Thanks to @Robertson.historian, and others for discussion. It seems like RR deserves its own thread.
There is a fantastic write up about Roam, and the paradigms used (Daily Notes, Graph Overviews, Shortcuts, Bidirectional Links, etc.) on Reddit (link below). It includes several note taking concepts and a system I havenāt heard of before, but that sound very interesting.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Roam.
I was going all in on Tinderbox, but its WikiLinks feature is failing me and Iām losing interest in working around its shortcomings (again).
Thanks for the redirect. That reddit post is a great example of some use cases. And frankly that is my main use case. I will present a few of my own workflows and how I implement a zettlekasten soon.
Iām jumping into Roam Research with both feet, and Iām really loving it. works fine on iPad and Mac (or anywhere with a regular web browser), and mostly ok on iPhone.
itās definitely a different paradigm from anything else Iāve used.
It is by far the closest software to zettlekasten, but taken to another level since it is digital. There are so many hidden/unfinished feature that no other notes app has itās ridiculous.
I will post my own workflow soon (I am prepping for the next semester at the moment so no time yet). But it is increasingly for drafting and mapping your ideas.
Thanks for posting this reddit thread. I have started using Roam in the last week and Iām quite impressed by it. Unlike many others, I have always liked Evernote and have been since day one. I am always skeptical of apps claiming to be better, as they usually fall short for me in some way. Evernote is far from perfect though, so I continue to explore new options.
I am super impressed with Roamās ability to make connections between notes. Finding and storing notes in a folder has always been preferable to me than tagging, but links between notes of similar content can easily be missed.
Evernoteās search method has always been a huge drawback for me, whereas Roam is very simple. Iām looking forward to digging deeper and would love to hear from others using this app.
Thanks @JohnAtl. re: Cons, I saw a video or post where Conor said it would be $14/month once out of beta. That made me feel better and worse about it ā $14 is quite a bitā¦ and I did notice the braggadocio. Confidence is great, and he really seems to āgetā the elements of a great note-taking app, but I hope itās not āover-confidenceā. Time will tell. Hopefully nvUltra will be released while weāre all still alive and that may be better solution.
The big risk with Roam in its current state is that itās an in-flight development prototype, not a product. The feature set is liquid, the back-end service is not fully robust and thereās no (publicly) defined path the a production-quality service. And yet, pretty much everywhere I look, thereās someone raving about how good a solution it is.
2-3 weeks ago, a number of users lost substantial amounts of work because the Roam backend couldnāt keep up with the load and synchronisation failed. Thatās lost data when surely the absolute sine qua non of any services is that āwe wonāt lose your dataā.
And the Roam team consists of 2 people right now - with a bunch of enthusiasts offering to pitch in.
None of these needs to stop us from using it (itās not stopping me), but I do think we child be careful about comparing Conorās delightful squalling baby child to prdocyts and services that are established and are underpinned by proper support infrastructures.
I know Iām coming over like the proverbial wet blanket, but I do think thereās a degree of irresponsibility on the part of the Roam team and naivety on the part of many of the users that might bite back hard some time soon.
Well, you are @ThatGuy
Youāre absolutely right. I export to .json and .md just about every time I add something. I do think Roam should be more upfront about the (essentially) alpha status.
Well, hopefully it wonāt go the way of BitWriter.
In the meantime, The Archive is nice, and supports WikiLinks.
Someone (Will) came up with a Keyboard Maestro shortcut to do lookup for notes, type [[ and a list of notes is presented.
it is generally understood that Roam will be pricey - 30$/mo, but with discounts for select groups - researchers/academics ().
It billās its bi-directional linking as its key feature, and it is, but it has MANY features under the hood that are being deployed quickly: mindmaps, Kanban, Tables, google sheets-like calculations, etc.
itās best understood to be a merging of dynalist and Notion, with obvious major features of each missing, but remains an apt comparison. In other words, an āoutlinerā (dynalist) based on content āblocksā (Notion). With formulas and code you can mix-and-match any block with in essence any other blocks for representations of that data in a single page - which can thereby be edited/modified within that single page.
being able to have the graphical view of connections of the whole database and any single note too is quite powerful.
If you were to dig into users databases as has been shared in the slack channel and in other areas, there are some amazing examples of data manipulation and aggregation that could only be rivaled by perhaps Org-Mode or a truly maticulous The Archive zettelkasten.
Edit: perhaps not a coincidence, once Keep Productive did two videos about Roam, the next week Roam struggled to keep up with the influx of users. It is a beta, and they have been sitting on funding for a while, so it makes sense to not ramp up until you have to in the server side.
No - itās a web app only. On the Mac, you can fake a local ap with something like Unite, but all that does is wrap a Mac windows round it. Convenient for working outside your browser, but not local.
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