They hold organized data and have integrations and views for those data. It's nothing fancy like a mature sql-database-system, but you have different high-level views you can configure through the interface. So you can make tables with filters, a kanban, calendar, timeline and some more[1]. People use it for task-lists, project-management, to manage their movie and book-lists, etc.
If they use any table or any of the features where there are a group of objects (pages) that have different status or properties, they are using databases.
It's pretty much something you accidentally create and use in notion without knowing unless all you are doing is writing documents.
Anything needs to be shown on a table, calendar, etc. is a database. It doesn't matter if user deliberately uses it or not. One can have a look at all the Notion's templates (https://www.notion.so/templates). All featured templates have databases. I also looked at all categories and their front pages filled with templates /w databases. Maybe 1 per category without it.
Thank you!
I can‘t stand that each week I come across some „Notion alternative“ of which none offer databases, except for Anytype.
Without that, those „Notion alternatives“ are just alternatives to plain text note taking apps. And there‘s plenty to choose from already.
App looks fine for a multiplayer notes app but I hate the marketing. "open source XYZ clone" when they are lacking essential features of XYZ, it's clickbait.
Someone else pointed out “databases”, which appears to be a vague all encompassing term for a bunch of features. Care to elaborate on which missing features you consider to be table stakes?
Yes, it's vague because it's quite a fundamental part of Notion. There's no way to describe that feature separately from Notion. Tables, Kanban boards, gallery views, subpages... everything you can't do in basic markdown is powered by a Notion database.
The level of quality and integration is very different. And obsidian only has it through plugins which can die any day and become useless, which happens quite often. Notion has it as a fundamental part of it's concept, and is constantly improving on it.
OSS at some point forgot that the web + hosted UX is great for saas companies because they can more easily charge rent. But the web isn't great for building input UX (it's all bloat + jank and you have to completely reimplement the input elements to do anything useful, on top of shifting sand).
moving UX back to desktop thin clients would be leapfrog innovation over the saas companies. I include things like MS word as a 'thin client'. MS word 2003 was more responsive than any web interface for just typing. slack has like 2 features and is still somehow sinking into the ocean unless you have a supercomputer because of electron.
the data can be shared or backed up somehow sure; that's just file hosting with a collaboration layer maybe. but desktop UX would be a superpower for any tool that needs powerful input
While you have valid points, from a dev perspective, desktop UX is just as much shifting sand and land mines, which fuels the move to the browser for better or worse
I think your use of "thin client" here is literally redefining a thin client to be the opposite. The thick client software of MS Word does all the things locally, which is part of what makes it responsive.
To be competitive with SaaS, open source software needs to have a web version because there’s so much less friction to use web software compared to desktop software. So desktop thick clients with native UI need to be maintained in addition to, not instead of, a web UI. Most open source options barely have the resources to build a web UI, asking also for a thick client for each user operating system platform seems unrealistic.
OSS is unfortunately an overloaded term. But assuming it is about FOSS, than software that runs on the user’s machine gives so much more freedom. Can software even be free for a consumer, when it is really unpractical to run it yourself, because it needs a server?
Ah yes, another web-grumbler, here to tell us to abandon the connected platform available on all devices that is hugely successful.
It's just your opinion that the web isn't great for UI. It doesn't have much evidence (and you certainly aren't making any testable assertions). If the web was so bad you'd think native apps would be ruling the planet, would be vastly more popular & loved & be what everyone is trying to ship. But that's not the case. The web is everywhere and companies have full faith in the web and it's working.
> But the web isn't great for building input UX (it's all bloat + jank and you have to completely reimplement the input elements to do anything useful, on top of shifting sand)
Theres a school of thought that wants a complete & total solution, handed to them, that does everything, that everyone uses.
These people are ideologically going to hate the web. Even though there are countless really really good well made component libraries out there, the fact that it's not all baked in upsets a certain type a lot. But, this is the strength of the web. The web is free to shift & change & emerge new patterns & ideas, is free to have new and different components emerge. This is a strength, this is why the ecosystem keeps steamrolling everyone else: everyone else is singular & tries to be complete, and the web is legion & perpetually innovating on the edge in a way classic platforms never can. Some people see weakness, but the ideas of the low level Web Extensibility Manifesto keep the web buoyant & iterating for developer and user happiness in ways no other system has remotely been able to achieve. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto
The other good news is that the OpenUI community group got formed & is upstreaming into HTML more components. Popovers and dialogs are both about to be fully usable by anyone. There's a ton of drive to improve the core elements available on the web. While also not harming that extensibility. https://open-ui.org/
> the data can be shared or backed up somehow sure; that's just file hosting with a collaboration layer maybe.
Being connected software is the new base expectation, is table stakes. You have to have connected software to succeed. And the desktop doesn't have this. It's all special snowflake systems, all build it yourself. It's the default for software to be connected on the web. And on the web it's the default that it'll run on you desktop, your phone, your tv, your fridge, and all your neighbors friends and coworkers device.
For something like a notion clone here, I think most users would have an enormous enormous expectation that this kind of groupware be on the web. Trying to reinvent a collaborative knowledge capture paradigm on desktop sounds absurd & sounds like folly. The desktop has no starting place for developers nor users.
