You try Roam if you’ve got some itch that there has to be something more for structuring thought than files in folders, or tree based outliners, and you are willing to deal with a few inconveniences to get access to features and workflows you definitely won’t find anywhere else.
Yes, that’s why I did try it. And found that I could neither get my data into it nor out of it while preserving structure or markup semantics. That’s kind of a killer, since style issues I could theoretically fix with a user style sheet. Plus, having your own unique markup language means that I can’t even write in it without conversion.
I am claiming that Roam users have an inside view that isnt super legible to those who haven’t really tried it as a tool for thought
I’m not sure if you’re speaking to me or someone else here. I was interested precisely because I understand what your tool would offer me, if only I could use it. It reminds me of some of Ted Nelson’s innovative hypertext designs, like ZigZag. Or good ol’ Houdini from my DOS days.
I appreciate what it could do for me in the realm of thought; my issue is that I’d like to be able to use it to help write things, things that will be shared in media that is not your program (e.g. blog articles, books, wiki-like websites, etc.) Which means I must be able to not only bring in text I already have, but bring out text I produce.
Also, I do appreciate the aesthetic criticism, and the bug report, it is a shame that that was enough of a distraction that you didn’t get a chance to discover what separates Roam from everything else.
I spotted what was unique from your not-very-detailed screenshot and jumped at the chance to try it. I’m an extremely long-term power user of outlining, idea management, and thinking-enhancement software of all varieties, for some 30+ years, so I have a keen eye for novelty in such systems.
If I didn’t understand what it could potentially do for me, I wouldn’t have been so bothered by the interop and usability problems, nor would I have bothered to try it in the first place. I actually explored a fair handful of features that would have had me trying the tool more seriously, if I had any certainty of getting my data out again, in a useful format. (For example, in order to take real advantage of your transclusion feature, I’d have to be able to export usable markdown versions of the documents where said transclusion was occurring.)
On top of that, I took some time to reflect whether there was anything I was currently working on that could benefit from the tool without being able to take structured/formatted content back out, or having things go out but not able to come back in after outside editing.
And I concluded that this wasn’t the case for anything on my “front burner” projects at the moment, and I can’t currently afford the time to play with it for back burner projects right now. I do expect to revisit this decision at some point, but from my experience I would expect the big payoffs from your unique features to only happen with days, weeks, or even months of continued use. In the short run, without a lot of data in it, it might as well be Dynalist plus bidirectional wiki links, and I don’t need that enough to spend the time learning or working around its particular quirks.
All that being said, I’m a little personally irritated that you not only jumped to the conclusion that I didn’t get what your product does (or the implications), but that you also wrote off nearly all of my feedback as “aesthetic” concerns. If you’re not concerned with feedback from people whose visual impairment is as lightweight as mine, I hate to think what you’d do with feedback from people with more serious vision problems. (Aside from you not acknowledging the many issues with editing, markup syntax, and interoperability that I took the time to write up for you and share, instead of saying “ho hum” and moving on with my day.)
As another software developer and entrepreneur, I consider even negative feedback from potential users or customers to be very helpful, especially if it lets me see their first impressions. That kind of information is something money can’t buy, even from a dedicated UX tester… and most people won’t take the time to give it to you. They’ll just move on.
I thought about just moving on yesterday. And then I thought, “eh, true first-impression UX feedback is valuable, I’m sure they’ll appreciate a write-up.”
As another software developer and entrepreneur, I consider even negative feedback from potential users or customers to be very helpful, especially if it lets me see their first impressions. That kind of information is something money can’t buy, even from a dedicated UX tester… and most people won’t take the time to give it to you. They’ll just move on.
I thought about just moving on yesterday. And then I thought, “eh, true first-impression UX feedback is valuable, I’m sure they’ll appreciate a write-up.”
As a UX designer and developer myself, I want to thank you for taking the time to write this. I find that even reading feedback about other people’s work, from someone who has considerable experience with the problem domain, is very valuable. (The notes about how you use existing tools, and what parts of Roam you found valuable, are useful info in particular, since I have quite a bit ofinterest in wiki systems myself.) So your effort expended on the grandparent didn’t go to waste!
Yeah, one of the things that was interesting to me was that superficially, Roam’s wiki markup was pretty darn close to what Gollum accepts, such that a suitable export from Roam might have been publishable by dumping stuff to git and pushing it to a Gollum-served website, or to a Wordpress instance by way of Postmark plus a filter to translate the links.
