First impressions after 2 days (as a heavy Notion & CODA user, coming from OneNote)

General Discussion & Q+A First Impression & General Feedback
#1

Hi Everyone,
When I first came across the website my heart skipped a beat. Since 3 years I am looking for a tool to manage all my tasks, notes, finances, study. habits and more and I am not satisfied with any solution yet.

About my current tools:
I have all my notes still in OneNote and tried to migrate to Notion for this purpose. I never did, due to online first, a simple page layout (no canvas as in OneNote), no Apple Pencil support etc, and no real connected thought tool. (Their synced blocks are not the real deal).

I use Notion mainly to power about 6 websites (here is my personal website: https://heuschkelsimon.com) and manage my current project / team work. Never really used it for personal notes.

I built a quite advanced Life tracker in CODA.io that tracks your habits, finances, tasks, recipes and time. I used coda because of inline formulas and buttons. This is what I have been using for data heavy use where I needed allot of formulas: Intro / About this Doc · Life Dashboard V2.0 - The advanced all in one tracker and manager.

In my search for the right tool I looked into Evernote, Remnote, Obsidian, Roam Research, Clickup, Slite, and a few others.

About My first experience with Anytype:
What I love about Anytype:
Offline first, open source (meaning I could build my own features longterm and dont have to wait for Anytype to build it), BEAUTIFUL design!, and the organisation structure away from folders, and the knowledge graph.

My second thought was: Wow, this is already super flashed out with allot of features, also the similar design language to Notion with the block style is really comforting and I was super impressed by the offline sync mode between devices. That is sick!

Things to consider:
I was in the onboarding, watched your videos and went through the tutorials and I am still not feeling that I understand how to set everything so that it works for me. Of course this object based approach takes some time getting used to but there are still a few open questions:

  • How are the different linking options (mention, in page, reference) show in the graph?
  • For my notes, how do I best reproduce a folder like structure? Do I use a list view and tags or should I create an individual object for each topic main topic? Will the tags not get extremely many over time? Can I filter tags ? depending on an object e.g., where would I store the information for each tag? I was thinking of to “archive” tags
  • For my task tracker: How do you represent life areas, projects, tasks and sup-tasks? All via tags and lists? Same here, If I use tags then over time finished projects will bloat my tags list but I still need them to find it again…Is there a better way? Should I use a separate relations for my Task Status vs other status?
  • For my notes:
    The main reason why I still don’t use OneNote or Notion for my notes is because I cannot link (and display) the same content in many places on a block level (like Remnote with portals). AFAIK Anytype doesn’t currently support this. The reason why I dont use Remnote or Obsidian is design. I dont like the markdown looking style and much more prefer your or Notions design.
    → Overall, I still need some getting used to to really be able to design my workspace the way I want to.

I think Anytype has huge potential, simply because of its architecture. Although I still need to spend more time on it, I hope it will become at least my note taking app and hopefully soon replaces my Coda use cases too.
What I would wish for:

Thanks for making this tool. I am hyped about the journey!

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#2

Thanks for that. Very helpful insights for me as a user with similar needs.

I’d also prefer more granularity, with blocks acting as objects.

How far did you get into RemNote? Care to elaborate a comparison? I currently have a big chunk of my life in RemNote but the lack of database/sets view limits it greatly.

1 Like
#3

Very interesting and good feedback! Coda is definitely very powerful in some important ways. There are numerous feature requests that cover much of what you raised here (though not necessarily all), so I definitely suggest searching for those and upvoting when you find something you’d like to see. Like Apple Pencil support. :slight_smile:

#4

Hey, glad I could give you some insights.
I didnt get too far in, not more than exploring the main features and going through their onboarding tutorial.
Its quite a step to change your default software to a new one, and especially for a “life operating system” or “common place book” I want to be sure that I can stick with it for long.
They are pretty close to a perfect solution. If I was still in school, I would switch without thinking due to their integrated flashcard system. here are a few other really great features of Remnote:

  • Ability to link to specific pages within a PDF and use them as a block in the rest of the note.
  • Portals are simply the best invention. No one does it as good as them. (Not sure how this works in obsidian though)
  • They also work off-line only
  • I think the learning curve is still quite good, and definitely better than Obsidian or Roam.

What I am missing are basically similar things as I already said: The design is not really my style and a canvas option as in OneNote (I used this extensively, since I am quite visual and dont want to be constraint to a a4 page size).

Thanks Oshyan for taking a look, really nice work. I will have a look at the feature requests. (Is upvoting the same as liking? Not sure if I do it right haha).

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#5

Currently yes, the “heart” button. A more formalized “vote” system might be used in the future, but an announcement will be made of that if it is adopted.

1 Like