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Amplenote
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Posted by satis
Jan 29, 2021 at 04:01 PM
I think apps creating their own calendars is usually a waste of programming resources. I have never seen a proprietary calendar app for a note taker app that could compare favorably to some of the dozens of already-available calendar apps that can natively pull in Apple or Google Calendar data. There are literally dozens of good mobile calendar apps already that work with Google Calendar, and several good PC/Mac ones too. And people in offices who have to use Outlook would be better off pulling in a sync to their existing calendars than having to use a completely different calendar app to work with their notes.
There are some excellent task managers I won’t consider because of this. Things for Mac/iOS uses a proprietary calendar, but its calendar is simply inferior to the one(s) I use. I have less of a need to integrate events with an outliner or a notes app, but it would certainly be a nice feature if it were able to provide 2-way sync.
The number of apps that natively offer two-way sync is rather small unfortunately. The ones I know offhand are TickTick, gQueues and Todoist. It’s possible to automate 2-way sync with an outside service like Zapier but I don’t know of any notes apps that work with it. (Zapier does sync Google Calendar with OneNote but I think that’s it for note-taking apps.)
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 30, 2021 at 05:09 PM
Of course it remains to be seen how useful Amplenote’s calendar will be, but having a calendar—that is a way to schedule tasks—is essential to their stated goal:
https://www.amplenote.com/about_us
So I hope they do a good job.
Posted by Luhmann
Jan 17, 2025 at 10:17 PM
One of the real discoveries of my effort to compare various PKMS was Amplenote, which I hadn’t known about before. It is surprising this app doesn’t get more attention as it is quite powerful.
Pros:
1. integrated task management
This is really important for me, because I find that there is tremendous utility in being able to have my notes and tasks in one place and have them integrated. A simple example is making a note to call someone about a project and then having the ability to link to pages about that person and project. Only a few apps let you do this easily.
2. Calendar integration
Again, only a few PKMs have this, but I agree with the comment above about how key this is for any kind of task management workflow. I also like to make notes on events and meetings. I haven’t really tested how this might work, but that is another reason for having good calendar integration into a PKM.
3. Mobile app
Right now I use Logseq, but have never been able to use it on mobile. The DB version should fix that, but even then they don’t currently have a dedicated mobile app developer, so it could be a long time before something decent is available.
4. Plugins
There already seem to be a number of useful plugins, such as for Readwise integration and better markdown support. I haven’t tested these yet.
Cons:
1. While it does have folding in outline view, it does not have zoom, which I consider an essential feature. Every PKM I’ve used for the past few years (Workflowy, Roam, Dynalist, Logseq) has it, and I would hate to loose this.
2. Not block based. It is document based like Obsidian, not block-based like Logseq. This means you can link to documents, but not to individual parts of an outline. I could probably live with this.
3. Limited offline support. Attachments are stored in the cloud, and so aren’t accessible if you are offline.
Posted by Luhmann
Jan 17, 2025 at 10:25 PM
Another con is the lack of aliases. The ability to refer to the same note by different names is something I use all the time. I’m not talking about link aliases where you have one name written but the link is something else; rather, true aliases like Logseq where you can link to the same note using different wikilink names. This is another key feature that many PKMs fail to implement.
Posted by Luhmann
Jan 17, 2025 at 10:56 PM
So you can create events. First you create a bullet and then you use the bullet menu or type ! to select a start time.
However, a problem with it not being block based is that if you create an event and then add a note or task as a child of that event (in the outliner), it is only linked to the page, not the event itself.
Example, from a fictional page titled “PKM Course”
2025-01-18 Lecture on outliners
- [[todo]] prepare power point
- [[notes]]
If you look up the todo or the notes, they will be linked to [[PKM Course]] not [[2025-01-18 Lecture on outliners]] but in Logseq they would be identified as being related to this block.
I could probably learn to work this way, but I don’t think i want to.