It reminds me of some of Ted Nelson’s innovative hypertext designs, like ZigZag
That’s a really high complement. Appreciate it.
I must be able to not only bring in text I already have, but bring out text I produce.
Completely agree. We’ve had to prioritize the getting things in part, but getting things out is essential. The site was restricted access / invite only until a week ago, and we’re still in beta (that’s why it is free). We won’t be charging for use until the export features are done.
in order to take real advantage of your transclusion feature, I’d have to be able to export usable markdown versions of the documents where said transclusion was occurring.
Totally agree—we plan for export to be html links of the text of block to the original block. Probably will be done in next few weeks, but had some technical pre-reqs
I’m not sure if you’re speaking to me or someone else here
Replying to you, but also largely speaking for the reader of your comment who may not be sure whether to try a new tool—and may be discouraged to do so by your comment (I also wouldn’t have found your comment except that another user of ours pointed me to it, so it didn’t feel like you were writing for our team)
I consider even negative feedback from potential users or customers to be very helpful, especially if it lets me see their first impressions.
As do I—but I did notice it felt quite different for you to do this in a public forum (and that it was followed by you encouraging others to not try the tool), rather than by responding to our onboarding email as every other user has so far.
The main thing you objected to with pasting content in is a feature we support—so I expect you’ve found a bug specific to your browser, OS, or the system you were coming from. Paste out also works, but is hard to get right for all tools people use as different apps respond differently to the clipboard, so we do appreciate when users tell us about places where things aren’t quite right. Very happy to help you sort that out—included our emails in an earlier reply.
We’ve got about 50 users in our slack channel discussing bugs, feature requests and updates. Very happy to send you an invite if you’re interested.
I consider even negative feedback from potential users or customers to be very helpful, especially if it lets me see their first impressions.
As do I—but I did notice it felt quite different for you to do this in a public forum (and that it was followed by you encouraging others to not try the tool), rather than by responding to our onboarding email as every other user has so far.
We’ve got about 50 users in our slack channel discussing bugs, feature requests and updates. Very happy to send you an invite if you’re interested.
I consider it very valuable—and (to use the local jargon) prosocial—that pjeby posted his feedback publicly. It allowed others (like me) to benefit, both by reading some valuable user responses to a potentially interesting tool (which responses and feedback are useful to my current and future endeavors), and by getting info about Roam (which I otherwise wouldn’t get, except as filtered and released by you, the product’s creators).
Conversely, siloing user/developer interaction in a private Slack channel is… not prosocial.
Paste out also works, but is hard to get right for all tools people use as different apps respond differently to the clipboard
The majority of outlining tools in my experience can accept a paste of plain text lines, indented with tabs. Certainly Workflowy, Ecco Pro, TkOutline, and Dynalist all do, and even OneNote handles it semi-reasonably. Roam (in Chrome) did not appear to accept or output tab-indented text as structured input. (Space-indentation is also produced by some outliners, but even the ones that output spaces will still accept tab-indentation as input.) Most will also let you select an item and its children and hit ^C to copy, without needing an explicit export step unless you need a specialized format.
Whatever format(s) Dynalist and Workflowy put on the clipboard as output, one of the formats is readable by OneNote and Typora as bulleted lists, which is also handy. The other format they produce on copy is four-space indented text, but since they accept tab-indented text as input, as do most other outliners, that should be one of the formats put on the clipboard when a copy operation is done in Roam.
tl;dr: I would suggest investigating what clipboard formats Dynalist and Workflowy use, and accepting either 4-space or tab-indented text on paste, and producing tab-indented text (plus whatever Dl/Wf do) on copy.
we plan for export to be html links of the text of block to the original block
Huh? Then what’s the point of transclusion in that case? If I were using it for writing, it’d be so that I could have single sources of certain type of information transparently included in the markdown output as if it were written there. That way I could have blurbs that I’d share between various newsletters, ebooks, lesson materials, etc. that I could edit once and update across multiple documents as of their next production.
(Or maybe you’re just saying you would wrap the included text in a link? That wouldn’t obviate the point of transclusion, but it’d be an irritant for my use case if I couldn’t turn it off. I just want to be able to transparently include stuff, and find other documents that include those things.)
rather than by responding to our onboarding email as every other user has so far.
