
Notion – Document Reimagined - mef
http://early-access.notion.so
======
brianclements
I know they're slightly different, but this reminds me of Workflowy[1] which
pretty much runs my entire life right now (todo, projects, journaling,
brainstorming, informal databases, bookmarks). In looking at tools like this,
it's hard to know where the line is between simple functions that you then use
to create abstract features, and more complicated interfaces that define
features explicitly. It's a nuanced thing. With Workflowy, the simple list and
tag interface can do much of what Notion does (of course, minus the great
design and multimedia support), but you really need a formal workflow and need
to stick to it to make it function well. Whereas Notion kind of designs those
patterns for you, but at the expense of some interface simplicity. I feel like
Workflowy demands more of a unix philosophy to achieve Notions features.
You'll need to chain web apps together. For example, you can use hyper links
in Workflowy to link to files in dropbox, or host images on some other site
and audio/video on another, where Notion puts in all in one spot. Very cool.

I can definitely see this as a great tool in the classroom for creating
interactive discussions. Copy a template for each class and you can have
everyone collaborate and focus on the discussion, not taking notes (or better
still, take notes in the collaborative page itself, things that aren't
originally there), and then after you have a record of everything which you
can share across all students and with different classes.

[1] [https://workflowy.com/](https://workflowy.com/)

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skimpycompiler
Workflowy reminds me a little bit of a desktop app called Zim, although
Workflowy and Notion are prettier.

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brianclements
I looked at Zim[1] actually once upon a time. I eventually settled on
WikidPad[2]. It had enough features to capture my ideas in the ways I wanted,
but I really needed multiple device and cloud support. Ideas happen all over,
not just at the desk. This was why Workflowy blew my mind when I discovered
how to use it to fit my needs.

[1] [http://zim-wiki.org/](http://zim-wiki.org/) [2]
[http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/](http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/)

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spyckie2
Every note taker I've found gets the building block unit wrong. The building
block unit shouldn't be stylized text with media - it should be content that
is digested and summarized. Quotes from books. Summarized web pages - either
automatically or through a clean UI experience. Snippets of video.
Wikipedia/dictionary snippets.

Stylized text marries content with design. Having the content be rich objects
makes your primary work to summarize instead of stylize, which makes much more
sense in research driven contexts (which is pretty much everywhere).

~~~
gravity13
Ah, cool! Yes, I completely agree. I'm actually working on something a bit
like this which puts blocks of content as the building block.

It's ideal in an educational authoring platform - since you can have some
people crafting the content and others curating it by linking groups of
content together. It's important to cater to both needs, I think.

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e0m
Fantastic onboarding flow! The "wow"-ing feature gifs followed by your
interactive tutorial sold me. Also beautiful use of web components.

I'm curious how far you think you can take contenteditable with all its cross-
browser quirks.

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hardwaresofton
Absolutely gorgeous looking, though I suspect I'm not the target audience, and
it seems like there is the slight danger of trying to do too much. Maybe I'm
just not thinking big enough about what Notion is trying to accomplish/become.

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rayiner
PDF support?

It blows my mind how bad PDF support is in all of these notebook/data
organizing apps (I'm looking at you OneNote) given how probably the vast
majority of non-HTML digital documents are in PDF format.

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nhdev
Evernote has very good PDF support but you need a premium subscription to make
it actually useful. I clip PDFs to Evernote and annotate them all the time.

~~~
larrywright
I've been thinking about this a bit today[1], because I fear that Evernote is
dying. I love and pay for Evernote, but they've been stagnant for years now.
They're slowly adding features, but absolutely nothing that I care about.

As far as I can tell, there's really no functional equivalent to what Evernote
does: a bucket you can throw data into and search for it later. OneNote
probably comes closest from a purely note-taking standpoint, but it's missing
some of the key features. This makes me a little nervous, as I now realize how
reliant I am on a tool that I have very little confidence in.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/larrywright/status/643495960480509952](https://twitter.com/larrywright/status/643495960480509952)

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TuringTest
What features do you find missing in OneNote? Genuinely interested, as I use
it intensely but don't use Evernote.

~~~
larrywright
It does basic note taking and checklists and things pretty well (better than
Evernote in some ways), but a frequent use case is creating a notebook with
stuff in it (a mix of clipped web pages, notes, maybe documents), and then
sharing it with someone. Also, it needs to be searchable. It's that part that
OneNote seems weaker at.

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codemac
Also - if anyone wants to use a great window manager, it's also named
notion[0] these days.

[0]: [http://notion.sf.net](http://notion.sf.net)

~~~
TranquilMarmot
Do they have a non-sourceforge link? Sourceforge is blocked at my place of
work (probably rightly so)

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codemac
Not that I know of, no. I wish they did move off of sourceforge after the
recent shit they pulled.

[https://github.com/raboof/notion](https://github.com/raboof/notion) is
probably your best bet.

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mrmondo
Is there a self-hosted option? I take it it's closed source?

