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Does it have offline support? This is the one thing I'm missing the most about Notion, Miro, Google Calendar, and all of this - offline support. In German trai

Does it have offline support? This is the one thing I'm missing the most about Notion, Miro, Google Calendar, and all of this - offline support. In German trains, I'm offline, on flights, I'm often offline; while traveling, I'm often offline. Offline capabilities are often neglected.

tonypham 4y ago
Offline support is costly, and we do not have the resources for it yet. For businesses that have a lot of small customers, offline support is challenging.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Really appreciated this no-no sense, straightforward reply. I agree, the reason offline support is often not that great is that the customers who are most likely to pay for your product are the least likely to have issues with online connectivity or to care about offline support, OP's edge cases notwithstanding. I even travel fairly often in the US and it's rare when I'm on a plane that doesn't have wifi.
- klabb3 4y ago
  To add why: the ecosystem is immature. I am building a decentralized app (the old way) but with an event sourced architecture (append-only list of JSON events/commands). The storage itself is trivial but for everything else (queries, syncing, conflicts, validation, permissions, schema changes) there's little support and I had to make my own stuff. It works for me, because because I only have 2-3 entities but your app is much more complex, so I wouldn't recommend it even if you started from scratch. I will say that there's nothing that really stops offline aside from ecosystem support and maturity. All it really takes is a medium-big well maintained project that solves 80-90% of use cases. I think CRDTs are promising for the data layer because it simplifies the API surface (at the expense of complex implementation).
curious_cat_163 4y ago
Have you tried Obsidian with its Kanban plug-in? If so, I’d love to learn what you make of options like that?
- tonypham 4y ago
  I haven't tried it yet. Will take the time to check it out. Thanks for your suggestions.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nisten 4y ago
It's rare to see offline support in a web app for a few reasons: LocalStorage is easy to use but too limited at 50Mb. WebSQL got deprecated by FireFox because of secuirty issues years ago ( albeit is still somewhat supported in Chrome ). The FileSystem API looked promising, and then google killed it. IndexedDb is the only option, it's slow on writes, therefore requiring major hacks like absurd-sql to be performant. It's also old, written before ES6, needs lots of boilerplate, but it does actually work. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A... Even then however there is a limit of 2GB of persistent storage it can use, which is workable but still: Some versions of Safari are known to delete IndexedDB after 1 week because of power savings. Chrome does not allow it unless you either accept notifications from that domain and/or pass a certain lighthouse score (these reasons are anectodal and not well-documented). So yeah it's a mess, and a bit sad considering it will take years to ratify a better standard for this, but not impossible to do. Also annoying to know that internally your browser is actually using sqlite under-the-hood anyway. Web based game engines (i.e. XREngine) are able to get by with IndexedDB i think, and apps like https://github.com/actualbudget/actual https://github.com/actualbudget/actual created by the author of absurd-sql are good codebases to follow as example. WebAssembly based sqlite is coming along nicely too. https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/tip/about.md https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/tip/about.md. I am personally working on an offline-capable ML product using pyscript, svelte & indexedDb and it's been a painful ammount of fun so far.
- leesalminen 4y ago
  There was a post a couple weeks ago here about SQLite on WASM that looked very promising [0]. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s at the top of my list. I want to try and combine it with LiteFS for syncing back up to the server, replication, etc. Wondering if anyone has tried any of this out yet? There’s the potential for a renaissance of offline-first support for devs. Edit: I see you mentioned it at the end, my bad [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374402
- lukevp 4y ago
  You could just wrap the web app in Capacitor for mobile and Electron for desktop, and easily use a SQLite db for unlimited persistence. If someone is interested in offline support, I don’t think it is a dealbreaker to have to download an app. That’s pretty common (eg Netflix, Spotify, hbo, any of the streaming services. The offline support only works in the app, not the web player).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
derekzhouzhen 4y ago
Offline is nice in theory, but not as useful in reality. For solo projects, I will skip all the fancy tools and just use org-mode (emacs), which is offline. For a company project, most people don't get to decide which tool to use. Besides, if you spend significant time in a project management tool, even if your title is project manager, there is something seriously wrong with the project already. In which case, the tools is not the problem you should be worried about.
ildon 4y ago
Try akiflow.com, it has excellent offline support.
kevsim 4y ago
Yeah, when we built our product (kitemaker.co) we introduced offline capabilities quite early because my co-founder often had very spotty wifi during train commutes. We ended up making all writes totally optimistic with data sync in the background. Has the nice performance benefit of the frontend never waiting for the server as well.
jonp888 4y ago
Remember the Milk (https://www.rememberthemilk.com/ https://www.rememberthemilk.com/) is a fairly advanced todo application which works identically offline and online. I believe they use Google Firebase Cloud to automatically synchronise data between all devices and platforms.
steveharman 4y ago
Doesn't Notion have offline support these days? I just launched the Android app with all networking and mobile disabled, the app showed me all my pages etc and allowed me to enter new data.
enra 4y ago
We built Linear(https://linear.app https://linear.app) to be offline first from the beginning. It’s kind of hard to do later. It’s architected in a way that client syncs the data, all the actions happen locally and then delta packets are synced back to the server. This also makes the app really fast because the client doesn’t have to wait for the network to complete the action.
- rattray 4y ago
  Thank you for building Linear the way you have! So snappy in so many ways. I think it could be interesting to see Linear add personal/private TODO support of some kind… like everyone gets a TODO list that is mostly a view of your linear tickets with each as a bullet point in a document (similar to when you mention them in a Notion checklist doc) but where you can also add other items which are just text (and/or entries in a personal/private linear space)
- crsAbtEvrthng 4y ago
  I love linear but your advertised "offline mode" is not what I would expect it to be. If I open the Mac app when I'm offline I just get a blank window and have no access to any of my data or a window telling me "Unknown Error loading your workspace data". So I have to login once and keep the app open before I go offline. If I close the app while being offline and reopen it without internet connection I won't have access to any of my data. This is sadly killing the app for me. Is this expected behaviour? Just a "read only" mode of the last state I had when last logged in would be enough for me.
- voz_ 4y ago
  Tell TA he's a wizard but his dependency graph causes deadlocks
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  Linear looks great! I love how focused it is on this specific problem area. I don’t find all-in-one apps like OPs very useful. Can’t replace all my tools like chat, docs, project management, etc at once. Will give Linear a try!
burntcookie90 4y ago
Trello has offline support for mobile https://tech.trello.com/sync-architecture/ https://tech.trello.com/sync-architecture/

