13 ms·

The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

131 points by prostoalex 8y ago

shanghaiaway 8y ago
Notion and Coda are attractive, but I'm wondering if the learning curve is too steep. Not sure if my team would use them without me setting everything up.
- sachin 8y ago
  We've tried to focus Notejoy on being as intuitive as possible to support any kind of team. Because of this, we've seen a variety of teams beyond just startups adopt Notejoy, including coffee shops, law firms, freelancers, agencies, coaches, and more.
- bkanber 8y ago
  I use Notion for personal projects and love it. Very easy to learn. I used it to plan and execute my NaNoWriMo challenge last month and really have nothing bad to say about it. Works well on all my devices. But it's unstructured. I think in a work environment it's most useful as a wiki/project planner/lightweight tracker, but still can't replace the MS/Google office suite, and can't replace Jira/Asana for in depth ticketing.
  - elithrar 8y ago
    I’d agree: Notion is great for individuals, a household, maybe even a small business? But it’d be a tough ask to scale to 100 people in an engineering org. But who knows, maybe it will find a niche like Basecamp did? It is a wonderful replacement for Evernote though, and it makes you wonder what Evernote has been doing all these years? The formatting, drag/drop, multiple views on the same docs are great.
    - hnzix 8y ago
      Evernote started the trend but Microsoft destroyed them in the same way they killed Netscape; OneNote is free beer and it's deeply integrated with the Office suite. I can scan a whiteboard using MS Lens on my phone and it's instantly available on my laptop in OneNote. Oh and I don't have to convince the SOE nazis to allow install.
      - briandear 8y ago
        I can do the same thing with Apple Notes. And I don’t have to pay Microsoft anything. And it’s all available to iWork. Notes even has document scanning. With Continuity Camera in Mojave, I can take a photo from my iPhone and instantly place it within a Pages document. For power Excel users, Numbers isn’t yet a replacement, but for everything else, the stuff that is built in to MacOS works great and is free while working seamlessly across all Apple devices. I don’t work with massive spreadsheets nor use pivot tables so for me, iWork + Notes solves office productivity pretty darned well, plus Keynote puts PowerPoint to shame.
        reacharavindh 8y ago
        Regardless of what other tools I try, I always end up coming back to Apple Notes for the ease of writing, drag & drop images, easy sharing as PDF, and being able to work on them on the go with iPhone and iPad. Apple's integration got me addicted. The search feature that can search even my sketches - bonus sweetness! I do wish Apple Notes had some way of making a Kanban board.
        freddie_mercury 8y ago
        > I can do the same thing with Apple Notes. And I don’t have to pay Microsoft anything. I don't understand what this means. I use OneNote and have never paid Microsoft anything.
  - ghostly_s 8y ago
    Interesting, haven't heard of this one. From a quick perusal of the site it looks kind of like a more feature-ful Workflowy, is that a fair impression?
    - bkanber 8y ago
      I'm not very familiar with Workflowy. They are similar though. I would say that Workflowy is what you'd get if you restricted Notion to only allow list items at the top level. In Notion every paragraph is a "node", and a node can be text, media, list item, database (excellent feature, though, really more of a table where each item is a page), reference to other object, etc. Anything can have a parent of anything else, and the UI/UX is smooth. For my NaNoWriMo project I've got databases of characters, places, maps, etc, and then pages for chapters with all the text, comments, to do lists, etc.
      - ghostly_s 8y ago
        For the benefit of anyone else wondering the same: I checked it out and no, it's really nothing like Workflowy. The key feature of Workflowy is that you can 'zoom in' to any list item, essentially meaning any data item can also be a document which makes it actually viable to do everything at the top level. It doesn't seem Notion supports this workflow. Definitely jealous of some of the advanced data-type features in Notion but it feels much too fiddly for my mental model. Thanks for the explanation, though.
SllX 8y ago
At this point I look at Word and Excel the same way I look at bash, gcc, grep, sed, awk, et cetera: there is so much iniertia that even when different and arguably better tools come along, it still never truly goes away. A lot of people still use emacs, vim, BBEdit and so on, but a lot of people also use IntelliJ, VSCode and Atom or whatever is in vogue this year. Vim and emacs will never truly go away no matter how many CPU architectures or operating systems come along this century, and neither will Word. At some point software is just infrastructure. We can build better bridges than we could a century ago, but there isn’t an incentive to replace a bridge until it falls down, and it isn’t like Word prevented Markdown and TeX and HTML from finding their niches.
- omeid2 8y ago
  Some other important factor about the software you have listed is that they are actively maintained, either because they have a community or a profitable enterprise behind them, I don't think inertia alone is enough.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jen729w 8y ago
  Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to its functionality/friction curve (assuming you already know how to Excel, that is).
