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New unofficial workflowy app
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Posted by steveylang
Apr 22, 2016 at 10:12 PM
I love Workflowy exactly the way it is- on the desktop and on my Chromebook. Not that it couldn’t be further improved or developed, but I use it every day and have no complaints.
I find the iOS interface to be lacking in usability, especially on an iPad (because it should really be as good as the desktop interface.) Too bad this app seems pretty kludgey.
Posted by Luhmann
Apr 23, 2016 at 12:41 AM
Here are three features that make Handflowy useful to me:
First is “view only.” In the standard Workflowy app, any touch on the screen brings up the keyboard and starts editing the outline. This means I can’t use Workflowy effectively for lecture notes because I can’t easily scroll through the notes as I teach. Handflowy solves this problem for me and is worth it for that alone.
The second is the ability to easily collapse and expand entire outlines without having to do it item-by-item. This (and several other keyboard shortcuts) make it much easier to navigate an outline on mobile.
And third is the ability to delete items, a feature not offered on Workfowy’s own mobile app.
Unfortunately it doesn’t bring the sharing interface to mobile.
Posted by danwa61
Apr 23, 2016 at 05:45 AM
I do love workflowy, but personally I’m getting tired of paying $50 a year just for the status quo back end sync & storage service, which is all it seems to buy. There is plenty of room for improvement without piling on features, but it just doesn’t seem to be happening. Eg simple usability improvements like being able to delete an item in the android app without manually backspacing it away. Or greater user control eg to allow all user data to reside on Google Drive or other 3rd party trusted cloud storage (not just backups to Dropbox).
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 23, 2016 at 11:50 AM
Luhmann wrote:
>Here are three features that make Handflowy useful to me:
>First is “view only.”
>The second is the ability to easily collapse and expand entire outlines
>without having to do it item-by-item.
>And third is the ability to delete items
I had a bit more time to play with it and it does seem like a huge improvement over WorkFlowy’s own iOS app, with loads of new features.
As Frank said in the blog post, it does require some upfront investment of time and effort to figure out all the features and customise them to your liking.
It’s partly the broad range of settings and customisability options that make it hard to assess initially the benefits HandyFlowy can bring to the table.
In addition to the ones you mention above (and besides the customisability itself), I also like the fact that there are toolbar icons now for moving items around up and down the list and the hierarchy, rather than the finger-based drag and drop technique in the proprietory WorkFlowy app.
The various toolbar controls for moving the cursor around and navigating the outline also seem useful, but it takes some time to learn which one does what. Perhaps removing superfluous functions from the customisable toolbar can help with recognising them more easily.
One thing I wonder about is that it says it requires an internet connection to be used. If I remember correctly, in the proprietory app you can add items offline, and then they get synced once you’re online again. Does that work the same on HandyFlowy?
BTW, HandyFlowy integrates with another iOS and Android app of theirs, MemoFlowy, for entering longer text and for using templates. I haven’t quite figured it out yet.
https://itunes.apple.com/no/app/memoflowy/id1052582668
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.nap.app.memoflowy
Anyway, I think in this instance competition is good. If nothing else, this might prompt the WorkFlowy team to think about how they want to continue supporting cross-platform users (whether through their own apps or 3rd party apps).
BTW, I think the HandFlowy developer is making a mistake by hiding the customisability option behind the paywall. This makes it very hard if not impossible for new users to evaluate what exactly they would be paying for, when customisability **is** itself one of the key benefits here.
It would make more sense to allow new users to have some limited time to play around with all the features, so they can decide whether they’d be prepared to pay for them.
From some of the reactions in this thread it seems that first-time users are turned off by the difficulty to get an overview of the product and be able to properly try it out.
If these users are finding the app “kludgy”, it’s unlikely the developer is going to get a whole lot of advertising revenue out of them.
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 23, 2016 at 12:10 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>BTW, I think the HandFlowy developer is making a mistake by hiding the
>customisability option behind the paywall.
>It would make more sense to allow new users to have some limited time to
>play around with all the features
In fact it might be better to remove the block on the customisability options altogether, if the developer is also going to keep the in-app advertising.
Subscribing WorkFlowy PRO customers would be very likely to pay to remove the ads if they can be convinced that HandyFlowy is much better than the standard app. But if they can’t fully evaluate the product, then they won’t bother with it.
The other category of users is the non-subscribing WorkFlowy Free users. They would probably use the ad-supported version, if it was fully functional. But if its key functions are crippled, there is not much reason for them to switch to HandyFlowy, and so in-app advertising is unlikely to produce much revenue.
Just my 2 cents…