tonypham 4y ago

Offline support is costly, and we do not have the resources for it yet. For businesses that have a lot of small customers, offline support is challenging.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Really appreciated this no-no sense, straightforward reply. I agree, the reason offline support is often not that great is that the customers who are most likely to pay for your product are the least likely to have issues with online connectivity or to care about offline support, OP's edge cases notwithstanding. I even travel fairly often in the US and it's rare when I'm on a plane that doesn't have wifi.
klabb3 4y ago
To add why: the ecosystem is immature. I am building a decentralized app (the old way) but with an event sourced architecture (append-only list of JSON events/commands). The storage itself is trivial but for everything else (queries, syncing, conflicts, validation, permissions, schema changes) there's little support and I had to make my own stuff. It works for me, because because I only have 2-3 entities but your app is much more complex, so I wouldn't recommend it even if you started from scratch. I will say that there's nothing that really stops offline aside from ecosystem support and maturity. All it really takes is a medium-big well maintained project that solves 80-90% of use cases. I think CRDTs are promising for the data layer because it simplifies the API surface (at the expense of complex implementation).

curious_cat_163 4y ago

Have you tried Obsidian with its Kanban plug-in? If so, I’d love to learn what you make of options like that?

tonypham 4y ago
I haven't tried it yet. Will take the time to check it out. Thanks for your suggestions.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nisten 4y ago

