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#thinking-together
Title
# thinking-together
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Josh Cho

05/13/2023, 9:58 AM
I have been creating a graph-based notetaking app; I am curious about the current landscape. I see Roam/Obsidian/Logseq sort of in the same category (with Obsidian Canvas as a feature with a lot of potential), and Tana (which I just learned about) goes one step further by nodifying more things. Are there any other killer features/products in this space?
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Christian Gill

05/13/2023, 10:08 AM
I gotta mention Notion, the idea of exposing it's data structure is quite powerful and I think the one you mentioned draw inspiration from there https://rauchg.com/2020/2019-in-review#notion-is-fancy
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guitarvydas

05/13/2023, 10:49 PM
I don’t know what I want, but I find myself using Kinopio and Obsidian daily. I am intrigued by: Descript, Khoj, Kagi summarizer, Just Press Record, I believe that the old-fashioned metaphors of “desktop” and “file” are in their death-throws. Perhaps ChatGPT will be retargeted at the masses (i.e. note taking) instead of being used to perform stupid pet tricks (David Letterman). IMO, notes aren’t going to be what we think of as notes. What are the atomic pieces that will enable a myriad of note-taking apps? A HUGE factor is the lack-of-friction. E.g. can I simply jot something down without being asked a bunch of questions first? (e.g. “what kind of mind-map do you want?“, “this app just crashed, do you want to send a report?“, “where do you want to save this?“, etc., etc.). From this perspective, I find Scapple and Kinopio to be the least friction-full. Just Press Record makes it possible for me to speak some thoughts while driving and to edit them later as text files. Likewise, I can use an audio recorder to capture my thoughts, then later have them transcribed by Descript (which creates “better” transcriptions). Descript has the intriguing feature of “studio sound” which makes it possible to record on a laughtop microphone, without using a $1,000 gold microphone pushed into your face, but, making it sound pretty good.
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Riley Stewart

05/15/2023, 3:19 AM
You may want to look at Hash also, they pivoted last year from a modeling/simulation toolkit to a workspace knowledge graph solution. https://hash.ai/
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Walker Griggs

05/15/2023, 4:23 PM
The option I've found and stuck with: Org Roam. It follows the same principals as roam but is lives in the Emacs / Org ecosystem. Free, free, and you don't need to leave your editor
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Benjohn Barnes

05/16/2023, 8:59 AM
Thanks @Riley Stewart, Hash looks interesting, I’ll try to dig a bit more in to that. My thoughts in this space are that notes are great, but we want / need structured arbitrary data, especially for collaboration. I think we don’t really want an “App” so much as a “System”. We want to be able to define new data types and mappings between them. And we’d like system to provide interfaces for interacting with that, querying over it, visualising, joining. Sometimes we’d like to tweak visualisations or provide new classes of visualisation, but its more important, imho, that the system can “find” the appropriate visualisations from the data types and their operations. This matters because as data types and operations each grow out fairly linearly with our effort to extend a system, the visualisation of of that I think must grow out at least something like quadratically. If we’re always building the UI in an explicit way (instead of system discovering it), we limit ourself to sub-linear (terrible!) growth of types and operations. … bit of a boil the ocean approach, but there you go 🙂
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Ulysses Popple

05/16/2023, 9:26 PM
+1 for kinopio
Used to work at hash! David seemed to like the idea of it being a repository for information in an easily accessible format.
Tana looks really cool - seems like a more automated obsidian
Gonna plug my thing again: been using https://nodysseus.io for code sketches. It's not useful for notes, but I'll throw down some calculations or an idea for something in threejs and it's saved locally.
Also heard good stuff about https://www.inkandswitch.com/ (inkbase and muse), but they're apple only so haven't tried myself.
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Duncan Cragg

05/16/2023, 9:46 PM
To me these apps have to have the following to be interesting: • local-first, not you-can-'t-use-without-an-online-account • work with Syncthing not requiring an account and payment • autosave to disk and auto-reload to work with Syncthing • markdown (or any open format on disk) • todos that are checkable with
- [ ]
• work on mobile ffs • some nice link autocompletion, thanks, not bothered about pretty graphs
Needless to say, I'm an Obsidian user
I see we have @Alexander Obenauer here but he's not been active. He seems to be behind https://tana.inc or at least connected to it. I don't see much discussion here of his ideas, Lab Notes, item-based / oriented OS, etc.? https://alexanderobenauer.com/ https://twitter.com/alexobenauer
I'm also slowly building something very similar, so thus my interest in all this
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Ethan McKean

05/23/2023, 1:25 AM
I've had good luck with Obsidian using https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git to sync between desktop and mobile. Just be sure to check the box to automatically pull when the app opens to avoid any merge conflicts.
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