3 ms·

I'll throw Notion (https://notion.so/ https://notion.so/) into the mix here, as an (as far as I can tell far more full-featured) alternative to this. I've used

by tekacs 10y ago

I'll throw Notion (https://notion.so/ https://notion.so/) into the mix here, as an (as far as I can tell far more full-featured) alternative to this. I've used Paper a number of times, starting from long before Notion was a thing, having been a happy Etherpad and Hackpad user in the past. Somehow Paper managed to inspire less in my collaborators than either the latter services (where perhaps plain text was the factor) or than Notion (the reaction of almost everyone I've shown it to has been amazement and excitement). Since this is the second time I'm mentioning Notion here, I'll reiterate that I'm not affiliated - just a happy customer.

5_minutes 10y ago
Notion looks really good, I am going to give it a go. What I like especially is that for a small 3 person team, just starting, it's price friendly. This in contrary to many other similar apps.
acchow 10y ago
Looking at the landing page, I have built some hypothetical mental model on how to use the app and its feature, but it's mostly guessing - it would be awesome if they put up a video showcasing real-world usage and features. "Task Board, Design Specs, Knowledge Base, Coding Docs, Team Handbook, Roadmap" - are these possible use-cases of the system? Or are they disparate document types? You create a document and pick one of these types which determines its features and layout? "lets you nest pages inside each other" - does this mean hyperlinking? "No more markup" - so WYSIWYG, just like Google Docs, Quip, MS Office, etc? "Love using Trello" - I don't know what Trello is. There's Slack notifications, but can you @tag people?
- tekacs 10y ago
  Use cases, kinda, yes, https://trello.com/ https://trello.com/, yes. I started explaining all of these in depth, but aspects of it would take an order of magnitude more text to explain than they would to simply experience first-hand - I'd encourage you to instead simply try out the first page of the demo experience, which I think would be dramatically more information-packed.
- chipx86 10y ago
  I'll try to give a bit of an overview to help answer the first three questions. In Notion, all your documents are basically a big nested hierarchy of pages. Pages (generally) exist within another page, rather than simply being linked to (though you can link to pages in a different part of the hierarchy through either their URLs or by aliasing the page, letting a document live in more than one part of the tree at once). By nesting the pages, you get a nice table of contents in the sidebar. Pages are composed of "blocks". These are just page elements, and most of these are the kinds of things you'd expect to see in a document (paragraphs, images, sections, bullet lists, etc.). There are some special ones, like TeX equations, inline discussion forums, and other things, but these are entirely optional. Unlike a document in Word/Google Docs, blocks are more of a real entity that you'd interact with. For example, you can select a whole block (and any children) at once, drag-and-drop them elsewhere in the document (even to the left or right of other blocks, creating columns), link to them, and even transform them into other types of blocks (like bullet lists to numbered lists). Pages themselves are actually a kind of block, which is neat. Let's say you have a giant page full of content, and you want to split out some of the sections in the page and put them in their own page. Simply click the block options for that section and choose "Turn Into -> Page", and now it's a new page linked where the section used to be, at the right place in the hierarchy. Task Boards, Design Specs, etc. are really just templates. They're nothing special. You can make them by hand if you want to, or change them however you want. They're really just there to help you get going if you have use of them. No different than templates in Work, Excel, etc. As far as WYSIWYG goes, since you're dealing with these page elements (bullet points, section headers, etc.), it really is pretty much WYSIWYG. You can select text or a header or whatever and change the styling a bit (colors, sizes, fonts, all to a limited degree). Along with that, though, there's a form of Markdown processing. These are really more like keyboard shortcuts, though. Type "# " to get a section. Enclose something in backticks to make it appear as code. "* " for a bullet list. Things like that. It's not a full Markdown engine, though. There are a few bugs with some of these shortcuts, but they mostly work. Editing in Notion is definitely a bit different, because you're kinda forced to think about blocks and hierarchy a bit more, but they've improved much of this over the past couple of months to make it more natural to work with. They've been hard at work with improvements, from the looks of it, so I'm expecting a lot of this to really improve more going forward.
primitivesuave 10y ago
I second the recommendation for Notion - such a beautiful and fast interface. It is lacking some Trello features needed in my workplace, but it's really great for personal note-taking.
tnorthcutt 10y ago
I've looked at Notion a few times, and it looks really impressive. It also looks really overwhelming – almost too many features/capabilities, so it's hard to know how it would fit into what I currently do, or what tools I should replace with it. But maybe that means I'm not the right customer for it :)
- tekacs 10y ago
  For better or worse, I replaced /most-all/ of them with it: :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796027 A few months later, I'm still using it in place of most other tools that I had been using, with the exception that for lack of an API or good way of pulling the very rich content out, I still use Google Keep for very plain text notes.
eslaught 10y ago
I just tried this in the browser and I can't get autofocus to work (Firefox 51 on Linux). Every time I hit enter for a new paragraph I need to click on it to be able to type again. Needless to say, a very dissatisfying experience. Though I can imagine it being nice if the auto-focus actually worked. I sent them a bug report, we'll see if they fix it.
chipx86 10y ago
Another happy customer here. We started off with Hackpad and used that for years, and tried moving to Dropbox Paper when Hackpad was end-of-lifed. While a good product, it wasn't really good enough for what we needed. We were using Hackpad like a wiki, and Paper just wasn't (at the time, at least) built to really be effective for public content like that. We moved to Notion, and while it's certainly more complex in what it can do, it's met our needs far better than Paper and even Hackpad have. Notion continues to improve pretty much constantly (I get excited when I get the blue banner at the top of the UI saying there are new updates), and the people we've interacted with there have been fantastic. It's not perfect, but they've been hammering out the major bugs and shortcomings we hit when we first started, and recently pushed a big update that improved how free/paid teams work, added namespaces for pages, and a handful of other improvements here and there. We have a lot of content in Notion now, and it's been pretty easy to keep that updated and to jump around. (The native Mac app has helped a lot with that as well.) (Also not in any way affiliated. Just another happy customer.)
mdonahoe 10y ago
What is going to happen to my docs when they get acquired and shutdown? Can I export?

