Another entry into a hot market with https://acreom.com/

"Your workflow in one place. Made simple. And private.
acreom is a powerful knowledge base & time management tool running on local markdown files."

curiously, the local markdown files is still listed as 'coming soon'.

It's still being shaped obviously, yet it is becoming impressive about the feature sets of new products hitting the market. They're emulating and starting out with functionality that took older platforms a lot of courage to bring to market in their day.

bigspud wrote:

Another entry into a hot market with https://acreom.com/

Looks interesting, thanks!

There are so many new apps/services launching that I wonder what will still be around in a few years.

Like NotePlan with Google Calendar integration and read-only document web publishing a la SimpleNote/GoogleDocs. An interesting start for the new, as yet unpriced service

Picking up interested inquiries from the other thread on Tana...

acreom is a flexible piece of software intended primarily for programmers running complex projects with lots of tasks.

But actually, that purpose applies to all of us, so when I realised that acreom actually had quite a pleasant interface, I thought I’d try it out. Since I first started experimenting with it, it’s been open-sourced (on GitHub), which means the pace of development has slowed somewhat drastically, but also that the versions currently available are fairly stable.

acreom is hosted on acreom’s own cloud, with end-to-end encryption all the way. You can also sync your remote “Vault” (yes, Obsidian-speak) with a local folder, however, which is precisely what I do. Or you can run your Vault locally (in which case you can always experiment with keeping it in e.g. iCloud, OneDrive, etc.; I haven’t tried doing this... yet).

acreom is quite reminiscent of Obsidian, albeit without all the plugins. But its task management facilities are actually more powerful than Obsidian’s, and easier to use than the various (very popular) task plugins for the latter, because acreom is designed with tasks in mind.

It uses markdown throughout, but in hybrid form, so really it’s more like writing rich text. All markdown syntax (including e.g. tables, equations etc.) is recognised. It also supports backlinks and tags (although the latter are only really useful if you’re creating “Views”, essentially smart folders based on user-selected criteria.

It has a My Day section, which is equivalent to Obsidian or LogSeq’s Daily Note concept. You can embed tasks in days, but it’s more efficient to embed them either in pages (stored in folders and subfolders) or in Projects, which also contain pages but display them according to their status (To do, In Progress, Done). You can enter dates against each task, you can specify how long a task should take, and you can even enter repeating tasks. Every time you open your Daily Note (which the mobile iOS and Android apps default to), any tasks due for that date will appear in a list at the top of the page, arranged by time. It’s not a calendar view as such, but it’s plenty enough for me, especially as there’s a second timeline view available from My Day that shows all your tasks in a long list on the right – again, not a calendar view, but almost as good. You can sync this timeline with your own calendars: acreom currently supports Apple Calendars (although unlike TickTick, the data isn’t carried over into the non-Apple apps), Google Calendar (ubiquitous) and .ics calendars.

Pages can accept a lot of text – they are very like Obsidian pages and just as elegant, but acreom doesn’t currently support folding (sad but true). However, its treatment of links and backlinks is very fluid and convenient: if a page has links to it, the number of links appears in a small box just under the page title (as does its status and the Project it’s assigned to). Click on the little box and a list of backlinks appears.

The search engine is also excellent. acreom uses a search/create field at the top of the window, but if a “quick search” doesn’t find what you’re looking for, you can immediately turn it into a deep search, or go directly to the latter using Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-K. This produces a nice list of highlighted hits in sentence fragments in a drop-down window (although hits are not highlighted when you move to the actual page).

The double structuring of pages is actually quite cool. You have smart Views (which allow you to select pages by a limited but, for task management purposes, perfectly adequate number of criteria). These appear as boxes at the top of the left-hand navigation menu. But you can also create Projects, which look much the same as Views but have their own specific pages assigned to them (you can move pages in and out of Projects into the folder system, or move pages out of folders into Projects. Projects show the number of pages they contain; folders, weirdly enough, don’t on desktop, but do in the mobile apps. You can reorder your View and Project “boxes” in the sidebar.

There’s also a facility for pinning pages to the left-hand navbar, which is convenient if you don’t want to overlook something.

The interface is simple but elegant, and you can split windows into tabs or into side-by-side windows (limited only by the width of your monitor). Unfortunately you can’t split the main window that hosts all these subwindows into two or more, but hey, you can’t have it all.

The mobile apps are much less developed than the desktop apps, but still very usable. They only work in portrait mode (clearly optimised for smartphone), so if you use a tablet, you have to get used to splitting the screen with another app (this works perfectly well) or working on it in portrait mode. Settings in the mobile apps are very limited; they really are intended as viewers rather than managers, although you have full access to all pages and tasks, so can edit them as you wish. The syncing service is pretty efficient; I have no idea how long acreom will continue to host files on their own servers, but I’ve not noticed any issue so far.

