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My issue is that it feels like none of these tools do anything significantly new, and are all so obsessed with wonky features like node-graph views and backlink

My issue is that it feels like none of these tools do anything significantly new, and are all so obsessed with wonky features like node-graph views and backlinks that are only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them. That's why I'm working on creating https://visible.page https://visible.page because I want a tool that isn't just for markdown organizational obsessives, but rather for organizing and visualizing ALL kinds of information the way regular people do. None of these tools handle things like dates, locations, numbers, and other data of various types well. With Visible if you add a date or a location to some content, that content is now accessible on a calendar and a map side by side with all the associated text and media you added to it as well. No worrying about what table column it goes into or what metadata row or plugin you need to render it well. Just add the location, and add a map view, boom done. Want more than one date associated with some content? Just add it, you don't have to figure out to add another "Date type" metadata section the way you do in Notion for example. It is not offline first. It is not file based. It is not catered to the needs you see so often here on Hacker News but don't actually hear when talking to regular people who just want to plan a trip together or keep track of an apartment/house hunt without spreading information across a half-dozen tools. Does no one else get frustrated that even Google can't show you a map of your week's upcoming event locations? That when you are doing research online you have to tediously copy and paste each address one-by-one into Google Maps and then copy an embed link for that into another tool, and even then the addresses are isolated with no relevant information like photos or notes attachable to them? We have so many amazing internet powers that are simply unavailable in any of these note taking tools. I'm sorry but markdown and backlinks are boring. I want to see my information the way it was meant to be seen and in a way that my parents can understand it as well.

