Yup, we fully agree then, and indeed those are things we had on our list from the beginning, so I guess a case of convergent evolution rather than copying things from apps that in the mean time seem to have become a category on their own.
And you’re exactly right, for studying/practice etc other apps are better, and equally for mind mapping exercises. If pure hardcore task management is what you need then apps like Things are probably better as well. Fortunately most of the time you need a bit of everything most of the time, which is the sweet spot we try to provide with Agenda.
The good thing is that our roadmap is basically a series of major updates where exactly these things that are mentioned here will be the tentpole features for each update. The down side is that we’re two men in a garage, so the goods will be delivered over time
“The good thing is that our roadmap is basically a series of major updates where exactly these things that are mentioned here will be the tentpole features for each update. The down side is that we’re two men in a garage, so the goods will be delivered over time ”
As others have commented and as you may notice from some engaged users, you are doing already a superb job. One reason for me to read and write here is that you do engage with the users in a constructive way.
I am therefore looking forward to following the developments
What I miss in the story is the desire to be vendor-independent.
With a lot of tools that’s not the case and your data is locked-in and difficult to get out.
I would like a tool that “hovers” over my data, whatever format that is, reads it, adds it’s functionality and updates it whenever YOU want it and leave it in your file structure, so you can see it with f.i. Finder. If another, better, tool comes along, you buy it and use without a lot of conversion work. Is that asked too much or does nobody wants that?
Yes and no, in principle you could envision a tool that keeps a metadata store on top of existing files, but to expect that a) everything could be stored as metadata while keeping some kind of plain text (?) file separate, and especially b) then expect a new tool to take the combination of that so you could happily continue in a lossless fashion, is not very realistic IMHO. For one because there is no standard.
There is never a standard, when something new comes up. That has to be developed.
It will be more difficult, however, to get software developers to adhere to such a standard as they prefer to keep your data locked in for their continuity.
Only if the user community is able to force data independency, it will be done.
Lately I select new tools only if I can couple them losely to my data and/or make export easy.
Yeah, but this is the chicken and egg problem. I’m skeptical this will happen. A design-by-committee approach rarely works, which means that if a standard evolves, it’s usually because some existing format gets so popular that it becomes a de facto standard. When it comes to note-taking one example that comes to mind is Markdown, which has become a bit of standard. But one thing you immediately see is that it’s limited, which means a plethora of variants start to be created to further extend “the standard”, which means incompatibilities will be introduced etc.
On the other end of the spectrum you end up with something like JSON, which is a general purpose format that should accommodate pretty much anything you can dream of (and indeed the Agenda file format is not much more than a zipped up JSON file, containing all info Agenda contains in a “readable” file format).
Problem then becomes that while the format is “open” and “standard”, the embedded data model is still completely tuned to this one program, which mean that while you could create scripts or importers for for example the Agenda file format, you will always have a lossy transformation step as you go from one datamodel to the other, at least to some extend.
Curious what examples you have in mind when it comes to a proper working standard when it comes to note-taking, or other disciplines even?
You’re in the implementation phase already while I am still in the requirements phase!
For me it’s important that:
my data can be handled by multiple applications. I tested The Archive and Obsidian at the same time and when working on the same file with one application, the changes showed simultaneously in the other. Now that’s nice but not a prerequisite,
my data can be transformed to another OS platform (Unix, Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS) without having to be converted. So data standards should be the same on the platforms or else the platform is not my choice.
my data will NOT be required to be uploaded into an application; f.i pre-iPhoto I stored my jpg files in my filesystem with folders named by me. Now they are all in Photos in I don’t know what format (heic, jpeg, jpg?). If I ever want to go to ChromeOS, I will have some work to do.
I am able to export from Agenda without much problems, but it has to be done with one-by-one note at the time. MacJournal exported the whole database to txt-files per Topic. Evernote is a day-job and Onenote is a total lock-in. Your text-notes there can only be exported to pdf’s. Many more examples to go. Sometimes it’s a lot easier than other times. So, better is to keep data outside an application.
Now you mentioned .md files but I prefer txt-fles. The Archive could work with txt and md, but had some other negative features. Obsidian can only read .md files, also no good. When using standard txt files, any Markdown can be done, when needed, to publish in text or HTML or whatever. I did not look into other data-standards, but pdf’s look fine. etc.
