Roam Research -- roamresearch.com

Launched within the past couple of weeks.

It includes features like automatic backlinks, link completion, etc.

Very promising!

I forgot to mention: I learned about Roam through the article, "Why You Need an Idea-Management System", which discusses outliners, wikis, etc:

http://martinbern.org/45/

"

Also includes outlining and a sort of cloning within outlines -- wow! (The feature is called "blocks")

Wow, this is quite nice.

* renaming nodes automatically (and silently, unlike ConnectedText) updates all references (this really should be a basic wiki feature, yet so many apps don't have it)
* search by typing [[ matches by ARBITRARY substring rather than initial substring (as is with CT's [[ search)
* the export format is just one giant text file, 'indented' with asterisks. More intelligible IMO than the many small files approach
* global search is instant (i.e. filtering, no need to press a button) and very fast
* graph view is very nice. Hopefully they will (1) introduce automatic layout options in the future (as in yEd), and (2) introduce the ability when clicking on a node to 'show neighborhood' (as in TheBrain and yEd's neighborhood view)
* no offline access though, which is something of a deal breaker for me. Hopefully they will introduce it in the future though

(Personally, since they have block-level tranclusion, I'd like very much like see them introduce the feature of 'inline transclusion' (i.e. for words and phrases within a sentence). Currently I'm using MSWord's citation field codes to achieve the same, which is far from ideal ...)

There's a help page which gives a is buried rather deep in the keyboard shortcuts panel.

https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/1308

Also a YouTube channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NAWkzbDW6XkHuuHpGKsSw

Thanks for the helpful posts. Also note that the developer has posted a white paper:

https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/Vu1MmjinS

NOT a "very promising" web site, however. Not a single explanation of what it does or how it does it or why anyone should care.

That's not just lousy marketing, that speaks to the developer's incompetence. Pass

I found the website not very helpful.

Listerene wrote:

NOT a "very promising" web site, however. Not a single explanation of
what it does or how it does it or why anyone should care.

That's not just lousy marketing, that speaks to the developer's
incompetence. Pass

These days a lack of slick marketing makes me a bit more trusting of the service. I've signed up for the beta and will be playing around today.

Listerene wrote:

That's not just lousy marketing, that speaks to the developer's
incompetence. Pass

Hm. A developer can still be a good developer even if he's not exactly good at marketing.
I am with you: He is good at hiding information. But the wiki system looks good to me - I only miss a desktop app or a browser app that lets me store files locally.

Nice wiki system. With a single developer, no robust local app, and maybe not the right marketing acumen I'm not investing my data future in it.

I don't even need something like a regular app. If it can run in the local browser, or something like https://github.com/cztomczak/phpdesktop , I'm already happy. But nothing at all? Nope.

The director of the project is a relatively young fellow named Conor White-Sullivan. Here is a bio from a previous role as a White House author:

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/author/conor-white-sullivan

He previously developed Localocracy and co-founded HuffPost Labs.

He co-developed Roam Research with Joshua Brown.

The software already includes import and export options, so it is perfectly possible to try out the software without making a determination about fully trusting it with all your sensitive and/or mission-critical data.

It is true that the website does not yet do a very good job of explaining itself, and perhaps I should have been clearer that it's still in beta, but, as is evident from the white paper, this is clearly an exciting contribution to the realm of thought processing software.

In terms of UX, it’s not bad. I like the potential of the page graphs.

The white paper mentioned earlier https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/Vu1MmjinS goes into a detail, however it is highly repetitive and waffles on.

The app itself is painfully slow, at least on my Samsung Tablet, to the point of being unusable.

My take is this is very much an academic exercise and the target audience is academics where the graph of interrelated information would be very useful.

A concern of apps like this is that you can spend a lot of time linking content together, organizing it etc, more so than actually making use of the content.

And organization seems to be done by typing [[links]] which is nice, but drag and drop is very often used these days and can deliver a better user experience. A combination of both is likely a good step.

Our earlier app Surfulater had two-way 'See Also' links and Clibu has one-way 'See Also' links. These also form a graph of content, albeit not as powerful as I imagine Roam does.

Our new app Clibu Notes will also have cross reference links and make much heavier use of drag and drop to organize content, add links etc. And of course full offline support, collaboration, local database etc.




Listerene wrote:

NOT a "very promising" web site, however. Not a single explanation of
what it does or how it does it or why anyone should care.

That's not just lousy marketing, that speaks to the developer's
incompetence. Pass

I appreciate this comment and like when developers give thoughts on different approaches. I very much like that you put put a lot of weight into two-way linking where that is one of the most often ignored features of most knowledge management software.

Maybe there was a different forum post about this, but I've been intrigued by Cliibu's option to run from one's own server. I'm comfortable with using cloud storage and syncing but in the really long run, like 10-20 years, it's hard to imagine many of these note-cloud ecosystems still existing. So as an end-user, we have to wonder if putting a lot of work into metadata of our content will always be erased when that platform is no longer viable.

For the most part, everyone's 'dumb export' is fine if our content doesn't get too fancy. We make the calculus that having to manually "re-metadata" our content every few years is worth the trouble so that we can use the best fit platform available at the time. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves when in reality we just have a growing list of 'import X notes into Y notes' on our to-do lists. But the platforms that will allow us to 'natively open' notes as they originally were captured and organized many years from now are getting fewer.

