Well that's awesome! I've been waiting for this for a while. My company uses notion internally for project management and I'd love to extend it a little bit (eg to generate burndown charts).
I'll probably try to resist the urge to build a massive, poorly-written project management tool on top of the notion api. Probably.
I just use Slack as a universal command line interface for everything.
Slack's bot extensibility make it great for:
- As a universal notification system (calendar events, github notifications, sms for the idiot apps that insist on it -- all sms go to my slack instead of my phone, alerts about my 3D printer e.g. print complete, alerts about low battery on any of my devices or robots, automatic google maps links of businesses I have visited, just about everything really)
- Expanding upon references to things, e.g. if I tag a bot and type the name of a hiking trail it can fetch the alltrails page for it and link it; if I tag a bot and type the name of a restaurant it can fetch the yelp page and link it
- If I paste code it can run it in a sandboxed environment and show the results much like a Jupyter notebook
- As a text interface to Google Assistant (the implementation is convoluted; I have to TTS the text and feed the audio result into Google's ConverseRequest endpoint. I couldn't figure out a way to feed text directly to Google)
- I have all my IOT devices linked to Slack, I can turn on/off lights, set thermostat, pause/unpause my 3D printer, request a snapshot from any camera in my house, everything right from Slack
- Slack is also great because I can upload arbitrary files, pictures, videos, sounds with ease.
The best part is that it is available on all my devices with data synced through the cloud and native mobile apps so it makes all of the above conveniently available on my phone and e-reader.
The biggest downsides are Slack's sucky search, and editing prior messages isn't the best experience.
So many other applications out there that don’t hold your data hostage like Notion.
I learned after spending an hour to transfer notes that they have a “limit” on the number of “blocks” (aka notes) that I can have.
Absolutely terrible user experience and turned me off from ever using Notion.
I ended up going open source with vimwiki (and obsidian as a visualization layer, although as comments pointed out it’s not open source). much more robust and less impervious to scummy growth tactics or companies shutting down due to acquisitions/pivots in strategy.
I had the same experience. It started off great, but I was not a fan of the idea of having all my data hostage with Notion. I'm using emacs with org-mode and org-roam right now, but I still don't have good flow with org-roam.
Both Obsidian.md and vimwiki look really cool though. Do you use Obsidian and vimwiki together, or for separate purposes?
I take notes with vimwiki (using tags) and then obsidian is the visualization layer (being able to filter and see what notes are related to one another)
The limitation only applies on free accounts, paid accounts for personal usage are extremely cheap, and it has full exportability into markdown and csv. Not sure what you're talking about unless this was a long time ago.
It’s highly unlikely that I’ll continue to use a paid service for 10-20 years, or whether that service is even going to be around. Which is what the whole motivation for having a “second brain” is for me, Having a robust note taking system that I’ll be using for decades to come.
Unlikely that vimwiki or markdown will be going away, can’t say the same thing about Notion.
That's an entirely different problem (one I sympathize with, but am not bothered by due to exportability) than spreading misinformation about how it works. Your post was false in one way and misleading in another. Saying a place where your files can be exported in a standardized format "holds your notes hostage" is hyperbolic and inflammatory.
Obsidian is not open source. I'm hesitant to dump my stuff into Obsidian because their markdown has plenty of nonstandard features. You can't run a directory of Obsidian notes through Pandoc and copy the output to your website. I think someone did write a partial converter at some point. This is kind of an issue with all the recent notes apps like Dendron, Logseq, and Athens.
It's not standard, but that's not a surprise, as Markdown is a pretty barebones format. Most of what they extended it with is pretty simple, like [[wikilinks]]. There are also other tools being developed that can work with the custom syntaxt extensions.
Also, at the end of the day, it's still just plain text. You won't lose any of your data if you no longer use Obsidian.
Big issue for me was not being able to sync with GitHub, which made it impractical as a project management tool. The api should solve that now so I’m hopeful.