I did reply to that email, with a link to the comment. The comment began as a comment here, and I ended up writing more into the comment box as I played with Roam.
you encouraging others to not try the tool
I said (emphasis added):
So, if you have trouble reading tiny text or weird alignments drive you nuts, or if you need to be able to use your writing outside the note tool itself, I wouldn’t recommend signing up for this thing right now. If you intend to use it as a standalone tool and the above-mentioned quirks wouldn’t bother you, then go for it.
That doesn’t look to me like “encouraging others to not try the tool”, so much as “expressing reservations that this is something you can use right now, today, if you have the sort of issues I do with it”.
If you want some real criticism, you should try posting a link on https://www.outlinersoftware.com/. ;-) (Content warning: if you’re into information management tools, that site is a time-stealing cognitohazard, not unlike TV Tropes)
I did reply to that email, with a link to the comment.
Found the email. And in that light the feedback does come across as much more well intentioned.
I said (emphasis added):
So, if you have trouble reading tiny text or weird alignments drive you nuts, or if you need to be able to use your writing outside the note tool itself, I wouldn’t recommend signing up for this thing right now. If you intend to use it as a standalone tool and the above-mentioned quirks wouldn’t bother you, then go for it.
Thank you for the clarification.
The majority of outlining tools in my experience can accept a paste of plain text lines, indented with tabs.
Wow. You’re totally right, completely missed that, and now understand your complaint. We had only been testing paste from google docs, workflowy, etc
fwiw you can import text files (.txt or .md) directly—it’ll interpret tabs, or spacing differences and convert that to the indentation structure. You can also import multiple files at once—it will also respect markdown and convert them into headings appropriately.
We’ll definitely add the paste from plain text, until we get that built you could get around this either with import or by pasting into workflowy from text, and then pasting from there into Roam. We’ll have paste in from plain text soon.
Or maybe you’re just saying you would wrap the included text in a link? That wouldn’t obviate the point of transclusion, but it’d be an irritant for my use case if I couldn’t turn it off. I just want to be able to transparently include stuff, and find other documents that include those things.)
fwiw you can import text files (.txt or .md) directly
That’s nice, but importing (or exporting) files is a huge pain compared to copy and paste, since most of the tools I use don’t really have files as such, or if they do there’s a multi-step process on both sides of finding the file, opening an import function, answering stuff, dragging the file (or worse, having to browse if the import-ee doesn’t support drag/drop).
Compare that to 1) select, 2) Ctrl-C, 3) Alt-Tab, 4) Ctrl-V. No mousing unless it’s for the initial select, if that. Plus, apart from Typora and Notebooks, most of the tools I use don’t even have “files” that would be meaningful to import, so I’d instead be copy-pasting into something else to then create the export file...
Anyway, I’m going to stop here, because my use cases aren’t necessarily what’s best for your project. I’m a CRIMPer (Compulsive Researcher of Information Management Programs), which means I can miss the forest for the trees at times… especially since I have an awful lot of trees, in different software, in which I have a lot of data, notes, ideas, and half-written books.
(I haven’t even mentioned Scrivener before this point… or ConnectedText, whose calendar your date-based pages reminded me of. I actually used CT for quite a while and then realized that I couldn’t really use the text anywhere else; that was before I caught the markdown religion.)
Paste out now handles block-references well (they just appear as the text that appears in the references)
Should also paste out pretty nice into most apps
Pasting in from plain text (and from scrivener) keeps formatting
OneNote provides some very strange formatting when you try to paste it into our app (or most other apps) -- but it’ll give you the right outline structure if you use Command-Shift-V for paste as plain text.
Yes, that’s why I did try it. And found that I could neither get my data into it nor out of it while preserving structure or markup semantics. That’s kind of a killer, since style issues I could theoretically fix with a user style sheet. Plus, having your own unique markup language means that I can’t even write in it without conversion.
I’m not sure if you’re speaking to me or someone else here. I was interested precisely because I understand what your tool would offer me, if only I could use it. It reminds me of some of Ted Nelson’s innovative hypertext designs, like ZigZag. Or good ol’ Houdini from my DOS days.
I appreciate what it could do for me in the realm of thought; my issue is that I’d like to be able to use it to help write things, things that will be shared in media that is not your program (e.g. blog articles, books, wiki-like websites, etc.) Which means I must be able to not only bring in text I already have, but bring out text I produce.
