>- Mobile performance could be better.
This is the reason I still use Evernote on mobile, even though I pay for Notion. Sometimes I'll even bend Trello into a note-taking shape. eugh. The startup time is far too long for the short interactions that you have on mobile.
There's one other shortcoming that drives me back to text files on a regular basis: often after highlighting some text in the desktop app, Ctrl-C doesn't copy. This is absolutely infuriating when using notion's code boxes to write down sequences of terminal commands. There's no way of knowing whether a Ctrl-C succeeded or not until I'm pasting the wrong command in a terminal. Text files, with any editor is a much more pleasant experience.
Even though this sounds like a list of gripes, I've found Notion invaluable as a knowledge base.
Will keep checking in in the future. Keep going though!
Ive never heard of this startup before, now they're all over this thread. Do you reckon they made this whole thread for marketing purposes? OP is a pretty anonymous user.
I already dislike them now & hopefully never have to use them. Someone else posted Tiddlywiki which is an amazing open-source program, suggest everyone at least check it out. It changed my life. I obviously have no stake in it, so why doubt me? No disclaimer necessary.
I've seen Notion mentioned often on HN, and after giving it a try I'd recommend to at least look into it to see for yourself.
[edit: I work at Notion. I’ve added some more color about that to the top here. This isn’t marketing spam I’m commenting from bed on my phone - sorry that it came off slimy]
Notion is a malleable collaborative wiki that also has relational databases.
We build Notion, so it figures that Notion is our single source of truth. I think the way we use Notion internally works pretty well - with better results than the smattering of tools I’ve used at other companies - but we’re a smaller team...
Notion makes a good wiki because adding, editing, and organizing information has such low activation energy. Each part of the org (Eng, Community, Marketing, People, ...) has a tree of pages with process, information, etc.
We have a few big centralized databases that everyone uses:
- Tasks. Lets us see what anyone is doing, assign tickets, track progress.
- Documents. This one has a weird name. All teams put meeting notes, research, proposed designs, RFCs, specs in this database. The common thread here is that documents are artifacts of their time: they’re authored, reviewed and commented on by the team, iterated on, then ratified or archived. We rarely change them afterwards because they store historical context on decisions. If an RFC changes a process, or a design gets implemented, the affected team(s) might update their wikis.
- Goals. Stores objectives, product use-cases, and large projects. We relate Tasks and Documents with the Goals they support.
Centralizing these databases fosters cross-team visibility and assists with collaboration, eg seeing Eng and Marketing tasks related to an upcoming launch, plus the designs and research.
Shortcomings:
- Search. At the ~50 person size it isn’t a desperate problem but it does hurt.
- Integration with email and calendar. There’s no way to sync Notion to Gcal or react to incoming emails.
- Integration with Github: none.
- Mobile performance could be better.
[Disclaimer: I work at Notion.]