vaporware vā′pər-wâr″
- n.
See nvUltra.
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The big risk with Roam in its current state is that it’s an in-flight development prototype, not a product. The feature set is liquid, the back-end service is not fully robust and there’s no (publicly) defined path the a production-quality service. And yet, pretty much everywhere I look, there’s 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 couldn’t keep up with the load and synchronisation failed. That’s lost data when surely the absolute sine qua non of any services is that “we won’t lose your data”.
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 (it’s not stopping me), but I do think we child be careful about comparing Conor’s delightful squalling baby child to prdocyts and services that are established and are underpinned by proper support infrastructures.
I know I’m coming over like the proverbial wet blanket, but I do think there’s 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.
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Not really. It’s in beta – sits in my dock now. Solid; minimalist; workable; not flashy; a bit of a snore.
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Damn! If it’s not shiny and new and full of options and features, I won’t have an excuse to spend ages playing with it
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Well, you are @ThatGuy
You’re 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.
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Well, hopefully it won’t 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.
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Tinderbox does that. Not well, but it tries.
Bear does that. Quite well.
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Yep, lost lots of time going down that road.
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Nice! I haven’t looked at it since before October. Thanks!
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A few short comments:
- it is generally understood that Roam will be pricey - 30$/mo, but with discounts for select groups - researchers/academics (
). - It bill’s 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.
- it’s 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 “outliner” (dynalist) based on content “blocks” (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.
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Roam doesn’t have a native macOS or iOS app yet, does it?
No - it’s 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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No. It is next on the list (so they say). Conor claims that first they are building some function that allows a kind of offline support (I am assuming like Notion’s “offline” - which is not that solid). Then the apps are coming. Still the best method to use is chrome - cross browser support is questionable. but overwhelmingly ok.
For me, While I am 99% of the time connected in some way, I just capture/create in drafts.app for offline support, then upload to Roam. However if I am in the writing mood, you need to be connected to access all the features that assist in content creation.
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tw: subscription
Roam is doing a survey about who the users are, how much they’d be willing to pay, etc.
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And apparently the feedback was that $30 per month was not popular, so it may be cheaper. Thanks for adding your feedback guys, all very good points I think. I have continued to use it over the last couple of weeks and I enjoy some the features a lot, but I do have my reservations. Evernote is not perfect but it has never let me down. I have never lost data. I wish they would just refine the product to be robust the way it is before trying to add a heap of features that frankly I will never use. It’s great to see some innovation in this space though, hopefully the other players will continue to innovate too.
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Reading and listening to Conor (founder) it seems that his ambitions are quite high and that the product is really not in a place that aligns with his vision. In other words if you are not into a product that aligns with his vision you may want a more traditional product. The features are coming out at a breakneck pace. But I haven’t seen too many bugs, just unfinished elements. But as far as I know they are sticking with the beta for a bit longer to continue to feel out the niche they are filling.
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I agree. Roam seems to me to have a very good underlying concept without a fully thought-through development plan/roadmap. While I can see great benefits in putting the “skeleton” out there and using the experience of users to define where the product should go, there are big risks. The two that concern me most are:
- The Home Simpson car
- Over-influence by a small but voluble group of “nerdy” enthusiasts who see opportunities for tinkering. I just want to take notes. I don’t want to spend my life on Github installing and configuring little Unix packages to make incremental speed or usage improvements.
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Updates released in Tinderbox 8.6 yesterday might provide an alternative, with similar plus more features (to date) than Roam, no cloud.
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Ha! They fixed the bug I reported, gave it a name, and called it a feature.
Edit: thanks for letting me know. Maybe I’ll revisit Tinderbox again.
To reiterate. The software is not really a note-taking. Your points are totally valid. But in my experience with the founder to this point is that it is a niche product and it intends to be. So if other software fills your needs, Roam is going to be doing involved with other things. Notion, Dynalist, The Archive, The Brain and Tinderbox all have great features sets above and beyond note-taking. If those satisfy I wouldn’t go to Roam. I do find many of these features useful for me, and I will continue to play with it. And since it offers plain text (or Json) export I can make a decision when it goes commercial whether I want to stick with it. Thanks for sharing.
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