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    Is this truly attributable to what Excel is actually capable of (excluding those cases like people who manage to accomplish things like 3D rendering with excel) or that Excel just has better market saturation and is, by default, the only spreadsheet tool people in the Enterprise are given to work with and we just normalized ourselves to what it does, but maybe not so many other spreadsheet file formats?
ecpottinger 8y ago
I thought Wang made the first word-processors.
matthiaswh 8y ago
I'm curious what open source options will crop up in this space. So far I haven't seen anything promising that compares to the Notion or the Air Table approach.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.
- tonysdg 8y ago
  It's worth noting this is a testament to Microsoft's (extreme) dedication to backwards compatibility. I sometimes wonder who's more fanatical: the glibc folks or MS. But it seems to have paid off for both teams in the end, so (especially as a young engineer) who am I to judge?
  - jdblair 8y ago
    This is especially noteworthy because the older Word formats were essentially memory dumps of the data structures used to store the document.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      The binary formats that immediately preceded the current OOXML were OLE compound files (aka "structured storage), which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file that's intended to be used for serialization purposes - to allow files to have arbitrary nesting of COM components. Individual data structures are then binary-serialized into that compound file, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a "memory dump". People often get that impression after looking at the compound file and seeing garbage there, much like unused blocks in memory - but that's because it's a filesystem, and as such, has a concept of unused "sectors". This is also why a freshly saved binary Word file might still contain bits and pieces of old data and metadata.
      - jdblair 8y ago
        That's how the DOC format in the 90s and early 00s worked. I was under the impression that the early formats for Word on DOS, Windows and Macintosh were all different and represented in-memory structures written directly to disk. Unfortunately, I can't find a citation, so I may be mistaken.
npunt 8y ago
Just a quibble but I see this a lot - if you're talking about strategy it's "bottom-up", not "bottoms-up". A bottom-up strategy is something like marketing your tool to users who then bring it into their company for wider adoption. A bottoms-up strategy is drinking until the problem goes away.
- sachin 8y ago
  Hah! I've def made this mistake
- why_only_15 8y ago
  you shouldn't discount the power of the second one
  - brylie 8y ago
    As a recovering alcoholic, I can attest that drinking does not resolve life's problems.
    - jboxee 8y ago
      I, for one, am glad you are recovering.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  I have the same feeling about this, and I've noticed that folks from the UK are more likely to use "bottoms-up" to mean both. I rarely hear it from US-born speakers. Has anyone else noticed this pattern?
  - dijit 8y ago
    I'm British, Never heard "bottoms-up" to mean the same as "bottom up" Bottoms up is when you finish your drink. Bottom up is sitting on a high surface (put your bottom up, usually said to a child), or lifting something from the inverse of where it's normally handled from or, like the parent said: a set of business strategies.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jacobkg 8y ago
Not mentioned in the article but WorkFlowy (YC ‘10) is still going strong. Minimalist web-based word processor with a flexible outline format. Can hold hundreds of thousands of items, without you getting overwhelmed.
- sachin 8y ago
  The same author actually wrote about WorkFlowy a few months back: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/workflowly-founder-new-list-update-popular-app-keeping-purists-happy/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/workflowly-founder-new-list-up...
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  I'm a Workflowy user but would never describe it as a general-purpose word processor, even with the "minimal" modifier. There are no formatting tools whatsoever. It's more of a minimalist mind-mapping tool.
lewisjoe 8y ago
Good insights on the trends in word processor markets. But, including rich text editors and note-taking apps into the word processor market is bit of an overstretch. Note-making apps are typically for digital screens, with a limited set of tools for document creation. Word processors cater both for digital screens and print media. They'd have a richer tool-set and are for power document making people. Interestingly both categories have made lots of improvements recently, when it comes to sharing, reviewing and co-editing. Take, Zoho Writer (https://www.zoho.com/writer/ https://www.zoho.com/writer/) for example. The product beautifully carries the ease-of-use of simpler apps, without compromising on the richer word processor features. This takes the game one-level up. Simple writing apps now have to bring in more document creation features to compete in the market with word processors. Otherwise, they are just their own category with their own market.
daniel_iversen 8y ago
I’m disappointed to not see our Dropbox Paper in that writeup, although it’s a good article! Wish they wouldn’t call it “word processor wars” though since that of course misses the point - it has too many associations to the printed page whereas I think everyone incl the author and the people quoted knows it’s about a more collaborative content creation experience.
- watersb 8y ago
  Yes. Dropbox Paper is fantastic.
netcan 8y ago
