7 ms·

Show HN: Momentum – create lists to structure your thoughts and projects

44 points by r0bin 9y ago

r0bin 9y ago
Hello HN, we built this web app which enables you to structure ideas, thoughts and your projects. It offers a similar flexibility in building hierarchy as OmniFocus. Just without being tied to apple or a missing web interface. One of the main reasons why we started this project. I want to highlight one feature that I never seen anywhere else. There is no difference between tasks, projects or folders. It works based on your hierarchy, for example an idea become a project when you add a "subtask". The app has no limit on how deep you nest and offers an extra view that filter all actionable next steps out of your hierarchy. It is a progressive web app, so you are able to add it to your mobile homescreen and use it offline. You can also encrypt your data with your login password. I am excited to get your thoughts about the app or any questions.
creativeembassy 9y ago
I love OmniFocus, but have always been bothered by a lack of web interface or Android client. (I use Focus GTD as an unofficial client on Android, and it's less than perfect at best.) I've been looking for something like this. Going to try it out and hopefully provide some insight.
voiper1 9y ago
... looks nice, but I'm afraid of being stuck having to pay. Will you have a free tier..? Currently using workflowy for stuff _like_ this, but it seems your system is much more flexible.
- r0bin 9y ago
  in the event of an introduction of basic income, there will be for sure a free tier, maybe free at all :) But in the long-term we need to sustain the infrastructure costs. That depends on the feedback of how users and the community is willing to contribute to the costs or the value they have from the app. Great to hear, we still search for cases where the flexibility provided by the app is not sufficient
d--b 9y ago
My own opinion: the navigation system seems overcomplicated. I don't see this beating workflowy as it stands.
- r0bin 9y ago
  The value we see in the app navigation is the following: The navigation is separated in three broader levels. 1. The first level is everything that is relevant in the moment (Inbox, Next, Away). 2. The second level is to organize everything Idea, Project or Archive. From time perspective mostly related to the next weeks. 3. And the third level is to review your hole system. After a short time it will feel like walking through different rooms and levels in a building.
  - AndrewOMartin 9y ago
    The third level sounds rather like navel gazing.
zichy 9y ago
Seeing the demo video on your website, I really have no idea what's going on. Your navigation doesn't have to be "revolutionary", it has to work. If no one has done it before, maybe there's a good reason for that. The interface features bad contrasts (neon colors on white), thin (illegible) fonts, and too much whitespace. The category/navigation bars seem way too small. Please work on your typography.
- r0bin 9y ago
  Further design themes are planned. For now the low contrast is by design. When you enter your projects they will be displayed in high contrast. Thanks for the feedback though
  - RubenSandwich 9y ago
    Low contrast is a poor 'design decision'. You instantly cut of a percentage of your potential market by that design, such as myself. I have an eye condition that makes focusing difficult and your low contrast design makes pieces of your website completely illegible to me.
  - nrser 9y ago
    It's cool. It's creative. It's different. Things that do not often top you're typical Hacker Newsie's values list, but - hey - if making software's a means to an end I never understood why anyone would write code themselves anyways. You created something, and that's rad. Yeah, if you're trying to sell out you're doing it wrong, but sometimes I wish I had marked up my soul a little higher back in the day. It flickers and fails and stutters all over the place, but I'm in China, which tends to get a big ol' stick up in western people's "this will always load and will be pretty fast and reliable" wheel rather quickly. I can't figure out how to use it at all, but I want to.
  - zichy 9y ago
    I get that the low contrast is by design. Everything is by design, since someone once thought about everything. I don't want to be a dick about it, but texts with low contrast are almost never a good idea.
jarvuschris 9y ago
Still stuck waiting for my verification email, and it's not in spam. You should let people use your app as soon as they finish signing up. Limit functionality or disable after a grace period to enforce email verification, don't stop people during the onboarding flow and lose their interest
- r0bin 9y ago
  very sorry for that, please give us a short notice directly from the "?!" help menu in the app thanks for the advice with the grace period, good point.
sigi45 9y ago