duderific 4y ago
It sounds like you're going for a completely different type of user than those who like Obsidian. That said, I've signed up for your Beta rollout, as what you're building sounds appealing for my use case, that of a kind of family planner.
- The5thElephant 4y ago
  Definitely targeting a different core user, although I think the simplicity and power that we will provide out-of-the-box may eventually sway some users caught in Obsidian/Roam land to try the Visible way. Thank you for signing up for the beta, we will start rolling out invites soon! "Family planner" is exactly the kind of early user we want. Daily life involves so much information that goes beyond text, and we feel there should be a tool that can handle any information you throw at it in an elegant way without tediously configuring and managing it.
dominotw 4y ago
> only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them. This describes me perfectly. I use obsidian to 'feel productive' but not actually do any work.
- The5thElephant 4y ago
  I fall into the same trap. We want Visible to be somewhere you create pages that are genuinely useful, not just info dumps. Millions of young people now use Notion to organize their lives, but as you can see from their marketing page it is a tool catered towards business knowledge-bases and not the variety of awesome uses these people have jerry-rigged Notion into. With just the map + calendar views alone you can address so many planning and tracking frustrations that simply aren't solved by the calendar invites and embedding Google maps into other information documents that we are limited to today.
- bccdee 4y ago
  I was pretty invested in the "tools for thought" space for a little while, but my interest cooled as I realized that I was using zettelkasten tools like Logseq to try and recreate simple folders of documents, because as it turns out that's all I really needed to begin with. I use Obsidian, because wiki links can be handy from time to time, but my notes these days are mostly just plain markdown sorted into folders by topic, and that's plenty for me.
pbronez 4y ago
Neat concept. What's the security story? The local-first architecture that Obsidian et al use is really valuable to me. In a world where everything lives on somebody else's server, I crave experiences that I can exercise some control over. Nothing hosted in the cloud feels private.
- The5thElephant 4y ago
  I totally understand and sympathize with that feeling which is not uncommon here on Hacker News, but when I speak to the average internet user they do care about privacy, they just don't have the same anxiety over cloud services. We are following a similar path to Notion or Paper who have millions of users who trust that their data is secure, private, and accessible. Also many features like realtime live collaboration are incredibly difficult to do with a local-first setup, but provides a user experience that lets Visible pages be useful for families, friends, and communities. We do want to make your data fully available to you via export, and we don't view or use the data in your pages for anything. We have basic event-based analytics to see how people (anonymously) use Visible, but that's just at the level of button clicks and seeing how many pages people create on average.
  - andreilys 4y ago
    Notion or Paper who have millions of users who trust that their data is secure, private, and accessible Until those services are inevitably hacked, as we've seen most of these companies play fast and loose with security.
tomjakubowski 4y ago
A friend and I used Notion to plan an overseas trip. We had a table of potential places to visit (with cost, how long it might take, etc.). I was disappointed to find out that Notion had no way to render those locations on a map. I'm also frustrated by the typical notes apps inability to store data in a way that it's convenient to retrieve. One example: I'd like to be able to just tag some string (think a UUID or other opaque thing) as a "blob" and then be able to click the "blob" just once to copy it to the clipboard, to be put into other tools. Your app looks much more up my alley and I'll be signing up.
- dogline 4y ago
  Are there _any_ ways to uniformly put a geolocation in a Markdown/note/txt file? Seems like there should be a general answer for this, as sometimes I'd like to put a geolocation and notes in a file, and some uniform way to parse this later, whatever the tool.
  - kepano 4y ago
    There are two Obsidian plugins for this: Map View[0] and Leaflet[1]. You can store the geocoded locations using YAML frontmatter or Dataview inline fields. [0]: https://github.com/esm7/obsidian-map-view https://github.com/esm7/obsidian-map-view [1]: https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-leaflet-plugin https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-leaflet-plugin
andreilys 4y ago
I'm sorry but markdown and backlinks are boring That is the intention. I don't want excitement with my note-taking, I want plain, boring, open-standards that will survive the test of time. Chances are high that your startup will: 1) Fail 2) Get acquired and gets shut down 3) Aggressively monetize leading to poor UI/UX (i.e. Evernote) The whole advantage of Obsidian is that it relies on an open format, and makes it easy to transition to a new platform I want a system that I know 20 years from now I can still use (or can transition to a better one). Maybe I'm in the minority but I've tried at least 10 different note taking apps over the last decade, and none of them have staying power because they all fall into the three issues I outlined above.
- least 4y ago
  I personally want something that allows me to work with things spatially, to draw things, to dump a bunch of images into it, and move things around in at least a two dimensional space. I want to be able to embed maps, images, audio files, music, draw connections between them, move them around. This cannot be accomplished in plain text. I think notes should use a database so it can effectively obfuscate data like the spatial relationships between objects in a note. An open specification and utilizing an open source database would be better. Plain text objects could still be used and easily exported, but you gain so much over simply plain text. Portability is important but it's not as important as having tools that meaningfully improve how you perform the task you're trying to accomplish.
  - andreilys 4y ago
    Portability is important but it's not as important as having tools that meaningfully improve how you perform the task you're trying to accomplish. I'm sorry but until you've experienced a startup shutting down the product that you built your whole knowledge repo around, you won't really understand the need for portability. I could care less about the shiny features, because I know that in 10 years this product will be defunct, while markdown will still exist.
    - least 4y ago

duderific 4y ago

It sounds like you're going for a completely different type of user than those who like Obsidian. That said, I've signed up for your Beta rollout, as what you're building sounds appealing for my use case, that of a kind of family planner.

The5thElephant 4y ago
Definitely targeting a different core user, although I think the simplicity and power that we will provide out-of-the-box may eventually sway some users caught in Obsidian/Roam land to try the Visible way. Thank you for signing up for the beta, we will start rolling out invites soon! "Family planner" is exactly the kind of early user we want. Daily life involves so much information that goes beyond text, and we feel there should be a tool that can handle any information you throw at it in an elegant way without tediously configuring and managing it.

dominotw 4y ago

> only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them. This describes me perfectly. I use obsidian to 'feel productive' but not actually do any work.