There was a Firefox thread on here yesterday. Interesting one. My take was that 10-15 years ago, FF's feature gap was enourmous. Tabs. Extensions like firebug for web development, adblocking for browsing, various "social add-ons" that were innovative and exciting. IE 6 was a dinosaur. The question for these is.. what more do you/we want from a word processor?
- chapium 8y ago
  Integration with documemt and version control with anything other than sharepoint. Something that is guaranteed to work without application crashes. Configurable Cloud storage/saving. 100% open document formatting to allow for interoperability.
xte 8y ago
Well... Few time ago I discover my "definitive" productivity app: Emacs. In few months it became the center of my IT life. And I still have to see ANY more effective, simple, flexible, pleasure to use modern application that can only compete with at least some aspects of Emacs. The problem IMO is that in the glory time of IT software was not a business, was a free thing that came with hw and if it was good and flexible people are more willing to buy your iron. Now (not from now) that software became a product commercial need destroy freedom and evolution creating a modern, colorful, limited and limiting digital middle-age that can barely stand like Babel's tower... IMO sooner or later tower will collapse and the more we wait the more it will hurt. More about software: our society mostly live on text: laws are text, newspapers are text, books are mostly text, text is the cheapest and effective means of communication we have so if we really want to being productive we need to have something focused on text. Yes, we have also images, videos, audios, but they are still marginal. We have excellent audiobooks, super-nice videos and diagrams/images that communicate something an order of magnitude better than text but they are still hard to make, hard to design, rare, not really flexible etc. so while we have to work on them hard and constantly to better support/integrate our focus must still be on text. For many years to come. Try only to do most common task without a keyboard and see how unproductive, limited and hard they are even with the best touch UI we have, with all "AI" support possible. That's a lesson nearly nobody want to learn but that's also the reality we have to face, willing or not.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
While I like to see competition, I still think Microsoft has the market for the foreseeable future because you get so much value. My yearly subscription for Office 365 family plan is just renewing and I can;t imagine not paying $99/year for: everyone in the family gets 1 TB of cloud storage, web based apps (which work just fine on Linux), and always up to date versions of the Office apps, if you want those too, and quality mobile apps for access to documents anytime. I use markdown and Latex to write my books, but I still find a lot of value in Office for occasional uses.
Djvacto 8y ago
I'd love to have one notebook-type app that works between all my devices, or some combination that lets me have the same or similar content. I loved OneNote back in Uni, though I reached a point where I stopped taking notes (through the fault of the powerpoint teaching method, and my own laziness), and OneNote does seem to be a bit bloat-y when it comes to sync. Stuff like EMACS org-mode (or, preferrably, some kind of Visual Studio Code equivalent) seems enticing, but I'm not sure how I could hook that into my phone in a way that isn't a terminal emulator. Anyone found anything (app, service, or custom setup) that works for them?
- newen 8y ago
  I use orgzly to take notes in my phone. It can create and edit org files and sync the files through Dropbox. Then you can edit the files in your computer through a Dropbox sync folder. It's just a nice app for taking notes for me though. I haven't even edited the notes through my computer. Good to know that my notes are backed up without having to use some opaque backup method.
- bkanber 8y ago
  Try out Notion. Works great on all my devices (MacBook, Chromebook, Android). Free tier is quite generous. I really like that in Notion you can just spin up quick data tables with rich data objects underneath. But also -- don't underestimate just having a notebook. For daily todolist type stuff I just use a pocket sized moleskin and the "Bullet journaling" method.
- com2kid 8y ago
  OneNote's sync has been completely rewritten, if you haven't tried it out in awhile, give it a go. It is much faster now, literal orders of magnitude.
- mickael-kerjean 8y ago
  Yes, there's a bunch of org mode client that works everywhere, I built this one: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/wiki/Release-0.1:-Org-Mode-everywhere https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/wiki/Release-0....
honkycat 8y ago
My problem with these sorts of tools is always the same: I have been spoiled by my emacs keybindings ( evil mode ), the ability to parse structured text, org-mode, and command line tooling. I do not have to open a web browser and navigate, I just launch my helm-project-search buffer and type `org/work`. I then have a fuzzy search that matches on file name. Toss these files into a dropbox folder, and you are good to go. None of these applications I have seen support structured text such that I can export / import through Emacs. They cling to your data as tightly as possible and do NOT want to let it go. I was working as a hobby on an RPG supplement for a popular anime series. I was attracted to notion and coda, but was dismayed to find I did not have a way to turn the data I entered into structured data which I can query to generate an attractive webpage for the game.