Subscriptioncost for a todo list? With this amount of functionality? Nope sry. Don't get me wrong, i like your idea. It looks simliar what i'm already doing on paper and was planing to write somehow. But i'm not subscribing to small features and i'm guessing that it is very cheap, for that i would not give you my credit card information or not that cheap and than i don't care anymore about it.
jsnathan 9y ago
Two other nice apps in this space are Workflowy[1] and Dynalist[2]. [1]: https://workflowy.com https://workflowy.com [2]: https://dynalist.io https://dynalist.io
- jfreax 9y ago
  This seems like an interesting approach to organize data. Are there any open source implementation that I can customize myself and host on my own personal server?
  - dobin 9y ago
    i found https://rockiger.com/en/akiee/ https://rockiger.com/en/akiee/, but not web based and seems to be dead. I'm also interested in self hosted apps.
  - NickBusey 9y ago
    I have been working on this for a while, it's not quite production ready yet, but it's pretty close.. https://github.com/NickBusey/bulletnotes https://github.com/NickBusey/bulletnotes
  - murftown 9y ago
    Some assembly required, but: I have a self-hosted solution. It's in an alpha state, not ready for public consumption, but would love any feedback from people willing to try it out. Here it is: https://github.com/ryanfmurphy/db_viewer https://github.com/ryanfmurphy/db_viewer This started as a DB Admin tool ala PhpMyAdmin, but I now use it for Todo lists, tree-style mind-mapping / brainstorming, tracking finances, etc. If you give this a shot feel free to email me for help setting it up / getting the most out of it. (Email is in my profile)
- epaga 9y ago
  Also shameless plug for my iOS app Mindscope that MacStories reviewed here: https://www.macstories.net/reviews/mindscope-review/ https://www.macstories.net/reviews/mindscope-review/
- 9y ago
mezod 9y ago
I was interested until I read "revolutionary design" while having a hard time to read most of the copy of the site. There are some other major design issues on the site that you might wanna get fixed. I'm not a design geek, but text has to be readable.
- dobin 9y ago
  TBH, i'm also confused, but i didnt invest more than 2 minutes looking at it. The menu changes the location to all sides which is a bit confusing. I also added some drop's, gave it a context, now they are gone? It seems that the application is trying to help a lot, with video and the help pages etc. Which is good, but also a sign that its not very intuitive.
ricardobeat 9y ago
Scrolling momentum is broken in iOS (couldn't resist!)
t----------- 9y ago
The reception would be much improved with better visuals. I can't read anything, the launch page hurts my eyes and I don't know where to look. The gifs play too fast to understand what I'm looking at.
yellowboxtenant 9y ago
I don't know what is going on, but I appreciate the fact that it's experimenting with UI methods.
- r0bin 9y ago
  thank you for the appreciation :), new UI methods are often a challenge and risky but we believe it is a experiment worth exploring
crush-n-spread 9y ago
There's already a product called Momentum Dash[1] which is a project-organizing Chrome extension. [1] https://momentumdash.com/ https://momentumdash.com/
- dmoojunk 9y ago
  I love dash and was excited for this, but the navigation is madness. Someone let UX drive this one. Being surprised by the novelty is not a good UX experience.
scandox 9y ago
I couldn't scroll with PgDn which always make me bounce off straightaway.
tmountain 9y ago
Just FYI - Momentum is a well established email platform that's owned by MessageSystems. If your project gets any traction, this is sure to cause issues at some point. https://www.messagesystems.com/products/momentum-platform https://www.messagesystems.com/products/momentum-platform
wpietri 9y ago
Please just let people try it. No signup flow, no barriers. Just let us use it. If it's as good as you say, we'll want to save what we've created; you can get us to sign up then. Also, you should really user-test landing pages like this. I get that you love the design and content. But the page is not for you. Book 5 people in your target market and study how it works for them. Then revise and book another 5. Repeat until people are actually engaging with the topic in the way you want.
- r0bin 9y ago
  I agree with you, our long-term goal is to use the approach you mentioned. We even considered it for the launch but thought it is to much work. But I realized that it worth more to make it as easy as possible to try out a web app, if you ask for feedback. So for the future and if possible I will do it differently. Thanks for the feedback, for now we are pretty happy with the engagement of the landing page.
apthnz 9y ago
