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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I was just looking up how to insert PDFs into one note and was shocked at how terrible it was. You have to do some bullshit Print to OneNote, which just inserts each PDF as a page in your section.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
For us, it was built using two linked jQuery Sortable lists (the sidebar, and the actual content). It's easier than it sounds, especially with Angular :)
For "WYSIWYG" content editing, ProseMirror looks like the best implementation so far [1]. Pure JS editor without the buggy contenteditable stuff. I'm sure that it can be extended to support other "rich" objects such as todo lists.
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...
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.
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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This is a whole lot better than a few other (ehem, Google. And, yes, MS, 15 years ago.)
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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/