How are you finding Notebooks? I have dabbled and it seems appealing but does not get a ton of love/attention.
I use it every day, and itās working well for me. I just upgraded to v2. One of the highest forms of praise that can be given to a piece of software or hardware is I donāt think about it. I just dump things into it, search for things, wonder why I didnāt put things into it, etc. It has lots of features I donāt use, such as tasks management, eBook creation, LaTeX export, etc. (Reading the help intro, looks like some things I should look into, lol.) Another thing to love is it uses regular files, rather than a database.
Itās basically my lab notebook / research log.
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Does it use the same linking format as the Archive?
Yes, it uses WikiLinks-style links
[[Note filename]]
Thereās a nice Keyboard Maestro macro for doing automatic lookups for The Archive, which should work on Notebooks too.
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If anybody is interested in Roam, I built two custom CSS themes to adjust the look of it. I posted it on reddit first. The require the Stylus extension in Chrome or Firefox. To be fair, I have no idea what I am doing. 
. I am a historian who loves my gadgets.
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Thanks for the mention of stylus, @Robertson.historian!
I now (finally) have a more pleasant looking MPU discourse!
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I was just starting to play with Roam and really like what it can do, but Iām not sure I personally can justify $15/mo for it. Sad day.
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Believable?
Wait and see.
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Been using roam for about six weeks, started slow, actually signed up back in January. Must say for how I work, total disaster, all over the place clearly adhd, roam has become indispensable. I use DEVONthink to organize all my files but now all text notes go into roam. What I really want is to find and easy solution to export to pdf from roam. Any ideas, for a semi tech literate person? As to cost I could easily justIfy 15-20 a month, but feel 12 monthly or 120 a year is the right sweet spot for where the product is right now.
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Conor was trolling Twitter (yes, slightly arrogant). Though that pricing is still the thought from the developers. 50% off for developers and developing world pricing on a case-by-case basis.
@PC1 My workflow is the same.
If I were to export from Roam to get to PDF, I would use my TextSoap cleaner to strip the formatting into plain text, then use my markdown editor to render using Marked 2, with output to PDF.
EDIT: For academics (not developers).
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Very interesting approach to marketing 
How do you backup your Roam data, @Robertson.historian? I am nervous about them losing my notes (as they donāt seem to tout ANY security for your data!) I want to start a daily backup practice also! Thanks.
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I export in markdown and json twice a day and hold files on my backup drive.
Worse-comes-to-worse though is that selective import is hard at this time - or just cumbersome.
I bought Nat Eliasonās course on Roam, just squeaking in under the wire for Roam credit. I think it was worth the cost. It is valuable to me to see how other people process and store information. Eliason also does a quick demo of PARA from Forteās building a second brain course.
He also sells his notes for 250+ books, which Iām considering buying as well. My thinking is that it will be valuable to see what someone else has taken from the books Iāve read (and largely forgotten), what he considered valuable in the book, how the notes are written, etc.
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I second that, the course was fantastic.
After moving notes systems every few years I finally figured out that hierarchical system is broken. You have to burn the ships every couple years because it just gets out of control (at least I have to).
This is totally different, more in line with how your brain works. This is the most powerful software I have found since discovering Notion last year (which I still use but for document type stuff, workflows, and SOPs)
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Yes - their whole approach has been āinterestingā:
- Cultivated the āRoamcultā - makes you feel youāre part of something āspecialā
- Development map (seems to be) based on whatever nerdy hacks gain some kind of traction within the cult
- āToo cool for schoolā tweeting as a substitute for actual announcements
- Nods and winks instead of clear statements
At present, it seems to be working for them - lots of users, lots of profile. I think things will change when 2 things happen:
- They start charging. As well as possibly dropping many users who are happy to play for free, theyāll be challenged to define and support the service for which theyāre charging.
- Serious non-hacky people have serious data in Roam - when you want to focus on work, not on finding hip little hacks to shore up your workflow, you become more exacting in your demands.
I think theyāre having a great trip right now; I hope they can manage a transition to a more commercial model.
As to the pricing - they ran a survey asking what people would pay - and you got a bonus if you picked $15/month. So thereās a risk theyāve set that price based on offering kids sweeties if they tick $15.
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Hereās the story behind Chapter Oneās recent investment in Roam.
I didnāt see trolling, and it wasnāt the first time the official Roam Account (and not just Conor) stated $180/yr pricing for end users. That pricing was noted several weeks ago. But I never read about a discount for developers, only āacademicsā. Though perhaps there was trolling back in January when Conor floated a price of $30/month.
https://twitter.com/RoamResearch/status/1250107036970315779
Sadly, I think that this cultish atmosphere (the company even promotes tweets with the juvenile hashtag #roamcult) is not going to help them much once we see a real pricing model and all the freeloaders scurry away. Conor is also retweeting fanboys who post silly things like, āā¦itās the first (or one of the first) to actually inspire new activities that can rewire usā¦You are witnessing their invention of new thought processes. Roam usage being both confusing and engaging is why it may give us new tools for thought.ā And Conor himself says things like journaling in Roam āhelps you DO SCIENCE on your life and relationshipsā (his emphasis, not mine) - whatever that means.
Already there are competing open source alternatives to Roam using free Wiki software, in which you can control your own data and not depend on Roamās cloud. This is an important distinction because as of yet Roam does not have an automatic backup solution.
Roam has some intriguing features, especially the bidirectional links, so you can see all the other things that are linking to something youāre in. (eg a meeting can be listed under a contract entry, and vice versa, and you donāt have to click to see context info, or even edit it.) But these features mean a lot of lock-in, for a new product with limited resources and unknown futureā¦ especially if pricing tosses it into a niche category.
I love outliners, and bidirectional links like these really float my boat, but I have no confidence in the current management, or the safety/security of my data, or any ease in pulling out interlinked info in the future in a way that makes all the files comprehensible. Iād be happy to see it turn into a great product but itās still a 0.9 product in many ways and I shudder at the thought of this being built on Clojure, which is a Lisp implementation on top of Java.
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Obsidian is invite-only, alpha software - barely worth discussing at this point. And the $240/yr pricing is for a team-collaboration tier that hardly anyone will choose, which Erica the dev acknowledged recently on Reddit.
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