It's rare to see offline support in a web app for a few reasons: LocalStorage is easy to use but too limited at 50Mb. WebSQL got deprecated by FireFox because of secuirty issues years ago ( albeit is still somewhat supported in Chrome ). The FileSystem API looked promising, and then google killed it. IndexedDb is the only option, it's slow on writes, therefore requiring major hacks like absurd-sql to be performant. It's also old, written before ES6, needs lots of boilerplate, but it does actually work. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A... Even then however there is a limit of 2GB of persistent storage it can use, which is workable but still: Some versions of Safari are known to delete IndexedDB after 1 week because of power savings. Chrome does not allow it unless you either accept notifications from that domain and/or pass a certain lighthouse score (these reasons are anectodal and not well-documented). So yeah it's a mess, and a bit sad considering it will take years to ratify a better standard for this, but not impossible to do. Also annoying to know that internally your browser is actually using sqlite under-the-hood anyway. Web based game engines (i.e. XREngine) are able to get by with IndexedDB i think, and apps like https://github.com/actualbudget/actual https://github.com/actualbudget/actual created by the author of absurd-sql are good codebases to follow as example. WebAssembly based sqlite is coming along nicely too. https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/tip/about.md https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/tip/about.md. I am personally working on an offline-capable ML product using pyscript, svelte & indexedDb and it's been a painful ammount of fun so far.

leesalminen 4y ago
There was a post a couple weeks ago here about SQLite on WASM that looked very promising [0]. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s at the top of my list. I want to try and combine it with LiteFS for syncing back up to the server, replication, etc. Wondering if anyone has tried any of this out yet? There’s the potential for a renaissance of offline-first support for devs. Edit: I see you mentioned it at the end, my bad [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374402
lukevp 4y ago
You could just wrap the web app in Capacitor for mobile and Electron for desktop, and easily use a SQLite db for unlimited persistence. If someone is interested in offline support, I don’t think it is a dealbreaker to have to download an app. That’s pretty common (eg Netflix, Spotify, hbo, any of the streaming services. The offline support only works in the app, not the web player).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

derekzhouzhen 4y ago

Offline is nice in theory, but not as useful in reality. For solo projects, I will skip all the fancy tools and just use org-mode (emacs), which is offline. For a company project, most people don't get to decide which tool to use. Besides, if you spend significant time in a project management tool, even if your title is project manager, there is something seriously wrong with the project already. In which case, the tools is not the problem you should be worried about.

ildon 4y ago

Try akiflow.com, it has excellent offline support.

kevsim 4y ago

Yeah, when we built our product (kitemaker.co) we introduced offline capabilities quite early because my co-founder often had very spotty wifi during train commutes. We ended up making all writes totally optimistic with data sync in the background. Has the nice performance benefit of the frontend never waiting for the server as well.

jonp888 4y ago

Remember the Milk (https://www.rememberthemilk.com/ https://www.rememberthemilk.com/) is a fairly advanced todo application which works identically offline and online. I believe they use Google Firebase Cloud to automatically synchronise data between all devices and platforms.

steveharman 4y ago

Doesn't Notion have offline support these days? I just launched the Android app with all networking and mobile disabled, the app showed me all my pages etc and allowed me to enter new data.

enra 4y ago

We built Linear(https://linear.app https://linear.app) to be offline first from the beginning. It’s kind of hard to do later. It’s architected in a way that client syncs the data, all the actions happen locally and then delta packets are synced back to the server. This also makes the app really fast because the client doesn’t have to wait for the network to complete the action.

rattray 4y ago
Thank you for building Linear the way you have! So snappy in so many ways. I think it could be interesting to see Linear add personal/private TODO support of some kind… like everyone gets a TODO list that is mostly a view of your linear tickets with each as a bullet point in a document (similar to when you mention them in a Notion checklist doc) but where you can also add other items which are just text (and/or entries in a personal/private linear space)
crsAbtEvrthng 4y ago
I love linear but your advertised "offline mode" is not what I would expect it to be. If I open the Mac app when I'm offline I just get a blank window and have no access to any of my data or a window telling me "Unknown Error loading your workspace data". So I have to login once and keep the app open before I go offline. If I close the app while being offline and reopen it without internet connection I won't have access to any of my data. This is sadly killing the app for me. Is this expected behaviour? Just a "read only" mode of the last state I had when last logged in would be enough for me.
voz_ 4y ago
Tell TA he's a wizard but his dependency graph causes deadlocks
systemicdanna 4y ago
Linear looks great! I love how focused it is on this specific problem area. I don’t find all-in-one apps like OPs very useful. Can’t replace all my tools like chat, docs, project management, etc at once. Will give Linear a try!

burntcookie90 4y ago

Trello has offline support for mobile https://tech.trello.com/sync-architecture/ https://tech.trello.com/sync-architecture/