Not being used as a project management tool, I only used it as a wiki. Then I switched to Roam which solves that use case better for my needs.
When I initially signed up for Notion, I did so thinking the API was already usable. It was used as a selling point for their premium service even though it wasn't implemented. This was a year and a half ago or so.
I felt pretty burned by it and killed my subscription. Hopefully this turns out well for the people who've been waiting for it, but that experience left a terrible taste in my mouth.
Isn't that the whole point of Agile MVP development? Sell something that doesn't exist and hope someone buys it? Personally, I don't expect much from it, after working with Airtable's API and hating every second of it.
Theres a lot of reasons why it makes sense to sell something before building it. You want to be up front about this fact but getting commitments to buy something is a good idea before actually spending money and time to build it.
There's some validity to the criticism, but that's more the intersection of short-cycle methods and American "hustle" culture than anything to do with an MVP approach itself. People with more integrity can take an MVP-centered approach and just be honest with customers about where they are.
Indeed, I think that honesty works better; underpromising and overdelivering is a great way to build trust among your initial customer base. Trust that you need to carry people through the inevitable bumps and anticipations of an early-adopter experience.
For those like myself ignorant about the company, Notion appears to be a project management tool with integrated wiki and docs support. With at least a claimed strong user focus.
Yup, that’s how they present it, though in reality it’s pretty clunky as a project management tool, and you’d almost always be better off using a purpose-built solution.
Notion makes a decent tool for a personal/organizational wiki but it’s too slow/unresponsive/janky to use for many other purposes IMO.
I’ve been using it for a couple years and I used to hold out hope that the performance could be optimized, but at this point I think it must be some fundamental issue with their tech stack (or some other organizational issue). It just feels bad to use. The pages take forever to load, the search is slow, and the actual page editing feels sluggish.
It’s a shame because otherwise I really like the core ideas of how Notion works. If someone released a tool that was “Notion but fast”, I’d switch in an instant.
Your comments reflect my almost two-year experience with the paid version of Notion.
I found it very difficult to figure out how to use the tools beyond very narrow use-cases they provided in examples.
And I found the docs were almost useless in explaining the overarching design. As a result, despite a lot of time spent, I kept bumping into unexpected limitations or design corners with no way out other than to scrap the document type I was trying to construct.
I went back to Trello for project management, Todoist for to-do's, and my Dropbox-backed markdown files for notes.
It's a shame because with more attention to the user experience and better docs, I think they'd have a killer product.
I had a similar experience. The slowness of Notion to me. I now use Obsidian which has tons of nice shortcuts and is snappy, even as it's what I believe is an Electron app.
I just recently deep-dived into using Notion for our boutique management consulting firm.
It has been great so far as a lightweight CRM, and a collaborative meeting note—taking tool with backlinks into CRM. Also documenting our internal processes.
When it first launched we talked to the guy who made it (pretty sure it started as a side project) and IIRC it was backed by a relational database with every block being a row and a lot of joins that make up a page. Hopefully they've optimised it since then, but if that's still the architecture it's going to be hard to get performant.
I set up Notion as an intranet for my wife's company and it has been enormously useful for posting company documents, policies, handbooks, announcements, etc. Employees are invited as "guests" at no additional charge.
We also use a Notion database with various views for tracking customers, sales pipeline, rewards, and a lot more.
When we bring on a new customer, we quickly create (from a template) a personalized welcome page for them with an embedded copy of their service agreement and a few other things. Notion can generate a public link so we send this right away and it makes a nice impression.
Performance isn't great but it is so useful for us that I don't mind. I do hope they provide an offline version soon as that is my biggest wish right for it right now.
* I'm not affiliated with the company, just a pleased customer.
The opposite is true, its a WYSIWYG wiki which you can abuse for project management. The project management capabilities are similar to Github Project boards which means that it is very basic.