My point is that it's comforting to keep local control of native files over the years. I could still open a Word or Text file I made in the 90's.... I could even open an ecco-pro file, though it would take some effort with emulated software (that I can also back up on my own). Conversely, I would not be able to hope to do any such 'recovering' of ancient data of many cloud-first platforms where the content files and software is not something I can keep my own versions of over the years.

One glaring example of the loss of personal content control is OneNote, which has been my old standby that has most my stuff, starting way back when it was like the other office software where it was file-based. I knew that in 20 years, I could find an old copy of OneNote 2007 and open THAT file some day if I needed to. That too has changed.

I tend to just go along with the convenience of the cloud services these days but I often wonder if lots of us will regret that. That you've made a cloud platform that I could (but probably won't) run off my own server is pretty cool.



Neville Franks wrote:

The white paper mentioned earlier
https://roamresearch.com/#/v8/help/page/Vu1MmjinS goes into a detail,
however it is highly repetitive and waffles on.

The app itself is painfully slow, at least on my Samsung Tablet, to the
point of being unusable.

My take is this is very much an academic exercise and the target
audience is academics where the graph of interrelated information would
be very useful.

A concern of apps like this is that you can spend a lot of time linking
content together, organizing it etc, more so than actually making use of
the content.

And organization seems to be done by typing [[links]] which is nice, but
drag and drop is very often used these days and can deliver a better
user experience. A combination of both is likely a good step.

Our earlier app Surfulater had two-way 'See Also' links and Clibu has
one-way 'See Also' links. These also form a graph of content, albeit not
as powerful as I imagine Roam does.

Our new app Clibu Notes will also have cross reference links and make
much heavier use of drag and drop to organize content, add links etc.
And of course full offline support, collaboration, local database etc.




Listerene wrote:
NOT a "very promising" web site, however. Not a single explanation of
>what it does or how it does it or why anyone should care.
>
>That's not just lousy marketing, that speaks to the developer's
>incompetence. Pass
>

Played around myself for a bit. It’s an interesting concept — seems somewhat specific (not overly so) to the designer’s preferences. I don’t fault the owner or the beta being unpolished, and will keep my eye on Roam Research. Preferably, it would store documents locally with the cloud as an option, otherwise I don’t see using it for anything much.

Beck wrote:

These days a lack of slick marketing makes me a bit more trusting of the
service. I've signed up for the beta and will be playing around today.

It's been a month since Roam came on my radar and wondering if anyone here is finding it useful?

I've been following the developer on Twitter and the app seems to be gaining traction/appreciation.

I haven't used the app very much, but I noticed that you can "book time" with the developer in half-hour blocks to discuss the app, how to use it, etc. No cost. What a great idea! Maybe it'll catch on.

https://roamresearch.youcanbook.me/

It’s a lovely extension of the Workflowy/Dynalist philosophy, I must say. I’m especially impressed by the way it draws phrases that are identical to page names to your attention (as “unlinked references") so you can turn them into actual links if you want to.

But I’m still mourning REXnotes, which was a very cool idea indeed. If only there had been an offline version…

Same applies to RoamResearch, actually – I’d love to see an offline version.

Does anyone here know whether an offline version is planned?

I emailed Conor White-Sullivan at the end of October. He said a desktop version was "three to six months" away

Thanks for the information, MenAgerie.

This is so useful, and yet so rare a feature. I'm only aware of Brainstorm and Zulupad (none developed anymore) that can do such a thing.

In fact, a quick search found my mentioning this several times in this forum, e.g. https://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/9302

MadaboutDana wrote:

I'm especially impressed by the way it draws phrases
that are identical to page names to your attention (as "unlinked
references") so you can turn them into actual links if you want to.

Yes, when you think of the many brilliant ideas that have appeared in subsequently vanished software over the years, it makes you weep, it really does.

Talking of which: one of the limitations I encountered in RoamResearch is an inability to open linked pages in a new window. Now if one was to combine the outstanding linking ability of RoamResearch with the side-by-side capabilities of REXnotes, what a lovely solution that would be!

I know we’ve drawn up our ideal set of features for knowledge management apps before; I really ought to settle down and sketch out all the ideas that people have found most useful over the years in an optimised app design. Or perhaps somebody more talented could do it? Then we’d send the sketches to, I dunno, 6Wunderkinder in Berlin (who seem to be chafing under the Microsoft regime) and ask them to build the actual app! For multiple platforms (like Wunderlist)!

Cheers,
Bill

It’s worth mentioning, incidentally, that the exceptionally brilliant NotePlan supports wiki-style links and gives you a smart dropdown list of links as soon as you type your double-brackets. This combines with the automatic dropdown list of tags that appears as soon as you type a hashtag. Oh, and Eduard has just introduced smart folders (well, saved smart searches - effectively the same thing). The combination is awesomely powerful.

Eduard has also promised folding in the near future. He’s a gem!

For my personal task management, I’m a total convert to NotePlan. I mean I haven’t even been tempted by anything else for months!

Not least because you can edit NotePlan’s markdown notes (in both the Calendar and Notes categories) using any Markdown editor. So if you’re caught short without NotePlan, but have access to iCloud, you can change things directly. It also means all data is easily transferable elsewhere in the exceptionally unfortunate event that NotePlan suddenly ceases to exist.

Cheers!
Bill