I really like the core concept of saving ideas/etc in one place and then splitting them up into categories based on how I'm going to deal with them. The navigation isn't intuitive, but that's probably because it's new to me rather than inherently complex. It's nice, but I wouldn't pay to use it, which I gather is the intention.
yarsk 9y ago
Thought restructuring is quite estream.
escovabr 9y ago
Pretty sure that will be good to have support for repetitive tasks, like every sunday or every 3rd day of month. I know I know, I can use postpone to the same task, but I think that a "task generator" will be a good feature =)
- r0bin 9y ago
  i agree, this feature is on the roadmap, it is planned as an upgrade for the copy function from archive to active view. Instead of doing it manually for grocery list, you will be able to define a repetitive time frame
savolai 9y ago
It says drop here. I tried to drag and drop an image. Doesn't work. What exactly does 'drop' mean in this context?
- r0bin 9y ago
  it means drop an idea, project or reference in the text field (text or emoji only). file support is on the roadmap
  - savolai 9y ago
    Anyway, it's an interesting UI idea, particularly the mouse-oriented sorting of items. I wish a middle ground between this and something like checkvist or dynalist could be found.
  - savolai 9y ago
    This seems challenging for a non-native like me to understand. I sort of anticipated this would have been the idea, but it's still hard to see if that's what it actually means - it's hard to see if 'drop' is a noun or a verb. It would be easier if it had a context word like you give here, i.e. "idea, project or reference".
- savolai 9y ago
  After reading the criticism here, I feel you might be in the wrong crowd. :) I too do think though the transitions between different screens (i.e. clicking sides & top, bottom) should really have animated transitions to avoid disorientation. And I don't get why different screens go up or left or right or down in different situations. What's the relationship? It's hard to understand what items can be moved from where to what other list. The behaviour seems random.
  - r0bin 9y ago
    Thank you for your follow up question, it is on our roadmap to rework the navigation with animated transitions to make it more clear what is happening. In this comment is some explanation about the meaning of levels. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15339086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15339086 It is like levels in a building (or reaching up to the of the mountain). You start with real practical stuff, like task you want to do this day, where it is clear what to do. The "higher" you navigate in the app (or walk up in the building) the lists become more abstract. Projects, Decisions(No, Done), Ideas. For the future the are even more higher levels planned like goals. The highest level will be your visions, kind of "why"(golden circles stuff) for every item in the lower levels. The more the lowest level is aligned with the highest level the better you feel. (Means doing stuff that brings you were you really want with your life, and not only daily stuff that keeps you just busy) Because all the items in the different levels are connected, it would be possible to give you feedback about a small daily task and how it relates or moves you forward with your big visions. We work to improve the understanding of movements of items between lists, here a first explanation: I believe that if you understand the meaning(relates strongly to gtd) of every view, the movement of items follows by logic: InView (List managed by user) - Capture everything without more work IdeaView (List managed by user) - Stuff you want to do in the future, no next step known here ActiveView (List managed by user) - Stuff you want to do next. For every project(more than one task) you have to define a next step or wait for somebody or defer to date xy. ArchiveView (List managed by user) - Stuff you want be able to find again in the future or reuse DoneView (Sink List) - things you have done NoView (Sink List) - things you decided not to do NextView (Auto filtered list) - all calculated nextsteps from activeView AwayView (Auto filered list) - all items you marked as away from activeView ReviewView (Auto filtered list) - all items from ideaView, activeView and archiveView that needs to be reviewed 2 examples: From idea to active means you finally decided to tackle an idea and want to define what to do next. So moving make sense here. From archive to active means you want to reuse for example a grocery list or a visit to known restaurant from your list. So copy make sense here. Our goal is to make this complex relationships as intuitive as possible without the need for the user to understand everything. Lots of work to be done here :) A metaphor I really like: Many people drive a bicycle everyday because it is faster than walking, but not everyone needs (and wants) to understand the physics behind a bicycle to use it.

