their own PCs, learned python and 3D modelling form fun and is pretty adept with most software (including Notion as it happens).

171
General Software Discussion / I hate the concatenation
« on: February 05, 2022, 10:21 AM »
I copied my recent post on Obsidian and copied it into a Workflowy note. (I'd written it originally in FocusWriter on the basis of a Workflowy outline but didn't want to save it at the time; I'd deleted the Workflowy outline and just wanted to keep it in a note.)
What entered the note was a mass of words; no paragraphs, no lines.
Pasted instead into Atticus, copied and pasted that. Nicely formatted exactly as in the post.
Copy/paste is so dependent on what programs decide to pick up and what to leave.
But I have no idea why it decided to keep the Atticus formatting, but not that taken direct from the forum.

Workflowy - using the bullets. Fairly new to me as a working method, but the bullets are blocks that are easy to rearrange
And when I export formatted and paste into FocusWriter, all the bullets and indent levels disappear and they become normal paragraphs. That feels useful.

172
writing pad
Programs I'm tending to use for this are:
FocusWriter - I've always found it good for this, and it saves as docx odt rtf as well as txt. Will open and save as .md, and can then move headed sections around in the outline; doesn't understand markdown syntax, but that's not an issue for me. No autosave either - was removed a few years ago after some data loss problems.
Typora - I can write into my vaults, with markdown interpreted, & Enter=new paragraph, and will export into a wide variety of formats.
Workflowy - using the bullets. Fairly new to me as a working method, but the bullets are blocks that are easy to rearrange (Roamanesque?); easily transformed into normal text in a word processor, easy to insert images (one image per bullet) - though they don't export as part of the outline.

WriteMonkey still has lots of attractions for writing in long files.

173
Very uncomfortable with Obsidian's direction (I'll address that in another post).
Very curious, please link here.

My concerns arise from my focus on long-term longevity and having all content safe in plaintext files. My original interest in Obsidian rather than competitor PKM apps, was its emphasis on local files. The picture in my mind was of a managing spider sitting on top of the files. The emphasis being on the primacy of the files. But now what I see is an increasing emphasis on Obsidian with much of the content value being embedded in Obsidian unique workflows.

Files
If files are the long-term repository, then the relationships between parts of the content need to be embedded in the files. This suggests that large markdown files are superior to small ones; Obsidian is biased towards small notes in its design and the plugins do like wise. Tags are generally useful, but links (whether they be wikilinks or markdown) depend on a program to use them; wikilinks would still have a function because they are just text that makes sense in context. A further limit is that full functionality is reserved for .md files, and there is strong resistance to changing that. Personally I always wanted the option of working with .txt files (or indeed any other plaintext format) because all the programs I use will work with .txt files but many won’t open or save .md.

Having everything in local files  is good. But when that everything includes multiple entries in YAML that’s not necessarily the case long-term. Especially if those entries have been made by long-deleted plugins. There’s already been an expansion of the number of json (etc) databases, and that will presumably grow further.

Plugins
Much of Obsidian’s popularity derives from its very active plugin developer scene and the rapidly growing number of plugins (c500 so far). But maintenance of these plugins is frequently less good. Bugs aren’t always dealt with, some appear to have been abandoned and not updated for the latest editor. There’s also a wide variety of approaches to coding and design; this is good for innovation, but not so good for an overall structure that’s easy to understand. I can only see maintenance becoming more of an issue over time.

The same is true of themes, and my impression is that most are not fully functional or don’t work in the new editor. Presumably this will stabilise as theme developers become accustomed to the needs of the new editor.

Community
A Venn diagram of community attributes would probably have central overlaps of Students, Computer Science/Programmers, TTRPG players. I’d hoped that the WYSIWYG development of Live Preview would be used to attract a wider range of users, but it seems there’s little interest in doing that.

The large percentage of students in the community is good for enthusiasm and innovation, and the programming expertise facilitates plugin development. But longer-term, students generally throw off what was fashionable in the previous student generation and the students themselves move on to other, more time-consuming, activities; reliability and ease of use become more important than new and interesting.
In general, my impression is that only a small proportion of the community is strongly attached to local files; many would be quite happy if Obsidian was a database program that could read and save local files.

Glitches and bugs
One of the most impressive aspects of Obsidian in its first year was the speed and quality of development. Features worked well with each other and bugs were quickly addressed. Very impressive for a new program, and contrasted with most of its PKM competitors. But that has changed.

