But its evolution of the initial backlinks implementation is the point! As I’d predicted, many devs are progressing, in fits and starts, to replicate the general features of RR. At the rate of development, I wouldn’t be surprised if a more established developer or two came up with some interesting advancements on it as well.
I’ve been playing with Dynalist for a few hours today. It’s quite nice as a basic free outliner, the pro version adds calendar sync, backups and other features (for too much $$ IMO), and the use of backlinks is intriguing. Still wedded to OmniOutliner, but between Dynalist and Obsidian the dev has some intriguing writing tools.
I liked the look of the app. Yes it was unique but the dev ghosted on users with no notice, shut his site and went back to his day job. For longer-form tree-like writing you could approximate it with a right-branching mindmap app, or an app like Gingko.
Of course it and OO have nothing to do with Roam or any of the backlink apps this thread is focused on. I’d switch from OO to a backlink-feature app like Dynalist only if I though I really could derive significant benefit from the backlinks. I’m just not sure at this time that I can for my work.
They also offer a 50% discount to students, renewable yearly. But their payment apparatus was so creaky that, at least in 2018, existing users couldn’t take advantage of the Black Friday deal without first canceling their subscriptions then resubscribing.
And their deal timing is wacky - they offered a deal on Black Friday 2018 but not until 55 weeks later in 2019, which of course resulted in some people resubscribing only to be annoyed by having overpaid by $48 by not letting their subscription lapse a couple of weeks.
Anyway, $96 is too much for the product, I think, at least for me. If they wanted to make it a permanent 50% cut year-round without playing games I might be more interested. Checkvist is a longtime competitor and is only $39/year, year-round, and like Dynalist has a free tier.
I agree. I think their team comprises 2 people so some whackiness sometimes occurs. But it is my favourite outliner and they are very responsive and always working on the app. The full price is high, but if you catch the discount, it is worth it.
As great as Bear is, this has nothing to do with what Roam is doing with bidirectional links. To me, the magic starts where you can embed a whole paragraph, and then edit it in the new context, either saving a version of the block or changing all linked blocks at once .
That said, it really depends on your needs. I love the nested tagging idea in bear as a base structure! The output options are also one of the nicest!
Well, not nothing. But my point (posted over this 400-post-so-far thread) has been to periodically point out the inevitable, incremental addition of Roam-like capabilities like backlinks to existing and new apps.
I don’t use Bear, and the added features are nice but haven’t initiated a Siren’s call to come to it yet.
I think the people behind Dynalist are also making Obisdian, which has a much better payment model.
Also, RAPID development - they’re clearly working hard.
Another Roam-like notetaking app, storing files at Github: https://logseq.com/
Unfortunately attributes and attr-tables are apparently missing, two functions I often use with Roam.
Yup. The cult thing is a liiiiittle immature. Last week I tried out Obsidian in earnest and was pretty frustrated by the basic Text entry incosistencies. I love Roam for enabling to indent blocks without requiring to be at the start of the first line, and that a tab always means indent and not start a code block on anything else. Obsidian in comparison still feels very rough at the edges. While I enjoyed having local files and the obvious advantages, I was still missing forwarding thoughts to a later date and have it appear on that day and the overall robustness of the entry in Roam.
The interface is highly flexible and adaptable for both, but at the core Roam is an outliner and Obsidian is a Markdown text editor with outlining features. In spite of Roam adding further export options in the future and Obsidian adding block references (which also are kinda hacky).
Interesting take on it. I have not played with Roam at all but I don’t consider Obsidian to be a markdown text editor at all. I see Obsidian as file linking system that happens to be using Markdown files but it’s more a modification of a file cabinet to me. In fact so far I haven’t entered in any of my notes actually in Obsidian as in typing them in as a note there. They have come in via other methods and might get modifications and links added in Obsidian but OS is not the source of the data.
Back in the day, I was the substitute teacher for the Spring term of high school physics and talked the school into buying a classroom set of slide rules so I could teach their use. Apparently I was already a tech dinosaur. These days, my old Pickett doesn’t get much use anymore but still hangs proudly on my wall.
Well over a year since @JohnAtl made this post, 380 replies and a lot of passionate opinions. I’m wondering who here ended up with Roam, and who settled on other solutions. Since we started this discussion many other apps have come forward with their takes on bidirectional linking, including venerable applications like TheBrain.
I initially subscribed to Roam on a month to month basis, until after a few months I was questioning the value, given the rapid development of cheaper or free alternatives. I switched to Obsidian. Unfortunately the result for me was I just stopped taking notes. The friction was too high and I hated the edit toggle dance. I also hated having to use a kludge workaround on my iPad.
So for now I have jumped back to Roam with a year’s subscription (locking in a current good exchange rate), and immediately I am taking notes on everything again. So I am happy - how is everyone else?
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