- Key Features::
- # and :: to link to page (multiple entrypoints to the same thing)
- (()) to link to actual blocks
- / quick insert
- quick insert of today/tomorrow/yesterday
- quick insert of TODOs
- quick insert of formulas like slider, page mentions, orphans, etc.
- Learning Areas::
- low friction to start being active in the product and derive value from it
- after initial site load time very performant and fast
- ability to get context from multiple areas at the same time
- sidebar view with full functionality (essentially an easy side-by-side tab) accessible via
shift+click
- can have multiple pages open in this view and all are collapsible headers
- capitalize on single source of truth
- changing one reference updates everywhere
- lends well to changing organizational structures\
- provides feeling of safety at very low cost
- usually recording your thoughts either requires you to invest some time “categorizing” your thoughts in order to make these thoughts manageable to find later or jump straight into the thought, making it very difficult to find later
- Roam does a good job giving you a sense of just being able to dump your thoughts in and trusting that the system will surface the latent structure for you
- gives you the power of organization without the cost of having to organize upfront
- obv some drawbacks in focusing solely on associative references but the aim of the tool is to aid thought/ideation which doesn’t require and may not even want very strict, hierarchical organization as documents for an organization might
- Drawbacks::
- hard to disambiguate and unclear how to handle from a user-perspective
- wikipedia deals with this a lot — in english lot of terms have overlap
- no concept of nested disambiguation (switch the book vs. a switch)
- or coda ideas vs. cooking ideas
- a lot of features are undiscoverable
- perception of being very complex and unclear what the “best” behavior is
- Observations::
- critical ah-ha moment that happens after a certain benchmark of adding references and thinking about something related that is a reference you have already added
- interestingly has a lot of hidden features that people snoop on via Twitter (see parallels with our hidden formulas), including one that allows arbitrary JS embeds
- outspoken public image and social media strategy
- another ah-ha moment is realizing you can link-ify entire phrases/paragraphs instead of just the normal things we would consider “linkable” like words and titles
- As opposed to coda centering around docs (which can have very diff purposes depending on the use case), roam is focused around ideas/thoughts being the main entity.
- Makes it a lot more powerful for networking disparate concepts that are related tangentially but can become noisy
- interesting view https://twitter.com/nbashaw/status/1257080134332321792?s=20