It’s weird that that’s (still) how they market Notion. I use it as sort of a combination of google docs and google sheets — I can write long-form documents and include attachments, link to other pages, etc, and also create databases (and every row is its own page).
You’d have to shoehorn project management into their database paradigm, which definitely seems subpar compared to a purpose-built task/project manager. But the “personal wiki” aspect of it is fantastic.
I didn't quite have the impression you had, but I did sign up for a "early access beta", that mostly resulted in me receiving a bunch of spam from the company telling me how almost ready the api was.
Happy the thing is released finally, it is a big improvement on Google docs.
Is this not the direct API? Databases are just a bag of pages that have the same properties. I would kinda expect that updating a record would just be a page operation.
There is a direct API for listing databases for instance. That isn't done through the pages stuff. Just a nit I guess but using the page patch API for databases updates is just weird to me.
Full Disclosure - I have been lucky enough to have closed BETA access to the Notion API and here are some things I have noticed. BTW I do not work for Notion, im totally indie :P
- The team building the API has been super responsive and respectful, very good collaboration on their Dev slack and I had a great time testing things
- The documentation has been updated with the feedback from the community who had access, it's in a MUCH better status now than when it started
- The API speed has increased, it was really slow, now its a bit faster :)
Looking forward to see how other companies are using the Notion API, whether natively or through other integrations, I've seen a lot of activity from the folks at Integromat and Typeform :) (which are awesome tools btw!)
I've also found them to be pretty responsive (I've messaged them a number of times with bug reports and feature requests). That really contributes to my overall appreciation of the product!
It has the same basic trigger (new item), actions (create/update item), and search (find item) as every other CRM integration. It is missing a trigger for item getting updated - still excited to see how folks are using it though.
I have to give a shoutout to the dev who wrote Nishan, a wrapper around Notion's internal API used by their webapp. I've been using it for a while and it will be a long time before the public API catches up. Getting users to find the api token from cookies has been a pain though, so I'll be looking into migrating asap. https://github.com/Devorein/Nishan
I have been using Notion in its API form for a while through notion-py[1]. Currently, it powers my blog[2] and for me, it's a really good integration. I write something, ask my friends to review it. I run a command to publish it, and it's live. The workflow is really, really good and removes a ton of friction because the software that you write in is also the one that powers your blog's content.
Overall, I think Notion API can open up many, many possibilities, since it can become a really good CMS, besides already being a great note-taking tool, and a team app. Notion has millions of users, and it's a huge market already.
Btw, if you're interested in running your blog on Notion, I would love to hear from you! [3]
I am interested in running my blog with Notion. I currently use a Gatsby blog on Netlify using NetlifyCMS. So I'd need to export any entries to Markdown and commit them to the blog's repo (the rest is handled by Netlify). I'd ideally like it to be bidirectional though, so that any changes to files in the repo are going to be reflected in Notion...
Notion static pages are extremely bloated. I commented previously about a documentation page created with notion that was 2+ mb for what was essentially 10 links
I really like the idea of what notion is trying to do, but their "databases" drive me nuts. They force a default column that's useless for relationships... and I never know if they want to be database like or excel like. Notion needs a good roadmap, and also start acknowledging user feedback, besides the "we got your feedback".
Along the same lines, the fact that they don’t have any simple inline tables that aren’t “databases” is annoying. Sometimes I don’t want a database or a spreadsheet, just a simple inline table with a few columns.
Kinda confused about this one? Inline tables are ... well inline tables. Why does it matter that they're actually pages/databases? Is it that you want tables in the formatting sense?
Good question! There are a few things. First, you can’t make a table that doesn’t have specifically typed vertical columns, which means a bunch of layouts just aren’t possible (you can kind of fake it with all text columns, but it gets messy. You also can’t hide the column headers.
You’re forced to have a name column, and your table has to have a title (you can make the title a space but that feels like a hack).