131 points by prostoalex 8y ago

Notion and Coda are attractive, but I'm wondering if the learning curve is too steep. Not sure if my team would use them without me setting everything up.

sachin 8y ago
We've tried to focus Notejoy on being as intuitive as possible to support any kind of team. Because of this, we've seen a variety of teams beyond just startups adopt Notejoy, including coffee shops, law firms, freelancers, agencies, coaches, and more.
bkanber 8y ago
I use Notion for personal projects and love it. Very easy to learn. I used it to plan and execute my NaNoWriMo challenge last month and really have nothing bad to say about it. Works well on all my devices. But it's unstructured. I think in a work environment it's most useful as a wiki/project planner/lightweight tracker, but still can't replace the MS/Google office suite, and can't replace Jira/Asana for in depth ticketing.
- elithrar 8y ago
  I’d agree: Notion is great for individuals, a household, maybe even a small business? But it’d be a tough ask to scale to 100 people in an engineering org. But who knows, maybe it will find a niche like Basecamp did? It is a wonderful replacement for Evernote though, and it makes you wonder what Evernote has been doing all these years? The formatting, drag/drop, multiple views on the same docs are great.
  - hnzix 8y ago
    Evernote started the trend but Microsoft destroyed them in the same way they killed Netscape; OneNote is free beer and it's deeply integrated with the Office suite. I can scan a whiteboard using MS Lens on my phone and it's instantly available on my laptop in OneNote. Oh and I don't have to convince the SOE nazis to allow install.
    - briandear 8y ago
      I can do the same thing with Apple Notes. And I don’t have to pay Microsoft anything. And it’s all available to iWork. Notes even has document scanning. With Continuity Camera in Mojave, I can take a photo from my iPhone and instantly place it within a Pages document. For power Excel users, Numbers isn’t yet a replacement, but for everything else, the stuff that is built in to MacOS works great and is free while working seamlessly across all Apple devices. I don’t work with massive spreadsheets nor use pivot tables so for me, iWork + Notes solves office productivity pretty darned well, plus Keynote puts PowerPoint to shame.
      - reacharavindh 8y ago
        Regardless of what other tools I try, I always end up coming back to Apple Notes for the ease of writing, drag & drop images, easy sharing as PDF, and being able to work on them on the go with iPhone and iPad. Apple's integration got me addicted. The search feature that can search even my sketches - bonus sweetness! I do wish Apple Notes had some way of making a Kanban board.
      - freddie_mercury 8y ago
        > I can do the same thing with Apple Notes. And I don’t have to pay Microsoft anything. I don't understand what this means. I use OneNote and have never paid Microsoft anything.
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  Interesting, haven't heard of this one. From a quick perusal of the site it looks kind of like a more feature-ful Workflowy, is that a fair impression?
  - bkanber 8y ago
    I'm not very familiar with Workflowy. They are similar though. I would say that Workflowy is what you'd get if you restricted Notion to only allow list items at the top level. In Notion every paragraph is a "node", and a node can be text, media, list item, database (excellent feature, though, really more of a table where each item is a page), reference to other object, etc. Anything can have a parent of anything else, and the UI/UX is smooth. For my NaNoWriMo project I've got databases of characters, places, maps, etc, and then pages for chapters with all the text, comments, to do lists, etc.
    - ghostly_s 8y ago
      For the benefit of anyone else wondering the same: I checked it out and no, it's really nothing like Workflowy. The key feature of Workflowy is that you can 'zoom in' to any list item, essentially meaning any data item can also be a document which makes it actually viable to do everything at the top level. It doesn't seem Notion supports this workflow. Definitely jealous of some of the advanced data-type features in Notion but it feels much too fiddly for my mental model. Thanks for the explanation, though.