When I think of performance specifically, I think of how much opportunity the web has. Any popular software platform is going to have an absolutely gobsmackingly huge amount of really bad software written for it. And that challenge is magnified greatly in the connected age where vastly more data lives outside of your computer than on it, where your computer is at best a local cache. We will always be beset by unideal software, by bad architectures, by poor data remoting practices. But that doesn't make me sad or want to go run away to the many different native platforms, to go trip over all the same data syncing & data architecture problems there. It makes me excited to see us iterate and improve, makes me so happy there are brave people cranking out Svelte and Stencil and Lit, makes me happy we are moving forward speccing out signals and observables (although having two s...
I tried it out in docker and quite like it. Running it on my Linux PC I can access it from other devices anywhere through ZeroTier. It's still early stage software, and lacks easy robust backups, so I'm not ready to rely on it for anything important, but I'm hopeful.
31 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 36.1 ms ] threadyou can make tables, with headers and data.
so if youre a team you can make tasks, and then another one for team members
then you can combine the two, so basically assign people to tasks and easily filter through them using the notion gui
or you can do simple things like your own tasks, add books to a "books i've read" collection, or whatever.
https://www.notion.so/help/intro-to-databases
and of course you can then easily take data from the db, and put them into your notes as well, at least if i recall. i've only used notion a tiny bit
[1] https://www.notion.so/de-de/help/guides/when-to-use-each-typ...
It's pretty much something you accidentally create and use in notion without knowing unless all you are doing is writing documents.
Citation needed on OPs "most people".
I personally use Obsidian and it has support for all kinds of templates/metadata/tagging etc without a standalone database feature.
at least its free and files are stored locally
And I feel pretty confident saying that, knowing that this is by far the most popular page on my personal website: https://input.sh/replicating-notions-tables-with-obsidian-pl...
OSS at some point forgot that the web + hosted UX is great for saas companies because they can more easily charge rent. But the web isn't great for building input UX (it's all bloat + jank and you have to completely reimplement the input elements to do anything useful, on top of shifting sand).
moving UX back to desktop thin clients would be leapfrog innovation over the saas companies. I include things like MS word as a 'thin client'. MS word 2003 was more responsive than any web interface for just typing. slack has like 2 features and is still somehow sinking into the ocean unless you have a supercomputer because of electron.
the data can be shared or backed up somehow sure; that's just file hosting with a collaboration layer maybe. but desktop UX would be a superpower for any tool that needs powerful input
Rent-charging isn't the only reason to use the web, especially for an application like this.
It's just your opinion that the web isn't great for UI. It doesn't have much evidence (and you certainly aren't making any testable assertions). If the web was so bad you'd think native apps would be ruling the planet, would be vastly more popular & loved & be what everyone is trying to ship. But that's not the case. The web is everywhere and companies have full faith in the web and it's working.
> But the web isn't great for building input UX (it's all bloat + jank and you have to completely reimplement the input elements to do anything useful, on top of shifting sand)
Theres a school of thought that wants a complete & total solution, handed to them, that does everything, that everyone uses.
These people are ideologically going to hate the web. Even though there are countless really really good well made component libraries out there, the fact that it's not all baked in upsets a certain type a lot. But, this is the strength of the web. The web is free to shift & change & emerge new patterns & ideas, is free to have new and different components emerge. This is a strength, this is why the ecosystem keeps steamrolling everyone else: everyone else is singular & tries to be complete, and the web is legion & perpetually innovating on the edge in a way classic platforms never can. Some people see weakness, but the ideas of the low level Web Extensibility Manifesto keep the web buoyant & iterating for developer and user happiness in ways no other system has remotely been able to achieve. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto
The other good news is that the OpenUI community group got formed & is upstreaming into HTML more components. Popovers and dialogs are both about to be fully usable by anyone. There's a ton of drive to improve the core elements available on the web. While also not harming that extensibility. https://open-ui.org/
> the data can be shared or backed up somehow sure; that's just file hosting with a collaboration layer maybe.
Being connected software is the new base expectation, is table stakes. You have to have connected software to succeed. And the desktop doesn't have this. It's all special snowflake systems, all build it yourself. It's the default for software to be connected on the web. And on the web it's the default that it'll run on you desktop, your phone, your tv, your fridge, and all your neighbors friends and coworkers device.
For something like a notion clone here, I think most users would have an enormous enormous expectation that this kind of groupware be on the web. Trying to reinvent a collaborative knowledge capture paradigm on desktop sounds absurd & sounds like folly. The desktop has no starting place for developers nor users.
When I think of performance specifically, I think of how much opportunity the web has. Any popular software platform is going to have an absolutely gobsmackingly huge amount of really bad software written for it. And that challenge is magnified greatly in the connected age where vastly more data lives outside of your computer than on it, where your computer is at best a local cache. We will always be beset by unideal software, by bad architectures, by poor data remoting practices. But that doesn't make me sad or want to go run away to the many different native platforms, to go trip over all the same data syncing & data architecture problems there. It makes me excited to see us iterate and improve, makes me so happy there are brave people cranking out Svelte and Stencil and Lit, makes me happy we are moving forward speccing out signals and observables (although having two s...
I tried it out in docker and quite like it. Running it on my Linux PC I can access it from other devices anywhere through ZeroTier. It's still early stage software, and lacks easy robust backups, so I'm not ready to rely on it for anything important, but I'm hopeful.