44 points by r0bin 9y ago

Hello HN, we built this web app which enables you to structure ideas, thoughts and your projects. It offers a similar flexibility in building hierarchy as OmniFocus. Just without being tied to apple or a missing web interface. One of the main reasons why we started this project. I want to highlight one feature that I never seen anywhere else. There is no difference between tasks, projects or folders. It works based on your hierarchy, for example an idea become a project when you add a "subtask". The app has no limit on how deep you nest and offers an extra view that filter all actionable next steps out of your hierarchy. It is a progressive web app, so you are able to add it to your mobile homescreen and use it offline. You can also encrypt your data with your login password. I am excited to get your thoughts about the app or any questions.

creativeembassy 9y ago

I love OmniFocus, but have always been bothered by a lack of web interface or Android client. (I use Focus GTD as an unofficial client on Android, and it's less than perfect at best.) I've been looking for something like this. Going to try it out and hopefully provide some insight.

voiper1 9y ago

... looks nice, but I'm afraid of being stuck having to pay. Will you have a free tier..? Currently using workflowy for stuff _like_ this, but it seems your system is much more flexible.

r0bin 9y ago
in the event of an introduction of basic income, there will be for sure a free tier, maybe free at all :) But in the long-term we need to sustain the infrastructure costs. That depends on the feedback of how users and the community is willing to contribute to the costs or the value they have from the app. Great to hear, we still search for cases where the flexibility provided by the app is not sufficient

d--b 9y ago

My own opinion: the navigation system seems overcomplicated. I don't see this beating workflowy as it stands.

r0bin 9y ago
The value we see in the app navigation is the following: The navigation is separated in three broader levels. 1. The first level is everything that is relevant in the moment (Inbox, Next, Away). 2. The second level is to organize everything Idea, Project or Archive. From time perspective mostly related to the next weeks. 3. And the third level is to review your hole system. After a short time it will feel like walking through different rooms and levels in a building.
- AndrewOMartin 9y ago
  The third level sounds rather like navel gazing.

zichy 9y ago

Seeing the demo video on your website, I really have no idea what's going on. Your navigation doesn't have to be "revolutionary", it has to work. If no one has done it before, maybe there's a good reason for that. The interface features bad contrasts (neon colors on white), thin (illegible) fonts, and too much whitespace. The category/navigation bars seem way too small. Please work on your typography.

r0bin 9y ago
Further design themes are planned. For now the low contrast is by design. When you enter your projects they will be displayed in high contrast. Thanks for the feedback though
- RubenSandwich 9y ago
  Low contrast is a poor 'design decision'. You instantly cut of a percentage of your potential market by that design, such as myself. I have an eye condition that makes focusing difficult and your low contrast design makes pieces of your website completely illegible to me.
- nrser 9y ago
  It's cool. It's creative. It's different. Things that do not often top you're typical Hacker Newsie's values list, but - hey - if making software's a means to an end I never understood why anyone would write code themselves anyways. You created something, and that's rad. Yeah, if you're trying to sell out you're doing it wrong, but sometimes I wish I had marked up my soul a little higher back in the day. It flickers and fails and stutters all over the place, but I'm in China, which tends to get a big ol' stick up in western people's "this will always load and will be pretty fast and reliable" wheel rather quickly. I can't figure out how to use it at all, but I want to.
- zichy 9y ago
  I get that the low contrast is by design. Everything is by design, since someone once thought about everything. I don't want to be a dick about it, but texts with low contrast are almost never a good idea.

jarvuschris 9y ago

Still stuck waiting for my verification email, and it's not in spam. You should let people use your app as soon as they finish signing up. Limit functionality or disable after a grace period to enforce email verification, don't stop people during the onboarding flow and lose their interest

r0bin 9y ago
very sorry for that, please give us a short notice directly from the "?!" help menu in the app thanks for the advice with the grace period, good point.