If there is a data format selection needed in order to come to an open standard, it should be done without the OS industry. Until that time I will go on in my own amateur-way.
Dear Raffy. Reading your requirements you are probably looking at other tools. I use DevonThink for collecting information of all kinds. For note taking, however I prefer an app like Agenda that has this ease of use, across my Mac, iPhone and iPad. I take notes for meetings with it, notes to organise my private life, notes to manage projects. I also use it to jot down research ideas but if there is something that feeds into other texts, related to my research, I share the notes in Agenda with DevonThink etc. I am perfectly happy with my notes in the iCloud or Dropbox because of sync across devices, allowing me to quickly take notes, easily relate these to the calendar and reminders, anywhere where I have my phone etc at hand. For sensitive information, there is an encrypted database in DevonThink, or another app to store such things. My suspicion is that your requirements do not fit so well to what I have discussed here, where the focus is on a discussion of how to edit, relate, combine, separate, find notes or elements therein.
Thanks for your reply!
I started using Agenda after it came on the market in search for a replacement for my journaling in the MacJournal application, because support there was fading.
Even pilot tested the Agenda iOS and ipadOS applications.
Agenda is a very nice application, but for me it is too much project, calendar and todo driven, so as time passed I used it less and less.
Devonport was pre-installed on the iMac 11 years ago, tried it, but hardly used it.
My requirement to replace MacJournal was still there as well as my needs to have solid PKM setup.
Exported my MacJournal data to txt-files in a folder, so I started coming back to a flat file/folder system in order to be OS vendor independent and with a cloud you can reach your data with iPhone and iPad as well. That’s how I arrived on the Zettelkasten “bandwagon” and looking for a solid PKM setup, without too much dependency on tools you can’t rely on for their support availability.
With your contribution on the Agenda Forum, you gave a very interesting overview of my issues.
While I am convinced that Obsidian, RemNote, Roam etc add really interesting ideas in relating notes, through clever search and display of other notes and elements, I have yet to find anyone who has customized his Obsidian or Roam in a way that it matches the design of native apps. Here are screenshot of Obsidian experts and their notes:
… I mean, really?? Yes, you can configure everything to your taste … but is this freedom and possibility really working out for most people? I was first attracted to the idea of styling everything to my taste, organising the workspace to my taste … only to realise that I spend an awful lot of time figuring out what I want and what I like. This made me realise that there are app developers that do this much better than me and I better trust them.
Similar with the backlinking. I was excited about it, started marking everything to create links, hoping that this will eventually allow me to discover links between notes and ideas that I was not aware of. This does not make any sense. DevonThink has an algorithm that suggest related notes, no need to do anything. Language analysis can be as simple and complex as you like, but surely it will soon be possible to suggest related notes in a much cleverer way than displaying graphs.
After my experiments, I realised that these apps are quite far away from the design of native apps and their ease of use. Maybe I am more a visual person but I am now hoping that apps like Agenda, Bear, DevonThink, with their beautifl visual and clever functional design, will adopt some of the core ideas emerging from the PKM community: (i) clever search for other notes and elements therein, (ii) the display of several short notes at the same time, and (iii) the folding of elements in notes to support outlining. Transclusion and an algorithm to suggest related notes based on a text analysis, are wonderful as well but the most important thing, for me, is the support to jot down ideas and remember other notes, to relate them.
This is the main reason (next to linking notes and events) I’m using Agenda. With all other apps I’d used, I would be hard-pressed to get a view at multiple notes at once the way I can in Agenda. Be it in a project view, a saved search, whatever.
I am a visual person, too, and visualize my workflow (thinking + implementing) is the extensive help I got from Agenda. I am looking forward to the new features suggested by Olaf and see if they can improve this visualization of my workflow.
I am visual as well so I imported my 2623 Daily notes (small md files of about 1KB with a total of 11MB) into Agenda, which took 36! hours.
Moving between these notes goes very slowww.
Editing notes is the same.
I think Agenda has a serious performance issue handling a large amount of notes.
Using Agenda for Journaling purposes is therefore not realistic.
You will be very pleased to hear that the upcoming 13.1 update should show some massive improvements when it comes to these kind of number of notes. It should go in beta later this week.
Update: Agenda takes a big step in light of this excellent discussion with the introduction of inter-note and project link autocompletion with backlink support. You can see it in action in this YouTube video
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