by tekacs 10y ago

5_minutes 10y ago

Notion looks really good, I am going to give it a go. What I like especially is that for a small 3 person team, just starting, it's price friendly. This in contrary to many other similar apps.

acchow 10y ago

Looking at the landing page, I have built some hypothetical mental model on how to use the app and its feature, but it's mostly guessing - it would be awesome if they put up a video showcasing real-world usage and features. "Task Board, Design Specs, Knowledge Base, Coding Docs, Team Handbook, Roadmap" - are these possible use-cases of the system? Or are they disparate document types? You create a document and pick one of these types which determines its features and layout? "lets you nest pages inside each other" - does this mean hyperlinking? "No more markup" - so WYSIWYG, just like Google Docs, Quip, MS Office, etc? "Love using Trello" - I don't know what Trello is. There's Slack notifications, but can you @tag people?

tekacs 10y ago
Use cases, kinda, yes, https://trello.com/ https://trello.com/, yes. I started explaining all of these in depth, but aspects of it would take an order of magnitude more text to explain than they would to simply experience first-hand - I'd encourage you to instead simply try out the first page of the demo experience, which I think would be dramatically more information-packed.
chipx86 10y ago
I'll try to give a bit of an overview to help answer the first three questions. In Notion, all your documents are basically a big nested hierarchy of pages. Pages (generally) exist within another page, rather than simply being linked to (though you can link to pages in a different part of the hierarchy through either their URLs or by aliasing the page, letting a document live in more than one part of the tree at once). By nesting the pages, you get a nice table of contents in the sidebar. Pages are composed of "blocks". These are just page elements, and most of these are the kinds of things you'd expect to see in a document (paragraphs, images, sections, bullet lists, etc.). There are some special ones, like TeX equations, inline discussion forums, and other things, but these are entirely optional. Unlike a document in Word/Google Docs, blocks are more of a real entity that you'd interact with. For example, you can select a whole block (and any children) at once, drag-and-drop them elsewhere in the document (even to the left or right of other blocks, creating columns), link to them, and even transform them into other types of blocks (like bullet lists to numbered lists). Pages themselves are actually a kind of block, which is neat. Let's say you have a giant page full of content, and you want to split out some of the sections in the page and put them in their own page. Simply click the block options for that section and choose "Turn Into -> Page", and now it's a new page linked where the section used to be, at the right place in the hierarchy. Task Boards, Design Specs, etc. are really just templates. They're nothing special. You can make them by hand if you want to, or change them however you want. They're really just there to help you get going if you have use of them. No different than templates in Work, Excel, etc. As far as WYSIWYG goes, since you're dealing with these page elements (bullet points, section headers, etc.), it really is pretty much WYSIWYG. You can select text or a header or whatever and change the styling a bit (colors, sizes, fonts, all to a limited degree). Along with that, though, there's a form of Markdown processing. These are really more like keyboard shortcuts, though. Type "# " to get a section. Enclose something in backticks to make it appear as code. "* " for a bullet list. Things like that. It's not a full Markdown engine, though. There are a few bugs with some of these shortcuts, but they mostly work. Editing in Notion is definitely a bit different, because you're kinda forced to think about blocks and hierarchy a bit more, but they've improved much of this over the past couple of months to make it more natural to work with. They've been hard at work with improvements, from the looks of it, so I'm expecting a lot of this to really improve more going forward.

primitivesuave 10y ago

I second the recommendation for Notion - such a beautiful and fast interface. It is lacking some Trello features needed in my workplace, but it's really great for personal note-taking.

tnorthcutt 10y ago

I've looked at Notion a few times, and it looks really impressive. It also looks really overwhelming – almost too many features/capabilities, so it's hard to know how it would fit into what I currently do, or what tools I should replace with it. But maybe that means I'm not the right customer for it :)

tekacs 10y ago
For better or worse, I replaced /most-all/ of them with it: :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796027 A few months later, I'm still using it in place of most other tools that I had been using, with the exception that for lack of an API or good way of pulling the very rich content out, I still use Google Keep for very plain text notes.

eslaught 10y ago

I just tried this in the browser and I can't get autofocus to work (Firefox 51 on Linux). Every time I hit enter for a new paragraph I need to click on it to be able to type again. Needless to say, a very dissatisfying experience. Though I can imagine it being nice if the auto-focus actually worked. I sent them a bug report, we'll see if they fix it.

chipx86 10y ago

Another happy customer here. We started off with Hackpad and used that for years, and tried moving to Dropbox Paper when Hackpad was end-of-lifed. While a good product, it wasn't really good enough for what we needed. We were using Hackpad like a wiki, and Paper just wasn't (at the time, at least) built to really be effective for public content like that. We moved to Notion, and while it's certainly more complex in what it can do, it's met our needs far better than Paper and even Hackpad have. Notion continues to improve pretty much constantly (I get excited when I get the blue banner at the top of the UI saying there are new updates), and the people we've interacted with there have been fantastic. It's not perfect, but they've been hammering out the major bugs and shortcomings we hit when we first started, and recently pushed a big update that improved how free/paid teams work, added namespaces for pages, and a handful of other improvements here and there. We have a lot of content in Notion now, and it's been pretty easy to keep that updated and to jump around. (The native Mac app has helped a lot with that as well.) (Also not in any way affiliated. Just another happy customer.)

mdonahoe 10y ago

What is going to happen to my docs when they get acquired and shutdown? Can I export?