I spotted what was unique from your not-very-detailed screenshot and jumped at the chance to try it. I’m an extremely long-term power user of outlining, idea management, and thinking-enhancement software of all varieties, for some 30+ years, so I have a keen eye for novelty in such systems.
If I didn’t understand what it could potentially do for me, I wouldn’t have been so bothered by the interop and usability problems, nor would I have bothered to try it in the first place. I actually explored a fair handful of features that would have had me trying the tool more seriously, if I had any certainty of getting my data out again, in a useful format. (For example, in order to take real advantage of your transclusion feature, I’d have to be able to export usable markdown versions of the documents where said transclusion was occurring.)
On top of that, I took some time to reflect whether there was anything I was currently working on that could benefit from the tool without being able to take structured/formatted content back out, or having things go out but not able to come back in after outside editing.
And I concluded that this wasn’t the case for anything on my “front burner” projects at the moment, and I can’t currently afford the time to play with it for back burner projects right now. I do expect to revisit this decision at some point, but from my experience I would expect the big payoffs from your unique features to only happen with days, weeks, or even months of continued use. In the short run, without a lot of data in it, it might as well be Dynalist plus bidirectional wiki links, and I don’t need that enough to spend the time learning or working around its particular quirks.
All that being said, I’m a little personally irritated that you not only jumped to the conclusion that I didn’t get what your product does (or the implications), but that you also wrote off nearly all of my feedback as “aesthetic” concerns. If you’re not concerned with feedback from people whose visual impairment is as lightweight as mine, I hate to think what you’d do with feedback from people with more serious vision problems. (Aside from you not acknowledging the many issues with editing, markup syntax, and interoperability that I took the time to write up for you and share, instead of saying “ho hum” and moving on with my day.)
As another software developer and entrepreneur, I consider even negative feedback from potential users or customers to be very helpful, especially if it lets me see their first impressions. That kind of information is something money can’t buy, even from a dedicated UX tester… and most people won’t take the time to give it to you. They’ll just move on.
I thought about just moving on yesterday. And then I thought, “eh, true first-impression UX feedback is valuable, I’m sure they’ll appreciate a write-up.”
Oops.
As a UX designer and developer myself, I want to thank you for taking the time to write this. I find that even reading feedback about other people’s work, from someone who has considerable experience with the problem domain, is very valuable. (The notes about how you use existing tools, and what parts of Roam you found valuable, are useful info in particular, since I have quite a bit of interest in wiki systems myself.) So your effort expended on the grandparent didn’t go to waste!
Yeah, one of the things that was interesting to me was that superficially, Roam’s wiki markup was pretty darn close to what Gollum accepts, such that a suitable export from Roam might have been publishable by dumping stuff to git and pushing it to a Gollum-served website, or to a Wordpress instance by way of Postmark plus a filter to translate the links.
That’s a really high complement. Appreciate it.
Completely agree. We’ve had to prioritize the getting things in part, but getting things out is essential. The site was restricted access / invite only until a week ago, and we’re still in beta (that’s why it is free). We won’t be charging for use until the export features are done.
Totally agree—we plan for export to be html links of the text of block to the original block. Probably will be done in next few weeks, but had some technical pre-reqs
Replying to you, but also largely speaking for the reader of your comment who may not be sure whether to try a new tool—and may be discouraged to do so by your comment (I also wouldn’t have found your comment except that another user of ours pointed me to it, so it didn’t feel like you were writing for our team)
As do I—but I did notice it felt quite different for you to do this in a public forum (and that it was followed by you encouraging others to not try the tool), rather than by responding to our onboarding email as every other user has so far.
The main thing you objected to with pasting content in is a feature we support—so I expect you’ve found a bug specific to your browser, OS, or the system you were coming from. Paste out also works, but is hard to get right for all tools people use as different apps respond differently to the clipboard, so we do appreciate when users tell us about places where things aren’t quite right. Very happy to help you sort that out—included our emails in an earlier reply.
We’ve got about 50 users in our slack channel discussing bugs, feature requests and updates. Very happy to send you an invite if you’re interested.
I consider it very valuable—and (to use the local jargon) prosocial—that pjeby posted his feedback publicly. It allowed others (like me) to benefit, both by reading some valuable user responses to a potentially interesting tool (which responses and feedback are useful to my current and future endeavors), and by getting info about Roam (which I otherwise wouldn’t get, except as filtered and released by you, the product’s creators).
