I’ve been using Supernotes for the last week or two, and I wanted to share my initial thoughts! I’ve been using Notion most recently, but before that I really enjoyed Workflowy. I’ve dabbled with Tana, Logseq, and Obsidian which just don’t seem user-friendly enough. Day One and Evernote feel antiquated and feature-limited. Supernotes has absolutely delighted me with some of its design choices, and I really hope it will continue to be refined regularly over time.
Notecards! <3
I’m a very visual person, so I was initially drawn to this app because of the notecard paradigm. I love that it incentives atomic thinking and breaking big ideas or processes into smaller ones. I love that, in theory, I should be able to get an easy high-level view of my notes by being able to look at a bunch of them side-by-side.
The Broadsheet view hints at this high-level perspective, but for me, I found it to be too rigid. Broadsheet allows me to view notes side-by-side, yes, but this requires I have already related them to each other in the Outline under the same parent, or via tags, etc. For me, the purpose of such a view would be to look at unrelated cards (or my entire deck) and work on creating those connections. You can drag-and-drop cards in the Broadsheet view to reorder them, but since the number of cards in each column is determined for you, they will reflow into other columns automatically. So mentally, you can’t use columns in the Broadsheet view as a way to organize or group cards either.
But maybe this way of thinking is best-served by something else like the Tabletop View, which I saw is still under development. This is the biggest feature I’m missing right now. I would love to re-arrange my cards freeform on an infinite canvas. Like being able to throw down a bunch of ideas and then organize them afterwards. I imagine each Canvas being its own working session, sort of like a saved view of whatever cards you want to add to it. You could toggle visibility of relation-lines on and off, draw new lines between cards to create links or parent/child relationships. And you could have multiple Canvases stored in a list above the Outline.
Markdown
Personally, I love the design choice to separate “editing” and “viewing.” I’ve tried working in other note apps that use Markdown where the syntax just disappears after you type it and it feels messy to me, like I can’t actually see what my note is under-the-hood. I love that despite it being in “editing” mode, we still render the styling so you can see it working in real-time. And I love that you can export cards in Markdown directly to the clipboard. This has been incredibly useful when I want to send notes to other apps or tools like ChatGPT.
Multi-select Mode Pains
In Multi-Select Mode, I want to select cards and hit the slash (Quick Couple) key to modify them. I’m sort of expecting it to work the same as the Quick Couple menu on a single card, where I can type “color,” “tag” or “parent” to assign a color, tag or parent. But instead this Modify menu seems to be completely different, and I have to scroll through an insanely long menu to find the property I want to modify.
The drop-down menu that comes up when you Modify in Multi-Select Mode is cluttered with:
- A list of all my parent cards - dozens of them!
- A list of icons - I never want to scroll through a list of icons by name. If I want to modify the icon, put them in a separate menu (and maybe just the icons without the icon names), or give me a search field to type into instead.
I think this feature should be reworked a bit to make it more consistent with how single cards are usually modified. +1 for using the universal coupler shortcuts
Move/Extract Text
I was so happy to discover the *Move* feature to split out text from monolithic cards into smaller, more atomic ones. But I feel like this verb is unclear. I assumed that it just moved the card to a new parent in the Outline. I highly recommend something like Extract or Nest instead. This feature should be way more prominent in on-boarding.
Related to this, I would personally love this functionality: Once the Move is done, automatically create a link in the current card to the newly-created card, using its title for the text, and select this entire link with the cursor. This would be great for creating in-line links, instead of just the parent-child link. And if the user didn’t need the in-line link, they could just hit backspace to delete it.
Quality-of-life Improvements & Feature Requests
In no particular order, some things I would benefit from:
- Quicker access to assign card colors without opening or editing them. I understand the desire to not clutter cards up with too many buttons. Perhaps a quick-select menu that only appears on card hover (on Desktop) - maybe a thin ribbon along the top edge of the card that is extra vibrant to suggest interaction?
- I find myself constantly updating my parent cards to reflect changes to their children. A table-of-contents entity, which would automatically list child cards and link to them would be amazing. If the title of a child card was updated, this would be reflected. Option to adjust ToC Depth as well?
- Easier way to rename or delete tags, especially ones I don’t want to see anymore.
- Manual sort for the Outline. I’m already using numbers to try and keep things in order.
- On iOS, a long press to drag-and-drop cards in the Outline. Organizing cards seems incredibly cumbersome otherwise. Apple Mail has this feature where you can long-press on an message in your inbox to pull up a context menu, but then if you continue to drag your finger around, you can dismiss the menu and interact with the message as a block item.
- Card versioning and history – I’d love to save older versions of my notes more elegantly.
Bugs I’ve Struggled With
- The “See more” banner at the bottom of longer cards often disappears, preventing me from reading the entirety of the card. Minimizing and un-minimizing the card seems to bring it back.
Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts and feedback! Again, I’m super excited to see Supernotes grow and evolve over time!