SllX 8y ago

At this point I look at Word and Excel the same way I look at bash, gcc, grep, sed, awk, et cetera: there is so much iniertia that even when different and arguably better tools come along, it still never truly goes away. A lot of people still use emacs, vim, BBEdit and so on, but a lot of people also use IntelliJ, VSCode and Atom or whatever is in vogue this year. Vim and emacs will never truly go away no matter how many CPU architectures or operating systems come along this century, and neither will Word. At some point software is just infrastructure. We can build better bridges than we could a century ago, but there isn’t an incentive to replace a bridge until it falls down, and it isn’t like Word prevented Markdown and TeX and HTML from finding their niches.

omeid2 8y ago
Some other important factor about the software you have listed is that they are actively maintained, either because they have a community or a profitable enterprise behind them, I don't think inertia alone is enough.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jen729w 8y ago
Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to its functionality/friction curve (assuming you already know how to Excel, that is).
- dvtrn 8y ago
  Is this truly attributable to what Excel is actually capable of (excluding those cases like people who manage to accomplish things like 3D rendering with excel) or that Excel just has better market saturation and is, by default, the only spreadsheet tool people in the Enterprise are given to work with and we just normalized ourselves to what it does, but maybe not so many other spreadsheet file formats?

ecpottinger 8y ago

I thought Wang made the first word-processors.

matthiaswh 8y ago

I'm curious what open source options will crop up in this space. So far I haven't seen anything promising that compares to the Notion or the Air Table approach.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.

tonysdg 8y ago
It's worth noting this is a testament to Microsoft's (extreme) dedication to backwards compatibility. I sometimes wonder who's more fanatical: the glibc folks or MS. But it seems to have paid off for both teams in the end, so (especially as a young engineer) who am I to judge?
- jdblair 8y ago
  This is especially noteworthy because the older Word formats were essentially memory dumps of the data structures used to store the document.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    The binary formats that immediately preceded the current OOXML were OLE compound files (aka "structured storage), which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file that's intended to be used for serialization purposes - to allow files to have arbitrary nesting of COM components. Individual data structures are then binary-serialized into that compound file, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a "memory dump". People often get that impression after looking at the compound file and seeing garbage there, much like unused blocks in memory - but that's because it's a filesystem, and as such, has a concept of unused "sectors". This is also why a freshly saved binary Word file might still contain bits and pieces of old data and metadata.
    - jdblair 8y ago
      That's how the DOC format in the 90s and early 00s worked. I was under the impression that the early formats for Word on DOS, Windows and Macintosh were all different and represented in-memory structures written directly to disk. Unfortunately, I can't find a citation, so I may be mistaken.