Conversely, siloing user/developer interaction in a private Slack channel is… not prosocial.
The majority of outlining tools in my experience can accept a paste of plain text lines, indented with tabs. Certainly Workflowy, Ecco Pro, TkOutline, and Dynalist all do, and even OneNote handles it semi-reasonably. Roam (in Chrome) did not appear to accept or output tab-indented text as structured input. (Space-indentation is also produced by some outliners, but even the ones that output spaces will still accept tab-indentation as input.) Most will also let you select an item and its children and hit ^C to copy, without needing an explicit export step unless you need a specialized format.
Whatever format(s) Dynalist and Workflowy put on the clipboard as output, one of the formats is readable by OneNote and Typora as bulleted lists, which is also handy. The other format they produce on copy is four-space indented text, but since they accept tab-indented text as input, as do most other outliners, that should be one of the formats put on the clipboard when a copy operation is done in Roam.
tl;dr: I would suggest investigating what clipboard formats Dynalist and Workflowy use, and accepting either 4-space or tab-indented text on paste, and producing tab-indented text (plus whatever Dl/Wf do) on copy.
Huh? Then what’s the point of transclusion in that case? If I were using it for writing, it’d be so that I could have single sources of certain type of information transparently included in the markdown output as if it were written there. That way I could have blurbs that I’d share between various newsletters, ebooks, lesson materials, etc. that I could edit once and update across multiple documents as of their next production.
(Or maybe you’re just saying you would wrap the included text in a link? That wouldn’t obviate the point of transclusion, but it’d be an irritant for my use case if I couldn’t turn it off. I just want to be able to transparently include stuff, and find other documents that include those things.)
I did reply to that email, with a link to the comment. The comment began as a comment here, and I ended up writing more into the comment box as I played with Roam.
I said (emphasis added):
That doesn’t look to me like “encouraging others to not try the tool”, so much as “expressing reservations that this is something you can use right now, today, if you have the sort of issues I do with it”.
If you want some real criticism, you should try posting a link on https://www.outlinersoftware.com/. ;-) (Content warning: if you’re into information management tools, that site is a time-stealing cognitohazard, not unlike TV Tropes)
Found the email. And in that light the feedback does come across as much more well intentioned.
Thank you for the clarification.
Wow. You’re totally right, completely missed that, and now understand your complaint. We had only been testing paste from google docs, workflowy, etc
fwiw you can import text files (.txt or .md) directly—it’ll interpret tabs, or spacing differences and convert that to the indentation structure. You can also import multiple files at once—it will also respect markdown and convert them into headings appropriately.
We’ll definitely add the paste from plain text, until we get that built you could get around this either with import or by pasting into workflowy from text, and then pasting from there into Roam. We’ll have paste in from plain text soon.
Solid point
That’s nice, but importing (or exporting) files is a huge pain compared to copy and paste, since most of the tools I use don’t really have files as such, or if they do there’s a multi-step process on both sides of finding the file, opening an import function, answering stuff, dragging the file (or worse, having to browse if the import-ee doesn’t support drag/drop).
Compare that to 1) select, 2) Ctrl-C, 3) Alt-Tab, 4) Ctrl-V. No mousing unless it’s for the initial select, if that. Plus, apart from Typora and Notebooks, most of the tools I use don’t even have “files” that would be meaningful to import, so I’d instead be copy-pasting into something else to then create the export file...
Anyway, I’m going to stop here, because my use cases aren’t necessarily what’s best for your project. I’m a CRIMPer (Compulsive Researcher of Information Management Programs), which means I can miss the forest for the trees at times… especially since I have an awful lot of trees, in different software, in which I have a lot of data, notes, ideas, and half-written books.
(I haven’t even mentioned Scrivener before this point… or ConnectedText, whose calendar your date-based pages reminded me of. I actually used CT for quite a while and then realized that I couldn’t really use the text anywhere else; that was before I caught the markdown religion.)
New version pushed up
Paste out now handles block-references well (they just appear as the text that appears in the references)
Should also paste out pretty nice into most apps
Pasting in from plain text (and from scrivener) keeps formatting
OneNote provides some very strange formatting when you try to paste it into our app (or most other apps) -- but it’ll give you the right outline structure if you use Command-Shift-V for paste as plain text.