Live Preview has been public for well over a month, and large numbers of bugs are being squashed with every update, only for more to appear. Some of it is trying to accommodate CodeMirror 6 (most other programs using it, like Zettlr, seem still to be on 5), some of it is upstream (the aforementioned CM6 or Electron), some of it is understanding Apple issues (iCloud deleting files, Mac crashes (though these seem reduced now)); other issues from plugins and themes no longer functioning as intended. Time is also needed to check the code of new plugins and themes before they join the community list. Not all the issues are to do with core development, but they all use bandwidth.

My personal experience isn’t that things that don’t work, but that the experience of using Obsidian is rougher than it was when my expectation had been that it would become smoother as little issues were addressed.

Developer resources
I don’t actually know how stretched the developers are. The core developers are a couple with a very young child, but there are also many very active volunteers and plugin developers. However, they have switched Dynalist into maintenance mode because Obsidian is taking all their time, and it feels as if they are fully stretched just keeping all the plates spinning, with little time spare for starting more. And I know that it’s not easy to increase developer resources, even if the money and desire were there. Adding one new person would have a fair chance of reducing output; adding 2, 3 or 4 would force radical change of working practice.

Overall
I feel as if the community is pulling the program in the opposite direction to my own needs, and I don't believe that heavy use of plugins enhances the long-term value of the notes. I don’t have a clear idea of what the program will look like in ten years time, but I’m not convinced it will be more useful or usable. My own approach is to keep things simple and use large markdown files with wikilinks. I use few plugins, none that pollute my notes, mostly simple and straightforward ones, and even then I have most turned off most of the time. I also use Typora and MarkText on files in Obsidian vaults; occasionally Logseq too.

The plugins I do use most of the time include File Info (not in the community yet) - I often have it open on the right so I can see the file stats while I use Typora or MarkText to edit the file in the vault, and txt as md.

174
I'm moving more activity into Workflowy and away from markdown/Obsidian.
The original attraction was the kanban/outline toggle which I use frequently.
But it also has wikilinks and editable transclusions (aka Mirror) - Obsidian's transclusionos aren't editable yet.

And then there's writing.
There's paragraphs vs lines. Conversion works, but consistency isn't great. But no glitches at all if I use word processors. I can even write using nested bullets and WPs convert in seconds. And everything needs to end as docx or pdf in the end (all formatters and publishers accept those, but I only know Jutoh accepting markdown), so is there any need for a markdown stage in the process? (I'm not a web writer; I never need HTML.) I will eventually keep plaintext copies; I'll save regular OPML copies; I may or may not actually do the writing in a plaintext editor - it's what I have done for years anyway.

So my point of balance is moving. Partly because of bit of jar in Obsidian workflows; partly because Workflowy seems to have become much more competent over the last year or so.

175
Quote from Obsidian forum re conversion issues with markdown lines

I loaded up the CSS snipped and opened Obsidian with the snippet applied. Then I found a long article and copied and pasted it into MS, just to take a look. There were line endings at the ends of paragraphs which I expected. However, since the markdown code would have to be eliminated to use in word, I ran it through a standard online markdown converter to html. When I pasted it back into MS, the line endings were stripped and the paragraphs ran together, which would be a real headache in a long piece of text.
-Rayo, post:14, topic:30851

It sounds very similar to the conversion issue I had going into OPML and back, which means that I need all text (bullet notes) in my Workflowy outlines to be formatted in paragraphs rather than lines. I have systematically tested all the editors and word processors on this machine to see which paste into the Workflowy notes with empty lines between paragraphs (a theoretical paragraph won't cut it if a copy and paste into Workflowy doesn't take it as such). It's a smaller list than I would like - Typora, MarkText, Atlantis, Word - but four is better than none.

When I pasted from WriteMonkey 2.7 after copying in HTML, it was interesting to see <p> at the beginning and </p> at the end, but no <br> at all. The intervening lines showed visually, but I know they'd disappear with another export/import. Nothing on any other copy.

PS
I decided to test Atticus, just to get an idea of how it works. But also thought I'd see how it works with this paragraph/line issue.
And it is very odd indeed.
Copying and pasting from a markdown file that is purely lines results in paragraphs. Those paragraphs past with the necessary spaces into Workflowy.
Pasting markdown paragraphs, double spaces paragraphs in Atticus (and then Workflowy).
But doing the same in Dynalist only produces lines.

I played round quite a lot more using other programs. Copy and Paste is inconsistent between programs.
afaics an exact test of the proposed use case is required to be confident it will work. And the test needs to be in both directions. What I found most surprising is that distinct paragraphs in Workflowy could become concatenated lines on pasting. OPML appears more consistent than copy/paste, which sometimes works best as plaintext and sometimes not.

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