There’s just lots of chrome. Even if you lock the table, you still have the lock icon and the new row button that will never go away.
These things may all seem minor, but they really do make tables not look or feel “simple”.
To be clear, I’m absolutely fine with the existing tables for certain purposes, and I don’t want them changed… I just wish there was a “Simple Table” block type as well.
It really irks me when the pricing page for any product has any tier that requires contacting "Sales". If you don't want to include pricing for a tier, exclude it from the pricing list or add a "need something else" or "we also offer enterprise plans" after the table. Maybe just a me thing, because I'm guessing it obviously works based on how often I've come across it.
The reason pricing is not shown for that tier (in most cases, I can't say for sure for Notion) is because it's not a normal tier, it includes the possibilities of negotiated pricing and custom setups. Why does it bother you?
but the product is great but it is underrated for some reasons. I think it is underrated because it is a small company compare to its competitor microsoft and google and getting use to notion is also little bit tricky.
I've actively searched for years to find a system to dump my brain into and Notion is the absolutely perfect fit for me. The fact that everything is a page, anything can go into a page, and you can nest forever on the fly is exactly what I need to model my actual IRL problems.
Putting together a Christmas list? Create a list and start adding stuff. Ahh crap, I know I want a new TV but I don't know any specifics. So I just open up the TV item in the list and dive into my research. Create a database inside there for prospective options, a separate view for finalists. Copy in images, links to articles and reviews without "losing my place."
I don't have to spend any mental energy thinking about how to organize my notes because I can just pick a direction and go without being stopped by anything. Everything lives where it's most relevant I guess it how I'd say it.
What makes the Notion illustrations so appealing and effective to me is not their style, though I love the way they look, it is that they are created for the need at hand. They are individually made to a purpose.
Side note: I manage several illustrators for a team that produces educational media and one of the hardest things we have to communicate to users is what an illustration is good for.
I have users come to me with an image and say, "I want an illustration that looks like this."
And we ask them, "But what do you want the illustration to do."
And they answer, "We want it to look like this."
They don't have any particular purpose for the illustration, it's just wallpaper for their website. A way to break up a page. A function of general art direction, rather than a working part of the content.
We end up doing a lot of what amounts to custom clip art, because that's what users often want. And it really does help a website or a video, or a document to have consistent art direction. But by far the the most compelling and engaging content we work on isn't from when a user asks for a set of stock images and icons, all in the same style, but it's when they comes to us and says, "We have this problem explaining this idea, or telling this story. Can you help us with that?"
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 76.9 ms ] threadI'll probably try to resist the urge to build a massive, poorly-written project management tool on top of the notion api. Probably.
I'll have to see if this API is complete enough to do what I want with Notion.
Slack's bot extensibility make it great for:
- As a universal notification system (calendar events, github notifications, sms for the idiot apps that insist on it -- all sms go to my slack instead of my phone, alerts about my 3D printer e.g. print complete, alerts about low battery on any of my devices or robots, automatic google maps links of businesses I have visited, just about everything really)
- Expanding upon references to things, e.g. if I tag a bot and type the name of a hiking trail it can fetch the alltrails page for it and link it; if I tag a bot and type the name of a restaurant it can fetch the yelp page and link it
- If I paste code it can run it in a sandboxed environment and show the results much like a Jupyter notebook
- As a text interface to Google Assistant (the implementation is convoluted; I have to TTS the text and feed the audio result into Google's ConverseRequest endpoint. I couldn't figure out a way to feed text directly to Google)
- I have all my IOT devices linked to Slack, I can turn on/off lights, set thermostat, pause/unpause my 3D printer, request a snapshot from any camera in my house, everything right from Slack
- Slack is also great because I can upload arbitrary files, pictures, videos, sounds with ease.
The best part is that it is available on all my devices with data synced through the cloud and native mobile apps so it makes all of the above conveniently available on my phone and e-reader.
The biggest downsides are Slack's sucky search, and editing prior messages isn't the best experience.