The5thElephant 4y ago
I fall into the same trap. We want Visible to be somewhere you create pages that are genuinely useful, not just info dumps. Millions of young people now use Notion to organize their lives, but as you can see from their marketing page it is a tool catered towards business knowledge-bases and not the variety of awesome uses these people have jerry-rigged Notion into. With just the map + calendar views alone you can address so many planning and tracking frustrations that simply aren't solved by the calendar invites and embedding Google maps into other information documents that we are limited to today.
bccdee 4y ago
I was pretty invested in the "tools for thought" space for a little while, but my interest cooled as I realized that I was using zettelkasten tools like Logseq to try and recreate simple folders of documents, because as it turns out that's all I really needed to begin with. I use Obsidian, because wiki links can be handy from time to time, but my notes these days are mostly just plain markdown sorted into folders by topic, and that's plenty for me.

pbronez 4y ago

Neat concept. What's the security story? The local-first architecture that Obsidian et al use is really valuable to me. In a world where everything lives on somebody else's server, I crave experiences that I can exercise some control over. Nothing hosted in the cloud feels private.

The5thElephant 4y ago
I totally understand and sympathize with that feeling which is not uncommon here on Hacker News, but when I speak to the average internet user they do care about privacy, they just don't have the same anxiety over cloud services. We are following a similar path to Notion or Paper who have millions of users who trust that their data is secure, private, and accessible. Also many features like realtime live collaboration are incredibly difficult to do with a local-first setup, but provides a user experience that lets Visible pages be useful for families, friends, and communities. We do want to make your data fully available to you via export, and we don't view or use the data in your pages for anything. We have basic event-based analytics to see how people (anonymously) use Visible, but that's just at the level of button clicks and seeing how many pages people create on average.
- andreilys 4y ago
  Notion or Paper who have millions of users who trust that their data is secure, private, and accessible Until those services are inevitably hacked, as we've seen most of these companies play fast and loose with security.

tomjakubowski 4y ago

A friend and I used Notion to plan an overseas trip. We had a table of potential places to visit (with cost, how long it might take, etc.). I was disappointed to find out that Notion had no way to render those locations on a map. I'm also frustrated by the typical notes apps inability to store data in a way that it's convenient to retrieve. One example: I'd like to be able to just tag some string (think a UUID or other opaque thing) as a "blob" and then be able to click the "blob" just once to copy it to the clipboard, to be put into other tools. Your app looks much more up my alley and I'll be signing up.

dogline 4y ago
Are there _any_ ways to uniformly put a geolocation in a Markdown/note/txt file? Seems like there should be a general answer for this, as sometimes I'd like to put a geolocation and notes in a file, and some uniform way to parse this later, whatever the tool.
- kepano 4y ago
  There are two Obsidian plugins for this: Map View[0] and Leaflet[1]. You can store the geocoded locations using YAML frontmatter or Dataview inline fields. [0]: https://github.com/esm7/obsidian-map-view https://github.com/esm7/obsidian-map-view [1]: https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-leaflet-plugin https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-leaflet-plugin

andreilys 4y ago

I'm sorry but markdown and backlinks are boring That is the intention. I don't want excitement with my note-taking, I want plain, boring, open-standards that will survive the test of time. Chances are high that your startup will: 1) Fail 2) Get acquired and gets shut down 3) Aggressively monetize leading to poor UI/UX (i.e. Evernote) The whole advantage of Obsidian is that it relies on an open format, and makes it easy to transition to a new platform I want a system that I know 20 years from now I can still use (or can transition to a better one). Maybe I'm in the minority but I've tried at least 10 different note taking apps over the last decade, and none of them have staying power because they all fall into the three issues I outlined above.

least 4y ago
I personally want something that allows me to work with things spatially, to draw things, to dump a bunch of images into it, and move things around in at least a two dimensional space. I want to be able to embed maps, images, audio files, music, draw connections between them, move them around. This cannot be accomplished in plain text. I think notes should use a database so it can effectively obfuscate data like the spatial relationships between objects in a note. An open specification and utilizing an open source database would be better. Plain text objects could still be used and easily exported, but you gain so much over simply plain text. Portability is important but it's not as important as having tools that meaningfully improve how you perform the task you're trying to accomplish.
- andreilys 4y ago
  Portability is important but it's not as important as having tools that meaningfully improve how you perform the task you're trying to accomplish. I'm sorry but until you've experienced a startup shutting down the product that you built your whole knowledge repo around, you won't really understand the need for portability. I could care less about the shiny features, because I know that in 10 years this product will be defunct, while markdown will still exist.
  - least 4y ago