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Going to Attempt All-in with Dynalist
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Posted by Christoph
Dec 28, 2020 at 04:51 PM
Drewster wrote:
>So if everything at its essence is an outline, why not use an outliner?
Yes, but I believe your premise that everything is in essence an outline is wrong. Take a hen and and egg. What comes first if you want to put them in a hierarchical outline?
Posted by Christoph
Dec 28, 2020 at 05:35 PM
Christoph wrote:
>I believe your premise that everything is in essence an outline
>is wrong.
This article explains it very well. Networks (graphs) are more than just trees (outlines):
https://medium.com/the-graph/trees-vs-networks-f7aef799f75e
That’s why I now prefer Obsidian over simple outliners, which I have used for a long time as well.
Of course, everything you can do with an outliner, you can also do with Obsidian, as trees are just a special kind of graphs. But Obsidian gives you more flexibility.
Posted by avernet
Dec 28, 2020 at 08:10 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>It was discussed many times on their official Reddit page, and the
>founder might have commented on it on Twitter as well. There was no 100%
>guarantee given that it will stay that way for ever. My understanding is
>that they didn’t find it worthwhile to spend coding time on locking out
>the free beta users.
Luhmann wrote:
>I’ve seen it on Twitter, Reddit, and the Slack channel. Basically, you
>can keep your existing graphs, but can’t create any new ones without
>paying.
Got it, and thank you Dr Andus + Luhmann for confirming this. I had noticed my initial graph was apparently still usable, but hadn’t read anything about this so didn’t know this was part of a “strategy”.
Posted by avernet
Dec 28, 2020 at 08:24 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
Luhmann wrote:
>>However, the Obsidian developers did suggest they might start
>>work on “Dynalist 2.0” after they are done with Obsidian. Basically, a
>>re-write of Dynalist that includes some of what they learned from
>making
>>Obsidian. That sounds ideal to me, but it could be a long way off (or
>>even never, they didn’t make any promises).
>
>That would make a lot of sense as I suspect Dynalist appeals to a much
>broader market (e.g. WorkFlowy users) than Obsidian, which is a bit of a
>niche (it doesn’t even fit my use case, and normally I’d be all over
>this kind of stuff).
My perception is that, in 2020, Obsidian created more buzz in the productivity space than Dynalist or WorkFlowy ever did. Maybe even more so than Roam Research and Notion, or on par with those. Will the commercial success be commensurate to that buzz? If so, even with Erica and Shida being are amazing developers, it might be hard for them to keep their focus on Dynalist if it generates significantly less interest (thus potential) and maybe even revenue than Obsidian. Does anyone here have a crystal ball they can read to know how those products will evolve in the next few years? ;)
Posted by avernet
Dec 28, 2020 at 08:36 PM
Christoph wrote:
>Of course, everything you can do with an outliner, you can also do with
>Obsidian, as trees are just a special kind of graphs. But Obsidian gives
>you more flexibility.
What about:
- Zooming/focusing at any level (not just headings).
- Folding/unfolding at any level (not just headings, and with the folded/unfolded state being part of the data structure).
To me, outliners, with WorkFlowy being the prototypical example thereof, are fundamentally different. Let me stress “different”. But for a given person, an outliner might be better, in particular if it better reflects the way one tends to mentally organize thoughts in their head, either by habit or for some other reason.