sigi45 9y ago

Subscriptioncost for a todo list? With this amount of functionality? Nope sry. Don't get me wrong, i like your idea. It looks simliar what i'm already doing on paper and was planing to write somehow. But i'm not subscribing to small features and i'm guessing that it is very cheap, for that i would not give you my credit card information or not that cheap and than i don't care anymore about it.

jsnathan 9y ago

Two other nice apps in this space are Workflowy[1] and Dynalist[2]. [1]: https://workflowy.com https://workflowy.com [2]: https://dynalist.io https://dynalist.io

jfreax 9y ago
This seems like an interesting approach to organize data. Are there any open source implementation that I can customize myself and host on my own personal server?
- dobin 9y ago
  i found https://rockiger.com/en/akiee/ https://rockiger.com/en/akiee/, but not web based and seems to be dead. I'm also interested in self hosted apps.
- NickBusey 9y ago
  I have been working on this for a while, it's not quite production ready yet, but it's pretty close.. https://github.com/NickBusey/bulletnotes https://github.com/NickBusey/bulletnotes
- murftown 9y ago
  Some assembly required, but: I have a self-hosted solution. It's in an alpha state, not ready for public consumption, but would love any feedback from people willing to try it out. Here it is: https://github.com/ryanfmurphy/db_viewer https://github.com/ryanfmurphy/db_viewer This started as a DB Admin tool ala PhpMyAdmin, but I now use it for Todo lists, tree-style mind-mapping / brainstorming, tracking finances, etc. If you give this a shot feel free to email me for help setting it up / getting the most out of it. (Email is in my profile)
epaga 9y ago
Also shameless plug for my iOS app Mindscope that MacStories reviewed here: https://www.macstories.net/reviews/mindscope-review/ https://www.macstories.net/reviews/mindscope-review/
9y ago

mezod 9y ago

I was interested until I read "revolutionary design" while having a hard time to read most of the copy of the site. There are some other major design issues on the site that you might wanna get fixed. I'm not a design geek, but text has to be readable.

dobin 9y ago
TBH, i'm also confused, but i didnt invest more than 2 minutes looking at it. The menu changes the location to all sides which is a bit confusing. I also added some drop's, gave it a context, now they are gone? It seems that the application is trying to help a lot, with video and the help pages etc. Which is good, but also a sign that its not very intuitive.

ricardobeat 9y ago

Scrolling momentum is broken in iOS (couldn't resist!)

t----------- 9y ago

The reception would be much improved with better visuals. I can't read anything, the launch page hurts my eyes and I don't know where to look. The gifs play too fast to understand what I'm looking at.

yellowboxtenant 9y ago

I don't know what is going on, but I appreciate the fact that it's experimenting with UI methods.

r0bin 9y ago
thank you for the appreciation :), new UI methods are often a challenge and risky but we believe it is a experiment worth exploring

crush-n-spread 9y ago

There's already a product called Momentum Dash[1] which is a project-organizing Chrome extension. [1] https://momentumdash.com/ https://momentumdash.com/

dmoojunk 9y ago
I love dash and was excited for this, but the navigation is madness. Someone let UX drive this one. Being surprised by the novelty is not a good UX experience.

scandox 9y ago

I couldn't scroll with PgDn which always make me bounce off straightaway.

tmountain 9y ago

Just FYI - Momentum is a well established email platform that's owned by MessageSystems. If your project gets any traction, this is sure to cause issues at some point. https://www.messagesystems.com/products/momentum-platform https://www.messagesystems.com/products/momentum-platform

wpietri 9y ago

Please just let people try it. No signup flow, no barriers. Just let us use it. If it's as good as you say, we'll want to save what we've created; you can get us to sign up then. Also, you should really user-test landing pages like this. I get that you love the design and content. But the page is not for you. Book 5 people in your target market and study how it works for them. Then revise and book another 5. Repeat until people are actually engaging with the topic in the way you want.

r0bin 9y ago
I agree with you, our long-term goal is to use the approach you mentioned. We even considered it for the launch but thought it is to much work. But I realized that it worth more to make it as easy as possible to try out a web app, if you ask for feedback. So for the future and if possible I will do it differently. Thanks for the feedback, for now we are pretty happy with the engagement of the landing page.