But it seems like in the meantime people have started to move on (I have). Let's hope this can bring back some momentum for them.
I learned after spending an hour to transfer notes that they have a “limit” on the number of “blocks” (aka notes) that I can have.
Absolutely terrible user experience and turned me off from ever using Notion.
I ended up going open source with vimwiki (and obsidian as a visualization layer, although as comments pointed out it’s not open source). much more robust and less impervious to scummy growth tactics or companies shutting down due to acquisitions/pivots in strategy.
Both Obsidian.md and vimwiki look really cool though. Do you use Obsidian and vimwiki together, or for separate purposes?
Unlikely that vimwiki or markdown will be going away, can’t say the same thing about Notion.
Obsidian is not open source. I'm hesitant to dump my stuff into Obsidian because their markdown has plenty of nonstandard features. You can't run a directory of Obsidian notes through Pandoc and copy the output to your website. I think someone did write a partial converter at some point. This is kind of an issue with all the recent notes apps like Dendron, Logseq, and Athens.
The main thing I use obsidian for at this point is visualizing connections between my notes
Went with vimwiki. I just store my notes in a private Github repository. It's simple and effective. So far I've been happy with this setup.
So in the event that they don’t survive or enact policies I disagree with, nothing changes for me
Also, at the end of the day, it's still just plain text. You won't lose any of your data if you no longer use Obsidian.
That's a bold statement.
- https://logseq.com/
- https://www.dendron.so/
- https://github.com/athensresearch/athens
- https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
For example, Vercel reverse-engineered the internal API and made a super awesome demo here when introducing "Serverless Pre-Rendering". [1]
There's a video demo and code of how they did it.
[1] https://vercel.com/blog/serverless-pre-rendering
I felt pretty burned by it and killed my subscription. Hopefully this turns out well for the people who've been waiting for it, but that experience left a terrible taste in my mouth.
Indeed, I think that honesty works better; underpromising and overdelivering is a great way to build trust among your initial customer base. Trust that you need to carry people through the inevitable bumps and anticipations of an early-adopter experience.
Notion makes a decent tool for a personal/organizational wiki but it’s too slow/unresponsive/janky to use for many other purposes IMO.
I’ve been using it for a couple years and I used to hold out hope that the performance could be optimized, but at this point I think it must be some fundamental issue with their tech stack (or some other organizational issue). It just feels bad to use. The pages take forever to load, the search is slow, and the actual page editing feels sluggish.
It’s a shame because otherwise I really like the core ideas of how Notion works. If someone released a tool that was “Notion but fast”, I’d switch in an instant.
I found it very difficult to figure out how to use the tools beyond very narrow use-cases they provided in examples.
And I found the docs were almost useless in explaining the overarching design. As a result, despite a lot of time spent, I kept bumping into unexpected limitations or design corners with no way out other than to scrap the document type I was trying to construct.
I went back to Trello for project management, Todoist for to-do's, and my Dropbox-backed markdown files for notes.
It's a shame because with more attention to the user experience and better docs, I think they'd have a killer product.
It has been great so far as a lightweight CRM, and a collaborative meeting note—taking tool with backlinks into CRM. Also documenting our internal processes.
Project management and ToDos haven’t stuck.
We also use a Notion database with various views for tracking customers, sales pipeline, rewards, and a lot more.
When we bring on a new customer, we quickly create (from a template) a personalized welcome page for them with an embedded copy of their service agreement and a few other things. Notion can generate a public link so we send this right away and it makes a nice impression.
Performance isn't great but it is so useful for us that I don't mind. I do hope they provide an offline version soon as that is my biggest wish right for it right now.
* I'm not affiliated with the company, just a pleased customer.
You’d have to shoehorn project management into their database paradigm, which definitely seems subpar compared to a purpose-built task/project manager. But the “personal wiki” aspect of it is fantastic.
