Awesome to see more people work on integrated productivity spaces! I work on something very similar at Life (https://life.so).
Since you decided to include notes into your bundling as well (which I did not so far) I am curious: How do you expect people to switch their note-writing habits from Notion, Roam, etc. to your project? It seemed to me that the notes market is extremely competitive already.
The design looks clean and beautiful. Congratulations to your launch and I will try to sign up for early access later.
Notes taking app tend to be very generic. You can type text, create bullet points and checkboxes. But they it is for you to manually move stuff from one page or section to another to "represent" another day, time or topic.
In Routine, every note (being a page or a task description) can contain text, bullet points, media etc. But every checkbox turns out to be a full-fledged task that can be scheduled, opened to enhance with a description (which in turn can contain subtasks) etc.
We've basically closed the loop. Every note can contain tasks. And every task can be enhanced with a note. And then we tight those notes and tasks to what is happening in your life.
If you are in a meeting, you can take notes that will be linked to this meeting and its participants. If you create a checkbox (action item) in such a note, it becomes a task that you can postpone for later or schedule right away.
Notion is best for teams and does not have this notion of task, nor is it well integrated with your calendar. Likewise for Roam which is more for people who love to take tons of notes: researchers, journalists etc.
Life.so looks very interesting. It does one thing I wish all task managements did: integrate calendar so that you can schedule tasks on your calendar. This, to me, is key to actually getting things done.
I would love to also have notes built into it - that way I won't be context switching and could (presumably) add tasks from within notes.
I've signed up for your app - looking forward to seeing it!
I built and app called Life Tracker[0] a while back, it's aim was to track your mood and have everything in one place. My blue sky goal was to reach something like life.so.
It's good to see people working in this space, though I feel as if sometimes the scope can be wayy to big. Everyone has different types of workflows, so I guess for a product to be used by a lot of people, it has to allow for as many possible custom workflows. Though at the same time keeping a simple design and easy-to-use interface.
Hey Alex, very cool project! What made you pause working on it?
You are making a great point. There is an inherent trade-off between customisability and simplicity. That is not necessarily a problem though because I think there are different target groups depending on where your product is on this scale. I like to think of productivity software as a pair of shoes where everyone has their preferred size and fit. That also allows different tools to successfully co-exist.
The desktop application is Electron-based, so porting it to Windows will be relatively easy. For mobile we go native though and that's why a native Android application will take some longer.
That's a very good point. Definitely Apple's direction.
I think it will take quite some time to reunite both world. But maybe indeed, eventually, we'll have only the iOS app that will run on both iPhones and macs.
Note thought that there will always be a big difference in experience. On desktop, we want the experience to be center-ed around the keyboard shortcut, the console and natural language.
On iOS (at least for most people), it's faster to use a well-crafter UI/UX than typing natural language. Though again, in the future, we might go in the direction of voice.
Hi criddell,
I'm the iOS dev for Routine. As of now, the iOS application is restricted for iPhone only. Regarding the iPad with keyboard it is definitely something we need to think about, as the usage is closer to a desktop than a phone.
As of now, if we authorized the iPhone version to be used on iPad it would lack the main desktop feature : the console.
Surely if we were to have the console on iPad (and all the features that are not developped on iOS as of now), we probably could release a native MacOS app along.
But realistically it will not be in the near future, as the iOS app is lagging a fair amount behind the electron app.
As of now, we're focusing on iOS on the simplest and most used functionalities as well as features that works well with touch UI.
Reading all the negative sentiment on HN about Electron beforehand I was a bit concerned about picking it for the desktop app but now I am positively surprised to be honest.
I totally understand that Electron's memory footprint is not acceptable for very small apps that only serve as a utility. For Life though, which is supposed to replace 2-3 other apps, a memory footprint of ~300mb seems fine to me. In-app performance is also good.
I cannot say anything about the iOS Routine app because I have not tried it yet.
I was curious about your product so I signed up. I was dismayed to find that I was just baited into providing my e-mail to an "product not ready yet" situation, and you want me to spend 5 minutes on a survey, just to be considered for access.
I would have appreciated a "We're not ready yet, sign up to be on our waiting list". I immediately unsubscribed.
I can't get my head around why their documentation is so poor.
They should have all the resources in the world to recruit people that have proven to write good documentation. If open-source projects run by volunteers can have excellent documentation (e.g. Vue), why can't Apple?
Better docs mean a better developer experience which means more people want to (and are able to) develop apps for iOS which increases the value of their platform. It looks like a no-brainer to me to invest some resources into this to improve the current state of affairs.
Apple developers are a captive audience, they will pay their annual hundred bucks and develop for iShiny no matter how crappy the docs are. There are just too many rich users and clueless PHBs demanding apple development to miss out. If those reasons went missing and Apple really had to compete for developer mindshare, docs would improve.
Which leads to the solution: Quote a lot more for Apple development or don't develop for Apple, and as soon as the stream of app updates and releases dries up, Apple might react. But not before.
iOS is Apple's bread and butter, and they make good money off those developers. It's in their cynical self-interest to spend the money to have the best documentation in the game, and it would even pay off inside Apple, with better APIs and better resources for their in-house teams to develop against.