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gaunab
Is there a more-or-less similar thing in Open Source? I'm looking for
something like this for quite some time, but would need it to be self-hosted,
and what would be even better, end-to-end encrypted (e.g. with shared secret).

~~~
TuringTest
If you just care about functionality, Leo Editor offers similar features, and
adds in being scriptable in Python.

If you also care about usability and zero learning curve, I'm afraid I haven't
seen anything similar which is open source, after being searching it for
years. The closest thing might be one of several content managers/social
networks a la MediaGoblin or Diaspora, or something more flexible you'll need
to build your own workflow on some open wiki platform like Twiki or Zwiki.

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lachenmayer
This is the Mother All Demos... Congrats to the team, this is amazingly done!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

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savant
Does anyone know if there is a JS editor that acts similar to how notion
works? I've seen a similar pattern with readme.io, and would love to be able
to use it for internal tools.

~~~
gravity13
The closest is ckeditor, I think. But that's still a long shot away.

Notion is actually really well constructed (as somebody who's been in the
space building tools kinda like it for a while, it's quite impressive). But I
agree, the space needs an open source notion...

~~~
lobster_johnson
Seen ProseMirror?
[http://prosemirror.net/index.html](http://prosemirror.net/index.html)

~~~
TuringTest
Yes, but it's currently just a rich text editor, it lacks the outlining
capabilities (i.e. creating separate hierarchical pages, and tagging). These
should be relatively easy to add, though.

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mintplant
Looks nice, but so far there's limited platform support:

>Support for your browser is coming soon. Check out Notion on Google Chrome
desktop, Safari, or iPhone.

>Copy and paste this link into a supported browser to continue:

>[https://www.notion.so/tutorial](https://www.notion.so/tutorial)

I'll try it again once Android support is in.

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puranjay
I'm not kidding, this is one of the best things I've seen lately. I basically
write for a living and this looks like a real gamechanger.

If you can keep up this quality and fulfill all the promises, I'll be willing
to pay a good deal of money for it.

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JayOtter2
I just got the 'unsupported browser' notice on Chromium. Surely it should work
the same here as it does on Chrome?

Gorgeous looking product. Site runs a little slow on my older machine but I
suppose that's to be expected with the fancy GIFs.

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OJFord
Looks really cool - love the inset video - but I'm struggling to imagine what
I'd actually use it for.

Site doesn't seem to say how saving/exporting works - anyone know?

~~~
giancarlostoro
I registered, you can currently only export as HTML.

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OJFord
That's pretty good though! I worried it might either save something
proprietary, lossy conversion (e.g. markdown), or irrecoverable (e.g. PDF)
only.

(Of course, you could always use browser-save HTML, but you'd have to manually
strip anything like the video)

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orf
Make this able to be self hosted, whip up a price plan for enterprise and add
a half-decent API then you've got yourself a lot of customers. Awesome looking
product

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giancarlostoro
This is one of the most gorgeous things I've seen in a while. I'm a little
saddened that the homepage doesn't work on Firefox yet.

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viraptor
What's broken? I see it just fine in FF40

~~~
shredwheat
(With Firefox 40.0.3) Support for your browser is coming soon. Check out
Notion on Google Chrome desktop, Safari, or iPhone.

Copy and paste this link into a supported browser to continue:

[https://www.notion.so/](https://www.notion.so/)

~~~
viraptor
Right, didn't realise the link here is for early-access (works), not homepage
(doesn't).

~~~
giancarlostoro
I should of clarified I was referring to the homepage showing that.

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psadri
This reminds me of hypercard!

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athenot
True, though this is closer to OpenDoc which was document-centric: a document
would contain widgets from a variety of components, in contrast to an app
being a silo for data it created.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc)

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zacwest
Sounds like this is an early revision:

> You are looking at Notion 0.5. We are working hard on the 1.0 that would
> have a lot more ideas flushed out. Stay tuned, and thank you for your
> feedback.

[http://www.producthunt.com/tech/notion-4#comment-147200](http://www.producthunt.com/tech/notion-4#comment-147200)

~~~
thanatropism
> ideas flushed out.

So there are too many ideas as it is?

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theon144
Yes, thank you! I can't try this yet since I only have Firefox at this
machine, but alternative note-taking and rethinking computer documents is
something I've long waited for.

If anyone knows of any similarly "different" projects, please tell me!

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Keats
This looks amazing and the onboarding process is really good.

I wanted to have a block based editor for a project but it felt a bit daunting
as this was not the main part of that project.

Did you use anything for the wysiwyg or are you just using execCommand?

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97-109-107
Obligatory reference to Xandu and Ted Nelson has to be dropped here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

Very pretty

~~~
TuringTest
I think web content creation tools are converging towards the classic notions
of hypertext, just like modern programming languages are converging towards
what was possible in LISP (but with better^H^H^H^H^H^H syntax) ;-)

These tools are lacking in end-user scriptability though. Something like
kimonolabs.com or transformy.io, combined with a WYSIWYM outliner like this,
could be the next HyperCards, yet no one (else) has made that connection -
yet.

I have ideas on how it should work and put to good use, but I don't have the
chops to build it myself.

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Numberwang
I love it.

This is what Dropbox notes should have been, but failed to realize.

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look_lookatme
Has notes been released?

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Numberwang
Nope, but I have access to the beta.

