Hypernotes by Zenkit looks like an interesting addition to the Roam-like space. It’s not as hackable as many of the other direct Roam competitors, but may well have appeal to anyone who wants Roam-esque features in a cross-platform package and isn’t particularly interested in modding anything. Linked pages, block level references, tasks, knowledge graphs, publishable pages, collaboration, etc etc. The iOS app has a few small bugs and it isn’t as polished out of the gate as Craft, but it bears some investigation.
If you’re already in the Zenkit ecosystem, this might be even more interesting.
Dashword is an interesting take on the outliner paradigm. Think outliner + columns. At the moment, most of what I can think of using it to do I can probably do with iThoughts, though I could imagine holding onto it in my “utility” stack and making use of it for planning when an alternative interface might help shake some thinking loose. Either way, I’ll be keeping an eye on its development…
@jsamlarose Thanks for constantly popping in with knowledge I didn’t know I was looking for!
Hypernotes brings up the part that I definitely feel is missing from my current setup, task management. I would love a tool that would hook into task managers (or just Apple Reminders) and even do deferring of tasks across files.
Happy to know that my pastime of aimlessly trialling apps like this is useful to someone!
Curious about your use case. I think my mind doesn’t do so well with apps that offer serious note-taking and task management all in the same space (at least it doesn’t seem so with the various experiments I’ve conducted) but, as I think you’re suggesting, tight integration is really useful invaluable. What’s your current set-up?
I haven’t fully wrapped my head around this yet, but Hypernotes has built-in task management that’s closely integrated with the notes you’d store in there, but also integrates with Zenkit Base and Zenkit To Do? Sounds like maybe a few too many layers of possible abstraction, but if it’s possible to cobble things together in intuitive ways, it could be a pretty powerful system to work with…
Zenkit Hypernotes: another app with the pretension that linking together blocks of words results in “knowledge”.
Stop writing notes.
Start creating knowledge.
Everything is connected. So is your knowledge: It forms a network. With Hypernotes you easily create a semantic network of your knowledge. The result? Less text, but more understanding.
having tasks I’m doing today be separate from things I need to do in the future (this is super awesome. I’ve literally felt stress melt off when I’ve forgotten to put things in Things, spread it out over the next week and realize I only have 1 thing to do that day)
Dislikes
having to look in so many places to know what’s going on. The idea of a daily note is intriguing since it allows for reflection/linking on the tasks themselves in addition to just checking them off
Having to manually create calendar events for time blocking (I’ve been seriously considering building a KM macro or even full application that would make this nice)
I do agree though about the tight integration often not working the way I’d like. I’ve also considered building a hazel like daemon for managing backlinks, auto generating reminders, etc that way there’s a looser coupling of things. More like automatically syncing separate apps but using the one that is best for the current task.
You know, I think I’ve been desensitised. I glossed right over that description! Went straight to test the app out for myself rather than reading the claims. Once I can glean a basic sense of the feature-set enough to determine whether it’s anything I might be interested in, I’m generally more interested in how the thing actually works than the superpowers anyone claims it has…
I’m thinking it’d be useful if the sample notebook that gets created when a new user first sets up an account is a set of Andy Matuschak or Anne-Laure Le Cunff notes on networked thinking or evergreen notes…
Daily note: For a while I used to run a Shortcut that collated all of my tasks, actions and links to any notes for the day into a single draft. I found that useful while I did it, but it didn’t stick. For me, there’s a sweet spot between too much and too little information. Being able to compartmentalise, and taking the time to move between my morning note, my calendar and my task list (GoodTask) has its own value.
Also, since GoodTask can show calendar items and reminders in the same list, it’s been more about making a note of what’s at the top of my mind at the top of the day, then jumping to my “Today” list in GoodNote to review whatever’s been scheduled. Seems to be working.
KM macros sound like a good move. I think that kind of automation is the glue that holds things together for those of us that work in this way. For me, Drafts’ actions are a boon. Now that I’m back on macOS part of the time (as opposed to being pretty much iOS exclusive), I greatly appreciate that Drafts my iOS workflows function in the same way on my MacBook, but also rediscovering Alfred and all it can do.
Funnily enough, this was the subject of a bit of systems thinking this morning.
I write and capture in Drafts; plan, organise and index/connect thinking/knowledge in iThoughts; schedule in Calendars 5; queue and review actions and projects in GoodTask; store files in Dropbox and iCloud; store primary references in DEVONthink (in the process of shifting over from Evernote), and second-tier references in Raindrop. Might sound like a lot, but the stack serves my needs well.
I’m usually pretty good for knowing where to search for what I’m looking for, but I dream of being able to search for anything via one tool/interface. That should probably be Spotlight… and maybe it is on macOS (I’m readjusting my usage balance after being almost exclusively iOS for the past few years). Or maybe Alfred? Rustem suggested Raindrop’s Spotlight integration would be available in the summer of 2019. That’d help a lot on iOS. Fingers still crossed…
Good take. Hypernotes is one of the closest Roam clones I’ve tried. Definitely a more enterprise level take, and I like they have 2FA and clearer privacy practices.
I have lots of questions though I respect it’s suddenly appeared. I’m not overly familiar with ZenKit, so I’m curious if you have to be a full user to take advantage of the ‘integrations’ it’s settings mentions? I’d like to use Dropbox, for example, as file integration. Speaking of which, how do I get data in and out? I didn’t see options for either. It has bad quirks like not updating links throughout your system if you change the title on it’s Page. Not least, does it actually lack a keyboard shortcut to immediately go to a search/creation entry? Maybe I was missing it but wow that would be an awful small thing.
That’s all short impressions, I could be missing the answers to all of that and maybe there’s an easy way to get answers that I didn’t see on a weekend. I just like to try these apps out too in a hobby-ish way.
The way I work, primary references = content in my system (documents/files, captured text); secondary references = useful information/references hosted elsewhere. So my Raindrop account holds links to apps that might be useful to reference some day, sites for grants and funding resources, artists/writers/musicians whose work I admire, cheat sheets for scripting languages, and a range of other stuff. It’s a bit of a mess in there, to be fair accumulated over years (I’ve imported all of my bookmarks right the way back to the Delicious days). I waver between thinking I should tidy it up and thinking that it’s not worth the effort as long as I can find what I want by searching.
More succinctly: primary = content stored in my system; secondary = references I’m happy to access via URLs (hosted elsewhere).
Makes sense. I have the occasional ambition to just save links to everything I read on the Internet, in case it’s useful. Raindrop might be useful for that – assuming it’s even a good idea at all.
Ahhh. Yes. For me, the vast majority of what I want to read online is filtered through Reeder. As I read something, I can then promote it to either “this is really useful, and I want to make notes on it,” in which case I’ll often capture blocks to individual notes in Drafts; or: “I might want to refer to this at some point in the future,” in which case it’ll probably get a link in Raindrop. But even if it doesn’t trigger any further action, it’s still stored in my Reeder archive, so if I ever have a moment of “what was that item I read on non-fungible tokens last week that I didn’t think was important then but now want refer to again” I know I’ve got a good chance of finding it there.
that way there’s a looser coupling of things. More like automatically syncing separate apps but using the one that is best for the current task.