It seems like a genuine institutional dysfunction. Apple has a culture of secrecy (which is necessary) and a result of this is deep siloing of teams. How this leads to documentation being such an afterthought is murky, but I suspect that's the cause, rather than merely being complacent about their walled garden.
I can also do handwaving culture arguments like apple design in a minimalist fashion, so everything that can be left out will be, including documentation. But I don't like those, I hate to diagnose cultures I only read about.
However, apple is a business, and leaving out docs makes business sense and is an easy and straightforward explanation.
It's a puzzling omission, given that building App Store revenue is such a priority, and they feed the supply side in a number of other ways. I don't think they're doing it on purpose, they're just bad at it.
I think what is happening here is that the attitude of Apple towards normal users is spilling over to its attitude towards developers. Which is obviously a big problem, if that is indeed the case.
The arbitrariness with which these companies rule over our digital lives infuriates me more from month to month. We do our best to fight dictators in the physical world but somehow accept them in the digital realm.
While they do have power over users on their platform, they're voluntary applications that people choose to give control to for convenience and publicity. Unlike credit bureaus who actually ruin peoples' lives with their carelessness and you can't even opt out, social media apps are purely opt-in, and you don't get your wages garnished or bank accounts emptied or lose your ability to drive because of them.
And while I hope danny gets his username back, and it's ridiculous what happened, the value of the user account handle that danny had was created by Instagram's efforts. You don't have property rights to it the same way you own actual property or a domain name registered under your name.
>While they do have power over users on their platform, they're voluntary applications that people choose to give control to for convenience and publicity.
It's true a username isn't property, but there are some instances where merely conferring a certain status has such an enormous impact on people's lives that there are certain legal protections around it. Your job, for example.
One could argue that digital identity codes like domains and social media usernames have become similarly important. Entire businesses, extremely profitable ones sometimes, can be tied to a single username.
I’m with you to a degree, but if most anyone’s email account vanished, or worse was stolen, I’d be pretty confident guessing that they’re screwed.
For more typical social media, losing a decade of pictures is pretty harmful. It’s not about the value of the @danny handle, it’s also about the account being gone. And the privacy issues if the new person got all the DMs and private info.
You're right that these things are devastating when they happen, but pre- social media, they happened all the time. Every year, half the people born in [year-21] lose their university email accounts (including their google drive, etc.) and eventually transfer to another email just fine. Before online identity, people lost their phone numbers and had to inform friends that they switched to a new one. You'd get the previous owner's texts, and have to tell them you just got that number. Or if you moved addresses and you would get the previous owner's mail, and the same would happen to you due to postal errors. People lost their pictures because of disk failure, fires, and other means, and would continue living happy and productive lives.
Post- social media, if people are backing up their data, then the problem is pretty much nil (chances that your social media account and your local storage both go kaput at the same time are pretty small).
Of course email isn’t new and neither are phones. Things like 2FA are new, as are other things assuming you still have the phone and email you signed up with. The problem isn’t the thing, it’s the services that rely on the assumption that you still have the thing.
...in an unfree economic system (patents and IP give monopolies) with a black box money system (money is an enclosed protocol). Cooperative Open Value Networks are the future. [1]
It is a nuisance to the people around you. If they're organizing something and make a FB/VK event for it, someone will have to bother themselves with relaying you all the updates via your preferred communication channels.
In this context he's not wrong. Planning a party (for example) might involve a lot of discussion for time, food etc. It's far more complicated to organize this with everyone and find a common demoninator compared to simply putting people in a group, with everyone giving his input when needed.
Yes. Some of my friends have a VK event for their birthday party that they reuse annually. Much more convenient than chatting with everyone individually or making a group chat (but then everyone needs to be using the same IM service so this problem comes up again).
In the end, if you're not on whichever social media service is popular around you, you're missing out.
Well said. There should be really good laws for these companies. Sadly no same bad PR yet received to google/amazon like facebook. The amound of data both collect is enormous.
I've often pondered this. Might be going out on a limb here but tech workers aren't typically the sorts of people espousing the tenets of Fascism. Why is it that the companies they work for invariably end up leaning that way?
I don't believe this is something inherent in Capitalism either. If I had an issue with any other kind of business the experience would be vastly different.
In most other industries there is actual competition so companies benefit by providing exceptional customer service. Due to the winner takes all network effects of social media platforms they can get away with treating individuals poorly since there are not real alternatives. If Instagram was separated from Facebook then both would have an incentive to improve.
You can just... stop using their services. I deleted my Reddit and Twitter accounts a year or two ago, and have missed out on absolutely nothing of importance. Digital "life" is totally impoverished.
I've been pondering the idea if software can help us to make decisions in the way you have shown here for a while. If you (or anyone else) would like to have an exchange about it, my email is in my profile.
Someone posted this in the Mac thread yesterday. I gave it a try and it has worked well for me so far. I spun up Divinity 2 and could play it on low settings without fan noise or excessive heat. That hadn't been possible before.
Their blog posts are great. They sometimes blog about really obscure parts of game development. It’s interesting to read even if you are not building games.
I’ve got nothing useful to add except saying that I find it inspiring that you were able to turn a personal loss into entrepreneurial energy for positive change.
Good luck to you guys. I’m certain that your endeavors would make her proud.
