Thoughts on new software

The software landscape is always in flux. I can’t say that I’m always able to keep up with what’s out there between exhaustive searches (or that my searches are completely exhaustive), but here are my current thoughts on the most recent entries:

• Notion: Data currently lives on the cloud. This is unacceptable to me, regardless of the other features. It seems to be popular as a wiki-like tool, and therefore seems to be targeting a different audience.
• Roam: Same as above. However, given how popular it is becoming among researchers, I am occasionally checking in to see if they’ll allow local storage.
• Obsidian: The first of the latest batch to actually have data stored locally. Unfortunately, they are storing notes in individual files, and I think this will greatly limit what can be done. Regardless, I’m following updates on this.

As an aside, what I find really fascinating about reading the discussions around the last 2 tools is that they’ll heavily biased towards -just- note-taking. I think most people have used their computer/phone notes applications, or “superior” alternatives like Evernote/OneNote, and are completely anchored to those metaphors. Then again, the world of useful task management spans from paper checklists to Omnifocus (which I personally find to be weighed down by the shear number of features). So maybe the takeaway is more that different people have different needs.

I have to regularly remind myself of the following two points:

• I just want a better tool to store/access/use all my collected, and future, knowledge. And, if the near-perfect tool does come out long -before- I can make this viable, I would consider abandoning this venture.
• Diversity is a good thing. There isn’t just one document/photo/worksheet/etc editor, there have been (and still are) hundreds, if not thousands. And building my own tool, when there are others that are somewhat similar to it, is not a waste of effort.

Basically, I’m trying not to get discouraged or jealous of the improving selection of knowledge-management-like tools. I still have an ideal in my head that I want to create. And, until such time as someone else creates a tool with all (or nearly all) those features, I’ll continue working on building the tool that I want.