apthnz 9y ago

I really like the core concept of saving ideas/etc in one place and then splitting them up into categories based on how I'm going to deal with them. The navigation isn't intuitive, but that's probably because it's new to me rather than inherently complex. It's nice, but I wouldn't pay to use it, which I gather is the intention.

yarsk 9y ago

Thought restructuring is quite estream.

escovabr 9y ago

Pretty sure that will be good to have support for repetitive tasks, like every sunday or every 3rd day of month. I know I know, I can use postpone to the same task, but I think that a "task generator" will be a good feature =)

r0bin 9y ago
i agree, this feature is on the roadmap, it is planned as an upgrade for the copy function from archive to active view. Instead of doing it manually for grocery list, you will be able to define a repetitive time frame

savolai 9y ago

It says drop here. I tried to drag and drop an image. Doesn't work. What exactly does 'drop' mean in this context?

r0bin 9y ago
it means drop an idea, project or reference in the text field (text or emoji only). file support is on the roadmap
- savolai 9y ago
  Anyway, it's an interesting UI idea, particularly the mouse-oriented sorting of items. I wish a middle ground between this and something like checkvist or dynalist could be found.
- savolai 9y ago
  This seems challenging for a non-native like me to understand. I sort of anticipated this would have been the idea, but it's still hard to see if that's what it actually means - it's hard to see if 'drop' is a noun or a verb. It would be easier if it had a context word like you give here, i.e. "idea, project or reference".
savolai 9y ago
After reading the criticism here, I feel you might be in the wrong crowd. :) I too do think though the transitions between different screens (i.e. clicking sides & top, bottom) should really have animated transitions to avoid disorientation. And I don't get why different screens go up or left or right or down in different situations. What's the relationship? It's hard to understand what items can be moved from where to what other list. The behaviour seems random.
- r0bin 9y ago
  Thank you for your follow up question, it is on our roadmap to rework the navigation with animated transitions to make it more clear what is happening. In this comment is some explanation about the meaning of levels. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15339086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15339086 It is like levels in a building (or reaching up to the of the mountain). You start with real practical stuff, like task you want to do this day, where it is clear what to do. The "higher" you navigate in the app (or walk up in the building) the lists become more abstract. Projects, Decisions(No, Done), Ideas. For the future the are even more higher levels planned like goals. The highest level will be your visions, kind of "why"(golden circles stuff) for every item in the lower levels. The more the lowest level is aligned with the highest level the better you feel. (Means doing stuff that brings you were you really want with your life, and not only daily stuff that keeps you just busy) Because all the items in the different levels are connected, it would be possible to give you feedback about a small daily task and how it relates or moves you forward with your big visions. We work to improve the understanding of movements of items between lists, here a first explanation: I believe that if you understand the meaning(relates strongly to gtd) of every view, the movement of items follows by logic: InView (List managed by user) - Capture everything without more work IdeaView (List managed by user) - Stuff you want to do in the future, no next step known here ActiveView (List managed by user) - Stuff you want to do next. For every project(more than one task) you have to define a next step or wait for somebody or defer to date xy. ArchiveView (List managed by user) - Stuff you want be able to find again in the future or reuse DoneView (Sink List) - things you have done NoView (Sink List) - things you decided not to do NextView (Auto filtered list) - all calculated nextsteps from activeView AwayView (Auto filered list) - all items you marked as away from activeView ReviewView (Auto filtered list) - all items from ideaView, activeView and archiveView that needs to be reviewed 2 examples: From idea to active means you finally decided to tackle an idea and want to define what to do next. So moving make sense here. From archive to active means you want to reuse for example a grocery list or a visit to known restaurant from your list. So copy make sense here. Our goal is to make this complex relationships as intuitive as possible without the need for the user to understand everything. Lots of work to be done here :) A metaphor I really like: Many people drive a bicycle everyday because it is faster than walking, but not everyone needs (and wants) to understand the physics behind a bicycle to use it.