If I were steering the future of Agenda I would try to make it the best and only (to my knowledge) app that combines a first rate note book app with a first rate todo app. Think Agenda meets Things.
In terms of the competitive landscape for notebook apps, there are products such as Notion that have a ton of features and with a big development team. That’s going to be hard to match.
But if Agenda carved out a niche as a Notebook/ToDo app then that would be a very unique and great selling proposition IMO.
The big draw back of todo apps, for me, is that while they’re great at keeping track of what gets done, they are horrible at being an app that you want to spend time in. There notes fields are so limited. I always hesitate to attach files or write notes in a todo app because I know I’ll never look back there again after the item is completed. With Agenda as your todo app, that would be completely different.
I don’t know that it would take that much to get there. You’re on your way with the new reminders integration. Look at GoodTask and you’ll see the features that would need to be added to make it complete. I could go on further but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
We think Agenda has quite a unique feature set. It will appeal to a certain group of customers, so we don’t fixate on the competition much. The other apps do what they do well, and we do what we do well.
We are also a native solution. Haven’t looked at notion much, but seems to be very web focussed, and probably more team oriented like Slack. (Seems they may have a macOS app, but it is like Slack’s I think — just a web page in a window.) Agenda is quite personal, and with a focus on nice design.
I agree totally. I think that Agenda is a great and unique product as it is. Full stop. For the reasons you mention and more. I probably should have started with that. AND. I think there could be a unique and much needed niche to fill, IMO, where Agenda also becomes a true hybrid Notebook /Todo app. I can’t think of another app that does that, certainly not one with the richness of a notes app that Agenda already has.
I don’t think I want to see it head down the full-blown task management app like Things or Omnifocus - Reminder integration is great, but full blown task management styles differ so much that you’d detract from the knowledge management side if you tried to muscle into that space.
Yes, Notion is web focussed, however now that iPadOS will enable a desktop-class Safari experience as well as multiple app instances this Fall, it will matter less and less to users when their iPad app has bad UX. Also, the iPhone app is sufficiently good for momentary offline work.
Regardless, Agenda and Notion serve different purposes: date-based notes VS linked notes (wiki). You could use the Notion calendar for notes, but I’ve tried it and Agenda does it better.
I’m personally more excited by the way they’ve chosen to do things so far: a great note-taking and -keeping interface that hooks into a discrete calendar and discrete to-do list. It’s the cleaner way to manage everything for the developers, and allows the user to choose how to manage things and what level of complexity they’re willing to take into their personal organization system.
Honestly, I’ve long given up expecting the podcasting community to be anything other than friends who have their support spread among people they’ve met or know. Once an app takes hold of their imagination it spreads between them and it’s hard to shift it. You’d swear Omnifocus had no competition for example, or Ulysses, or Drafts, don’t get me wrong, all great apps, it’s just that people hit on a solution that works and the journey’s over. Gruber loves Agenda, you may hear more from him on it.
I agree that making Agenda a todo app as well is not the way to go. It integrates well with links back and forth with any todo app, so for me there is no need to add on a half-baked to do app here. And it would have to be half-baked compared to apps that focus on being a great todo app. I am not a fan of apps that try to do it all.
Just to be clear, I didn’t suggest that Agend try to do it all. I was just suggesting that it offer a complete TODO solution along with its notebook. This isn’t a big stretch because:
It’s already a good way of the way there. It has checkboxes for to items and, reminder’s integration. There are relatively few more features it would need to be a complete todo app.
It’s called Agenda. Its very purpose for being, and the thing that separates it from other note taking apps is that it creates a daily trail of what has been done. So it’s certainly within its purview to add todo functionality (which it’s already at about 70 percent on anyway)
I get what your proposing, but I feel that many Agenda users are figuring out how to make Agenda work for them in that way with the features available. There are some good threads out there about this.
While I am always excited to see what the developers are working on and new features when they arrive, I also really appreciate how intentional they are with adding features and not making the app drastically different than what it is.
Sometimes it is about the user making the app work specifically for them, rather than the app being changed to work for the user.
I guess this was a more controversial post than I anticipated. I was offering a suggestion to the developers for a niche that I think could be very lucrative for them. I’ve been in software marketing for decades and thought the suggestion might be useful. That’s all. I guarantee that someone willl own that niche in the not too distant future and my sense is that Agenda is 80 percent of the way there. Let’s consider this thread closed. At least for me it is.
Good to see different takes on the future of Agenda being discussed. I don’t think it has to be one or the other. Further improving Agenda as a capable To Do’s manager as suggested by @stevew has been on our roadmap from day one, which includes things like the ability to create overviews of unchecked items, better list display and management options, etc. So we’re definitely not done yet
At the same time, @stedmaniv is right that it’s not just about the app needing to be expanded or changed to fit an existing workflow, but also about tweaking your workflow to optimally leverage what Agenda can bring already today.
In that sense our overall goal is to give you the building blocks to optimise your workflows rather than providing a single complete and definitive solution. This is also exactly the idea behind this talk section of the Agenda community, to discuss with and help each other leveraging these building blocks.
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