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Real-time collaboration via the public API is challenging. (I work at Notion)

by jitl 4y ago

speakfreely 4y ago
Do you have any insight into what the hell they're thinking by putting out this feature before addressing basic stuff like offline mode? This is literally insulting to paid users, pumping out stuff that no one asked for and no one wants while basic feature parity with other products continues to suffer.
- jitl 4y ago
  “Offline mode” is a bit of an ambiguous term. We regularly ship behind-the-scenes improvements to data synchronization and caching systems. These systems are much more reliable today compared to a year ago. However, we don’t have a way to explicitly manage the local caching policy. Are there other collaborative wiki products that implement your ideal “offline mode”?
  - speakfreely 4y ago
    At this point just the ability to cache everything locally for read-only access while offline would be a huge improvement. And ideally, feature parity with Apple Notes, Google Keep, Evernote would be nice. But I would be thrilled just to get offline read-only access to everything.
TechBro8615 4y ago
Lots of people don't care about real time collaboration
no_wizard 4y ago
any other notable challenges, and for those challenges are there any workarounds? Additionally, any timeline on improvements to those public APIs? and am I correct to assume the public API is the same API for functionality that notion itself uses or are there unexposed features that only the first party client gets?
- jitl 4y ago
  The public API is substantially different from the internal API so we can provide a better developer experience with more understandable and consistent interfaces that match product concepts, rather than exposing incidental implementation details. We only build public APIs needed to enable a set of use-cases; right now "develop an alternative editor" is not one of the use-cases we intend to support - so there's no active work toward things like realtime collaboration APIs. If your client decides to use the internal APIs, it may be blocked as part of our anti-abuse countermeasures.

Real-time collaboration via the public API is challenging. (I work at Notion)

by jitl 4y ago

Real-time collaboration via the public API is challenging. (I work at Notion)

Do you have any insight into what the hell they're thinking by putting out this feature before addressing basic stuff like offline mode? This is literally insulting to paid users, pumping out stuff that no one asked for and no one wants while basic feature parity with other products continues to suffer.

jitl 4y ago
“Offline mode” is a bit of an ambiguous term. We regularly ship behind-the-scenes improvements to data synchronization and caching systems. These systems are much more reliable today compared to a year ago. However, we don’t have a way to explicitly manage the local caching policy. Are there other collaborative wiki products that implement your ideal “offline mode”?
- speakfreely 4y ago
  At this point just the ability to cache everything locally for read-only access while offline would be a huge improvement. And ideally, feature parity with Apple Notes, Google Keep, Evernote would be nice. But I would be thrilled just to get offline read-only access to everything.

TechBro8615 4y ago

Lots of people don't care about real time collaboration

no_wizard 4y ago

any other notable challenges, and for those challenges are there any workarounds? Additionally, any timeline on improvements to those public APIs? and am I correct to assume the public API is the same API for functionality that notion itself uses or are there unexposed features that only the first party client gets?

jitl 4y ago
The public API is substantially different from the internal API so we can provide a better developer experience with more understandable and consistent interfaces that match product concepts, rather than exposing incidental implementation details. We only build public APIs needed to enable a set of use-cases; right now "develop an alternative editor" is not one of the use-cases we intend to support - so there's no active work toward things like realtime collaboration APIs. If your client decides to use the internal APIs, it may be blocked as part of our anti-abuse countermeasures.