npunt 8y ago

Just a quibble but I see this a lot - if you're talking about strategy it's "bottom-up", not "bottoms-up". A bottom-up strategy is something like marketing your tool to users who then bring it into their company for wider adoption. A bottoms-up strategy is drinking until the problem goes away.

sachin 8y ago
Hah! I've def made this mistake
why_only_15 8y ago
you shouldn't discount the power of the second one
- brylie 8y ago
  As a recovering alcoholic, I can attest that drinking does not resolve life's problems.
  - jboxee 8y ago
    I, for one, am glad you are recovering.
gnicholas 8y ago
I have the same feeling about this, and I've noticed that folks from the UK are more likely to use "bottoms-up" to mean both. I rarely hear it from US-born speakers. Has anyone else noticed this pattern?
- dijit 8y ago
  I'm British, Never heard "bottoms-up" to mean the same as "bottom up" Bottoms up is when you finish your drink. Bottom up is sitting on a high surface (put your bottom up, usually said to a child), or lifting something from the inverse of where it's normally handled from or, like the parent said: a set of business strategies.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jacobkg 8y ago

Not mentioned in the article but WorkFlowy (YC ‘10) is still going strong. Minimalist web-based word processor with a flexible outline format. Can hold hundreds of thousands of items, without you getting overwhelmed.

sachin 8y ago
The same author actually wrote about WorkFlowy a few months back: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/workflowly-founder-new-list-update-popular-app-keeping-purists-happy/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/workflowly-founder-new-list-up...
ghostly_s 8y ago
I'm a Workflowy user but would never describe it as a general-purpose word processor, even with the "minimal" modifier. There are no formatting tools whatsoever. It's more of a minimalist mind-mapping tool.

lewisjoe 8y ago

Good insights on the trends in word processor markets. But, including rich text editors and note-taking apps into the word processor market is bit of an overstretch. Note-making apps are typically for digital screens, with a limited set of tools for document creation. Word processors cater both for digital screens and print media. They'd have a richer tool-set and are for power document making people. Interestingly both categories have made lots of improvements recently, when it comes to sharing, reviewing and co-editing. Take, Zoho Writer (https://www.zoho.com/writer/ https://www.zoho.com/writer/) for example. The product beautifully carries the ease-of-use of simpler apps, without compromising on the richer word processor features. This takes the game one-level up. Simple writing apps now have to bring in more document creation features to compete in the market with word processors. Otherwise, they are just their own category with their own market.

daniel_iversen 8y ago

I’m disappointed to not see our Dropbox Paper in that writeup, although it’s a good article! Wish they wouldn’t call it “word processor wars” though since that of course misses the point - it has too many associations to the printed page whereas I think everyone incl the author and the people quoted knows it’s about a more collaborative content creation experience.

watersb 8y ago
Yes. Dropbox Paper is fantastic.

netcan 8y ago

There was a Firefox thread on here yesterday. Interesting one. My take was that 10-15 years ago, FF's feature gap was enourmous. Tabs. Extensions like firebug for web development, adblocking for browsing, various "social add-ons" that were innovative and exciting. IE 6 was a dinosaur. The question for these is.. what more do you/we want from a word processor?

chapium 8y ago
Integration with documemt and version control with anything other than sharepoint. Something that is guaranteed to work without application crashes. Configurable Cloud storage/saving. 100% open document formatting to allow for interoperability.