Finally, acreom has an archiving facility (one of its preinstalled smart Views is “Archive”), but on my system at least, it doesn’t work. But this brings us to a useful aspect: you can view your files in Finder or Explorer directly (by right-clicking an item in the context menu), and you’ll find that, like Obsidian, acreom uses a straightforward folder/markdown file system to store data, meaning you can also access your acreom Vault/repository using Obsidian, Tangent, Typora or any other markdown-supporting editor of your choice.

After getting all anxious about the open-source move, I’ve returned to acreom from my otherwise beloved TickTick, simply because I much prefer working in it. Very much a UX thing – I like the fact you can open big pages if you want to, or view tight lists if you don’t. Since I write copious notes on projects and tasks, this suits my way of working very well (TickTick also supports copious notes, of course, but not in such an immediately user-friendly way).

There we go. I think I’ve covered all the main points, although there are several I’m sure I haven’t mentioned. Give it a go! You’ll find it remarkably flexible and pleasant for an app that’s essentially quite simple and uncomplicated (oh, except for the bizarre decision to exclude the My Day pages from the main interface – you have to access them from the My Pages button, whereupon today’s page will appear and you can move to and fro from page to page or use a dropdown calendar to move directly to a specific page. In this respect, acreom differs from e.g. Obsidian. The mobile apps default directly to My Day, which – given their primarily viewer-like function – makes perfect sense).

Cheers,
Bill

Thanks a million!

MadaboutDana wrote:

Picking up interested inquiries from the other thread on Tana...

... and a couple of other things I should have mentioned.

There are back/forward arrows in the top (menu) bar which allow you to move back/forward through the pages you’ve been viewing.

And apart from the universal search engine (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+K), there’s a simple in-page search function called up by the usual Cmd/Ctrl+F which works very well, especially if you’ve got big pages. This function does highlight hits in the page!

acreom supports wikilinks, so linking to a page is a simple matter of typing two [[ and some of the text in your target page's name, whereupon a list of pages with that text in their names appears.

I keep most of my to-dos in Project boxes. But I keep copious notes in the folders underneath (all of these things are in the sidebar). Thanks to wikilinks and the friendly “Move to” function in the context menu, it’s easy to link to notes and/or move them into or out of Projects. I have a large screen on my desktop, so I’ve got 11 Project boxes in the sidebar and 3 View boxes, apart from the 4 standard boxes put there by acreom itself (My Day, Active [a list of all your tasks, no matter what page they're on, although you can filter it if you wish], All Pages [regardless of which Project or folder they’re in] and Archive [doesn’t appear to work, but I live in hope!]). But below these boxes I have a standard hierarchy of folders and subfolders with linked notes and thoughts, including meeting notes.

Personally, I’ve labelled my Project boxes based on broad parameters (e.g. Business Development, Family, Personal, Admin, Quotes, Projects, etc.) – each Project box can hold as many pages as you want, which in turn can hold as many tasks as you want. The Views are smart lists that show pages filtered by various criteria (for example, I have one called Meeting Actions that shows the list of tasks from my various pages containing minutes of meetings).

I also use acreom for journaling (I used to use Obsidian, but it’s easier to keep it all in one place). I do use Obsidian to edit or reorganise journal entries on occasion (remember, you can open an acreom Vault as an Obsidian Vault if you wish), or else I use my favourite markdown editor Typora.

And that’s it, I think!

Cheers!
Bill

Thanks, Bill.
That's very helpful.
After Obsidian kept freezing when I opened a particular vault, I started looking for an alternative. It turned out my problem was caused by a community plugin - after disabling all of them at once, I could access my vault again.
I do not want to go back to a PKM with proprietary database/file format. So a PKM using the MD files on the disk is what I am looking for. And there are only a few alternatives to Obsidian. acreom has the strongest appeal for me.

I’ve had exactly the same issue. I’ve now refined my list of Obsidian plugins to a bare minimum, which meets pretty well all my needs, but I prefer to manage my tasks using another system, although I still use Obsidian for research and writing work!

Franz Grieser wrote:

Thanks, Bill.
That's very helpful.
After Obsidian kept freezing when I opened a particular vault, I started
looking for an alternative. It turned out my problem was caused by a
community plugin - after disabling all of them at once, I could access
my vault again.
I do not want to go back to a PKM with proprietary database/file format.
So a PKM using the MD files on the disk is what I am looking for. And
there are only a few alternatives to Obsidian. acreom has the strongest
appeal for me.