Happy the thing is released finally, it is a big improvement on Google docs.
That said, Notion is a really good product.
This is a promising start, but so far it's read & append it looks like -- no updating (of blocks at least).
Updating page properties can take it a way, but looking forward to seeing it expand a little.
(I work at Notion, but not on the API team)
Along with stylus support.
For example markdown support for read/write would make it much easier to use it as CMS or sync the data, instead of working on the custom block types.
- The team building the API has been super responsive and respectful, very good collaboration on their Dev slack and I had a great time testing things
- The documentation has been updated with the feedback from the community who had access, it's in a MUCH better status now than when it started
- The API speed has increased, it was really slow, now its a bit faster :)
Looking forward to see how other companies are using the Notion API, whether natively or through other integrations, I've seen a lot of activity from the folks at Integromat and Typeform :) (which are awesome tools btw!)
It has the same basic trigger (new item), actions (create/update item), and search (find item) as every other CRM integration. It is missing a trigger for item getting updated - still excited to see how folks are using it though.
Overall, I think Notion API can open up many, many possibilities, since it can become a really good CMS, besides already being a great note-taking tool, and a team app. Notion has millions of users, and it's a huge market already.
Btw, if you're interested in running your blog on Notion, I would love to hear from you! [3]
[1]: https://github.com/jamalex/notion-py
[2]: https://shubhamjain.co/
[3]: https://twitter.com/shubhamjainco
yes, this
They said in Twitter that stylus support is a priority, but no plans yet for a Linux client.
And, the Android app is quite clunky, not as good as Android native Notes apps.
So, yes, since they are using electron they might as well provide a Linux one too, but I don't see why the lack of one would hold you back.
You’re forced to have a name column, and your table has to have a title (you can make the title a space but that feels like a hack).
There’s just lots of chrome. Even if you lock the table, you still have the lock icon and the new row button that will never go away.
These things may all seem minor, but they really do make tables not look or feel “simple”.
To be clear, I’m absolutely fine with the existing tables for certain purposes, and I don’t want them changed… I just wish there was a “Simple Table” block type as well.
Okay, but what does it do and why do I want it?
Why do sooooo many businesses insist on homepages that tell me literally nothing about the product they provide?
I'm fearful of lock-in, and just use markdown plain text, sync'd with dropbox, and then use different markdown apps on different OSes.
Putting together a Christmas list? Create a list and start adding stuff. Ahh crap, I know I want a new TV but I don't know any specifics. So I just open up the TV item in the list and dive into my research. Create a database inside there for prospective options, a separate view for finalists. Copy in images, links to articles and reviews without "losing my place."
I don't have to spend any mental energy thinking about how to organize my notes because I can just pick a direction and go without being stopped by anything. Everything lives where it's most relevant I guess it how I'd say it.
- Roman Muradov: https://www.bluebed.net/
- Iris Chiang: https://irischiangart.com
What makes the Notion illustrations so appealing and effective to me is not their style, though I love the way they look, it is that they are created for the need at hand. They are individually made to a purpose.
Side note: I manage several illustrators for a team that produces educational media and one of the hardest things we have to communicate to users is what an illustration is good for.
I have users come to me with an image and say, "I want an illustration that looks like this."
And we ask them, "But what do you want the illustration to do."
And they answer, "We want it to look like this."
They don't have any particular purpose for the illustration, it's just wallpaper for their website. A way to break up a page. A function of general art direction, rather than a working part of the content.
We end up doing a lot of what amounts to custom clip art, because that's what users often want. And it really does help a website or a video, or a document to have consistent art direction. But by far the the most compelling and engaging content we work on isn't from when a user asks for a set of stock images and icons, all in the same style, but it's when they comes to us and says, "We have this problem explaining this idea, or telling this story. Can you help us with that?"
- Demo: https://pipedream.com/apps/notion
- Workflow Example: https://pipedream.com/@tod/p_D1C3LlN