[HN Gopher] How Roam Research analyzes product design and team b...
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How Roam Research analyzes product design and team building
Author : jeffmorrisjr
Score : 43 points
Date : 2020-05-08 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thetwentyminutevc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thetwentyminutevc.com)
| ThalesX wrote:
| My antivirus went red.
|
| >> We blocked this phishing page for your protection:
|
| >> https://thetwentyminutevc.com/
| karl11 wrote:
| Roam Research is awesome. The lack of pretension around structure
| and hierarchy of your data is so refreshing. I have used Notion
| extensively and still think Notion is superior as a place to
| house canonical unstructured data for groups. But for
| individuals, RR is A+. Coming from nvALT + Drafts which I still
| use on mobile and then copy into Roam later.
| lukevp wrote:
| I've been using Roam some, and it feels mostly like a personal
| wiki with markdown, and the pages generate automatically based on
| the notes entered. I like the functionality, but it's not
| optimized for the way I take notes or think about most concepts.
|
| I've spent years trying different tools to organize information,
| and none of them feel tailored to my note taking approach. I want
| something that is light weight, works on every device, syncs
| immediately, works offline, and functions more like a traditional
| notebook (focus on creating notes as quickly as possible) while
| providing just enough tagging and query support to easily find
| what I need later. Nothing strikes that perfect balance for me,
| so I started on my own platform.
|
| I plan to launch soon, but if anyone is interested in alpha
| access and would like to give me feedback prior to launch, I
| would love to hear from you. Contact info in profile!
| gatleon wrote:
| I've been using Roam daily for the last month. What I like
| about Roam is the markdown, the ease of creating bidirectional
| links, and the automatic daily notes. The daily notes feature
| particularly eliminates friction for me. I just start writing.
|
| What I don't like about Roam is its slow load time. Also
| writing does not feel snappy enough - if that makes any sense.
| I feel a slight delay at times between typing a key and seeing
| the character on screen. Every time that happens I like Roam a
| little less. I've never experienced that with an app like
| iaWriter, and as a result, even for all its lack of features,
| every time I use iaWriter I like it a little more.
|
| I think what Roam is missing for me, besides improving the
| writing performance, is a weekly email digest somehow
| summarizing my notes. This could use the bidirectional links
| and give me a quick overview of what I wrote for the week. That
| would help improve my memory and be more introspective.
| lukevp wrote:
| I agree. A note taking app should be high performance and low
| friction for entering notes, this is one of the key uses of
| this type of app. If you are walking down a hallway with a
| coworker and they mention something you'd like to take a note
| for, the app you use should be fast enough that you can
| quickly jot that down. If you feel the need to hold the data
| in your mind or write it on paper because your app is too
| hard to use, then it's not fast enough.
|
| However, entering notes should also include enough markup to
| allow quick recall of data at a later date and hopefully
| allow some intelligence in grouping and analyzing the data
| (much like your request for digest summaries).
|
| If you haven't already, please send me an e-mail so I can
| send you the info for the alpha, it's a good balance of what
| you mentioned!
| sgarman wrote:
| It actually used to be really fast - obviously they are
| dealing with massive growth performance pains.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Every time I read about Roam it sounds like the same note-
| taking system I've built for myself. I just use a couple of
| Bash scripts with light text editor integration on top. (The
| Bash is so I can quickly add the same features to whatever
| text editor I'm using, today that's VSCode and Vim, but I
| setup Emacs at one point too. It's mainly just keyboard
| shortcuts that call the Bash scripts.)
|
| The basic features are taking a default Markdown mode and
| adding:
|
| 1. Follow a link to a relative file at the cursor
|
| 2. Make a link to a relative file out of the selected text
| (e.g., "my big idea" becomes `[my big idea](my-big-idea.md)`
|
| Daily notes is just open a text file with the current date.
| (This doesn't include back links or transclusion, but I don't
| think those are make or break features either?)
|
| All in all this is pretty trivial to add to an existing text
| editor, and if you do, you get all the power of that text
| editor: E.g., the best search, comparison, and split view
| systems anywhere. Plus the longevity of plain text.
|
| I can see the appeal of Roam, especially for audiences that
| aren't already using an extensible text editors. But for
| people that do already use extensible text editors, I'm
| surprised there's not more discussion about how easy these
| features are to add.
| crixlet wrote:
| the digest is a neat idea. have you seen some of the roam
| spaced-repetition approaches?
|
| they are apparently working on improving the slow load time
| and also closing down new signups
| infogulch wrote:
| What I like about Roam is that it doesn't really proscribe a
| particular note-taking system at all. It's mostly four main
| features in my mind: free text documents with a natural
| hierarchy, very easy to create references to other documents,
| automatic back-references when you go to a referenced page, and
| truly embedded sub-documents that can be put into any other
| document where edits for that sub-document are propagated
| everywhere its been embedded. And a ton of UX polish.
|
| What I'm missing the most from it is self-hosting, large file
| support, full point-in-time history, and programmatic access. I
| want it to be self-hosted because I don't want to lose my
| "second brain" just because some company couldn't find a viable
| business model and went belly up 20 years from now. I want
| large file support so I can put everything in my life in it:
| pictures, videos, pdfs, web page archive files, source code etc
| and I don't want to pay uber-$$$ to store huge files in their
| cloud. And I'd like programmatic access so I can make my own
| additions. For example, every link/bookmark I add could
| download the webpage and cache it so I can search its content
| and so it's not lost when the website changes owners.
| lukevp wrote:
| My app is structured in a way that self-hosting would be easy
| to add in the future, as well as programmatic access. Large
| file support will be included after the alpha period, it will
| be billed by usage tiers in the cloud version but I could
| envision a self-hosted version that would let you store
| whatever. I'm also building it in an extensible way with the
| plan to add hooks to act on note data. Please reach out if
| you'd like to try the alpha, I'll be launching it in the next
| week and then proceeding to a beta hopefully in the next
| month or so.
| vimota wrote:
| This sounds exciting! I'm having the same problem: I really
| like Roam's workflow/network structure, but want a Bear app
| version of it (polished, native, etc).
| alexktz wrote:
| If it's self-hostable, yes please.
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