Struggling to Use Daily

Thoughts & Feedback
1

Hey,

I thought I’d take a moment to share some frustrations with SuperNotes that is leaving me conflicted and failing to use it as my daily driver for note taking.

The biggest challenge is the primary interaction with cards and sub-cards. Using a hierarchy for my cards is definitely a superpower, but that also means I need to edit cards that are close together in that hierarchy often. Having to move up and down the hierarchy with SuperNotes is pretty painful. Opening a note board doesn’t work. I feel this should work like a file explorer on my computer. When I am in a card, I should have access to subcards on the side and there should be some fluidity in the way I can move around.

I don’t know what the answer is, but this is definitely the biggest cause of frustration for me.

Next, tagging. Tagging inline within a card is also really important to understand why the tag exists. The tags are part of the natural language of a note and having them as metadata on the card makes it too difficult to keep those tags up to date and removes them from the cognitive model when reading the card.

Inbox. I was excited when you said this was coming, however it’s only for sharing. When creating new cards and no hierarchy can be inferred (or even as quick capture on mobile), I would like a triage / inbox for my own cards. A place for them to live until I triage them and add the appropriate metadata.

Finally, dates. Even with the challenges above, I have been able to enter cards and get value from SuperNotes. However, I immediately need to leave SuperNotes the moment I want a card to be surfaced on a certain date. The ability to add dates and reminders to my cards will allow me to keep the majority of my notes in SuperNotes without the escape hatch.

With regards to my escape hatch, I keep falling back to RoamResearch. I’m sure you’ve played with it and I hope there’s some inspiration for improvements to SuperNotes to come.

  • Daily Notes
  • Frictionless Inline Page Links / Page Creation (SuperNotes does OK here, but opens the new card when creating within a card, and also - slash commands don’t work on mobile)
  • Backlinks are surfaced better (SuperNotes doesn’t display breadcrumbs / context)

Looking forward to more updates, I am a huge fan of SuperNotes and I hope this feedback helps and SuperNotes can become my daily driver.

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I agree with your sentiment. I want to love Supernotes - but in the current state, I find the application to be frustrating vs. useful.

Linking cards is frustration instead of fun - and the program has way too much friction to be an everyday application.

For myself, I’m going to take a few months away and check back in. Hopefully, by then the program will be smoother and better to use.

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Hi there,
Having used the platform for a few months now myself I agree, there are some annoying things.
I agree the mobile experience is cumbersome and shortcuts don’t really work. This app promised is needed for Android and IOS.
The hierarchy is messy and would be better as a standard file structure we all know as using parent cards for me me is messy. The search feature does not always find the cards I want so setting it up as a knowledge base is going to be tricky.
Updates with some good changes that make the UI easier to use are slow and really based off the desktop experience.
For me notes are taken a lot on my android phone no so much on my laptop, hence my frustrations. For general notes and ways to find then easy I still drift back to Evernote but really want SuperNotes to work.

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Thank you all for taking the time to share your in-depth feedback (please keep it coming!). This is incredibly useful and is helping us prioritise our roadmap - almost everything you have mentioned we are actively working on improving. @connor and I would like Supernotes to become your daily driver more than anything else!

On that note, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share what’s coming next, these new features should address most, if not all of the points of friction for you.

New (WYSIWYG) editor

We recognise our editor is very minimalist at the moment, and heavily relies on pure markdown which is not for everyone and not great for mobile users. Our new WYSIWYG editor will solve many of ergonomic issues you are all facing (hopefully a little less friction for you @MSuperNotes) as well as greatly improve mobile support:

  • Faster inline links + tagging
  • Auto links – the editor will scan your card database and suggest links for you
  • Reminders
  • Mentions
  • Improved image upload support

and more… find them in the WYSIWYG thread. Also for those who enjoy pure markdown, that will still be supported of course!

Custom Metadata

You will be soon be able to add custom metadata to cards from dates, numbers, text and boolean values and more. You may have noticed that the card “options dropdown” UX has changed in structure recently, this is to accommodate this. Custom metadata will paired with a filters / sorting update (that will include date support!) making it easier to find the right cards.

Card Depth

With the new graph view, we will be adding the ability to see ‘deeper’ into a hierarchy instead of just one level down, even when viewing the cards as a list not just as graph. This gives you a lot more control over what child cards are contained within a parent, even a few levels down.

Desktop & Mobile apps

We have spent a lot of work recently on our Desktop apps and they will finally be out very soon, we are just putting on the finishing touches. Mobile apps will follow suit, and we will be adding a lot of the improvements to the mobile UX that will make the experience a lot smoother for you @Karper71.

Web clipper

Finally, our web clipper for Chrome & Firefox is also on the horizon, and this will allow you to make a Supernotes card from anywhere on the web – paired with custom metadata this will become very powerful. Here we are reviewing the possibility of adapting the ‘inbox’ to be not just for sharing but also for your own content – more like a triage you were envisioning @rawkode.

These are all big updates and regarding when these will be released, Connor and I are working around the clock to get most if not all out by the end of the year! Thank you for bearing with us, we really appreciate all of your continued support and we are very much looking forward to sharing this all with you.

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Thanks for the update, @tobias :+1:

I’ll keep an eye on the updates :heart:

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I want to echo some of Rawkode’s comments but I’m excited to see the pace of updates with this app. Fantastic! It appears the next updates will address several issues. I’d like to add a couple things that would make it a better daily driver for me.

Priority Default - I’d rather see Priority as the default so my notes show up in the sidebar. At the very least, this should be user-selectable in settings whether notes default to priority or visible. If you have a lot of notes, especially nested notes, just grabbing them out of the sidebar is super convenient. I think Bear has the best sidebar.

Drag to reorder - I love the new addition to drag notes on top on each other. I’d also love to be able to drag to reorder notes on the note board. Even better would be multiple columns on the noteboard to see notes side by side.

Nested Lists - there doesn’t appear to be a way to nest lists in a card. If that is added, then expand/collapse would be key given the card real estate.

Thanks for listening! Looking forward to the future of supernotes!

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I second the request for Priority behaviour to be settings-manageable. Currently every time I double click a card it seems to add the card to Priority/the sidebar, which I find frustrating because I prefer a cleaner sidebar.

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None of these are mentioned in the 1.7 thread. Are these still expected before end of year?

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We’ve shuffled a few releases around – all these features are still a high priority though and we are aiming to get them out in the first few months of next year!

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I’ve moved on from SuperNotes. While I was initially excited with the product, it’s been almost 5 months and I don’t think anything of significance has shipped. The desktop apps were expected in June/July 2020

I wish you the best of luck

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@rawkode Totally understand the frustration when there isn’t much movement on your pain points, but rest-assured we are definitely working on them. There are some big changes we’ve been working on behind the scenes in order to give power users the features they need while also keeping the baseline Supernotes experience as simple and fast as possible.

In the meantime we will keep pushing updates and hopefully we can win you back!