xte 8y ago

Well... Few time ago I discover my "definitive" productivity app: Emacs. In few months it became the center of my IT life. And I still have to see ANY more effective, simple, flexible, pleasure to use modern application that can only compete with at least some aspects of Emacs. The problem IMO is that in the glory time of IT software was not a business, was a free thing that came with hw and if it was good and flexible people are more willing to buy your iron. Now (not from now) that software became a product commercial need destroy freedom and evolution creating a modern, colorful, limited and limiting digital middle-age that can barely stand like Babel's tower... IMO sooner or later tower will collapse and the more we wait the more it will hurt. More about software: our society mostly live on text: laws are text, newspapers are text, books are mostly text, text is the cheapest and effective means of communication we have so if we really want to being productive we need to have something focused on text. Yes, we have also images, videos, audios, but they are still marginal. We have excellent audiobooks, super-nice videos and diagrams/images that communicate something an order of magnitude better than text but they are still hard to make, hard to design, rare, not really flexible etc. so while we have to work on them hard and constantly to better support/integrate our focus must still be on text. For many years to come. Try only to do most common task without a keyboard and see how unproductive, limited and hard they are even with the best touch UI we have, with all "AI" support possible. That's a lesson nearly nobody want to learn but that's also the reality we have to face, willing or not.

mark_l_watson 8y ago

While I like to see competition, I still think Microsoft has the market for the foreseeable future because you get so much value. My yearly subscription for Office 365 family plan is just renewing and I can;t imagine not paying $99/year for: everyone in the family gets 1 TB of cloud storage, web based apps (which work just fine on Linux), and always up to date versions of the Office apps, if you want those too, and quality mobile apps for access to documents anytime. I use markdown and Latex to write my books, but I still find a lot of value in Office for occasional uses.

Djvacto 8y ago

I'd love to have one notebook-type app that works between all my devices, or some combination that lets me have the same or similar content. I loved OneNote back in Uni, though I reached a point where I stopped taking notes (through the fault of the powerpoint teaching method, and my own laziness), and OneNote does seem to be a bit bloat-y when it comes to sync. Stuff like EMACS org-mode (or, preferrably, some kind of Visual Studio Code equivalent) seems enticing, but I'm not sure how I could hook that into my phone in a way that isn't a terminal emulator. Anyone found anything (app, service, or custom setup) that works for them?

newen 8y ago
I use orgzly to take notes in my phone. It can create and edit org files and sync the files through Dropbox. Then you can edit the files in your computer through a Dropbox sync folder. It's just a nice app for taking notes for me though. I haven't even edited the notes through my computer. Good to know that my notes are backed up without having to use some opaque backup method.
bkanber 8y ago
Try out Notion. Works great on all my devices (MacBook, Chromebook, Android). Free tier is quite generous. I really like that in Notion you can just spin up quick data tables with rich data objects underneath. But also -- don't underestimate just having a notebook. For daily todolist type stuff I just use a pocket sized moleskin and the "Bullet journaling" method.
com2kid 8y ago
OneNote's sync has been completely rewritten, if you haven't tried it out in awhile, give it a go. It is much faster now, literal orders of magnitude.
mickael-kerjean 8y ago
Yes, there's a bunch of org mode client that works everywhere, I built this one: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/wiki/Release-0.1:-Org-Mode-everywhere https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/wiki/Release-0....

honkycat 8y ago

My problem with these sorts of tools is always the same: I have been spoiled by my emacs keybindings ( evil mode ), the ability to parse structured text, org-mode, and command line tooling. I do not have to open a web browser and navigate, I just launch my helm-project-search buffer and type `org/work`. I then have a fuzzy search that matches on file name. Toss these files into a dropbox folder, and you are good to go. None of these applications I have seen support structured text such that I can export / import through Emacs. They cling to your data as tightly as possible and do NOT want to let it go. I was working as a hobby on an RPG supplement for a popular anime series. I was attracted to notion and coda, but was dismayed to find I did not have a way to turn the data I entered into structured data which I can query to generate an attractive webpage for the game.