Your take on workflows that need consolidation

Thoughts & Feedback
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Clarissa and her recent poll regarding the most desired new features (great initiative!) inspired me to reflect on what I think would be the logical next step for Supernotes. In my view, ever since 3.1 has been released, Supernotes has reached a state in which it provides a highly consistent toolset to tackle the major task of any PKMS, which is to conveniently and effectiely manage encoding and retrieval of information. So much so that, in my opinion, most new features will not exceed a rating of nice-to-have.

This motivated my somewhat laconic remark that I would rather like to see bugs fixed before heading towards new goals. I came to realize it’s probably a good time for not only fixing bugs, but more generally a consolidation of whats been created so far.

Particularly, I think the app would benefit from a streamlining of common workflows where there are still some impediments, even more than it would from addition of new features. To give an example, here are the top three workflows or workflow-related features that i think should be addressed in future updates

  • View multiple search results. performing a fuzzy search becomes cumbersome when trying to view multiple search results, which is discussed in-depth here
  • Create new priority card. When adding a new card that will be hidden from the current view due to applied filters once , it is inconvenient to make it priority.
  • Prevent duplicates. When creating a new card, if a similar card already exists, there is no system to prevent duplicates from happening, or to provide suggestions to link related cards, so a manual search is usually required.

What do you think? Does workflow consolidation trump new features? And what is a workflow that you think needs streamlining?

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It’s a pretty minor thing, but I would love for a way to quickly add a card without automatically making it a child of the current view. I often find myself wanting to capture random, unrelated thoughts while working on some larger idea or project that’s set as my current view. I can achieve this by cutting the card before I finish adding it, so it’s a minor step, but it would be nice to have.

Duplicate detection could also be cool. At the same time, not having duplicate detection kind of urges you to review cards and reorganize manually on occasion which is a good habit to get into. Indicating duplicates/similar cards in this mode of review could also be helpful. Maybe something as basic as cosine similarity on card contents would be enough.

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Don’t want to distract too much from the brainstorming, so keep it going, loving the thoughts so far!

Just wanted to point out @solsen that this is possible if you use a card creation shortcut, either by pressing CMD+N on desktop, selecting the “New card” command from Universal Search, or by long-pressing the search icon on mobile.

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I think for me right now (only been using it for two days, so I might not have found a short cut, yet) it would be nice to see breadcrumbs and/or have a way to go back to the parent card from within the child, without using the outline. Like a regular back button, ykwim?

I sort my notes like this class → topics → sub-topics → (sub-sub-topics), and one topic might only have one sub-topic and then I need to go back to the class to add a new note on a separate topic etc.

And another one for me would be some kind of optional drawing-type notes or Excalidraw integration on mobile/tablets. Sometimes I just need to handwrite my notes when studying for an exam, but I need to have all of my notes in one place and have them be linked to each other, because there are a lot of recurring topics (this is why I chose Supernotes in the first place, cause compared to other platforms it fits my study method and requirements best). I think I have a workaround for now (using 2-3 apps), but it would be nice to see in the future.

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Thanks @connor! There are so many features intelligently packed into the app that I sometimes forget how to trigger them, long press is perfect!

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The idea of breadcrumbs is difficult to implement as there are potentially multiple parents. However, you can navigate “back” (“up”?) just by clicking (single or double click) on the parent indicators just beneath the cards title. Also, you can choose to “locate in outline” to get a quick grasp of the hierarchy. Would that serve you well or is there still some friction?

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Thank you, I figured that out yesterday. Like I said, still getting the hang of things :sweat_smile:

but I keep hitting the back button on my mouse to go back, which works fine on the web version, but not on desktop, which I prefer using. This should work regardless of how many parents a card has, shouldn’t it? I know nothing about programming, so please excuse my naiveté …

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Hi @freisatz,

Thanks for opening this. As @connor mentioned, it’s been great to hear your discussions. We are deliberately taking more of a backseat role in the community so we can see what you all really want without our added bias – replying later once a discussion has concluded (@MacGI good point about the mouse back / forward buttons, I’ve made a note for us to look into and improve this behaviour for you on desktop).

If anyone needs instant help, you can always message us via the in-app messenger in the ( ? ) Help menu across all our apps.

I’m not sure if you saw my recent reply on the Web Clipper feature request, but that’s exactly our thinking right now. We’ve added a huge amount of features in the past year, and now we’re taking the time to consolidate and review our features as well as fix all the outstanding bugs before starting to work on another big release.

It’s always a challenge as often a lot of people want to see constant new features, using that as a measure of “how good a product is.” However, we feel this is misleading and can quickly make a product feature-bloated and cumbersome to use. We agree that right now, Supernotes is a very comprehensive software product, fulfilling almost all the expectations since you became a lifetime member four years ago.

Nevertheless, there’s still a huge backlog of minor improvements. We want to release more YouTube tutorials and written guides to help you make use of the already feature-rich set. Once we’re happy with the performance, stability, and utility of Supernotes, we’re planning on tackling the following key features (in order for now but this may change):

  • Push Notifications
  • File Attachments
  • Web Clipper

This is far from a comprehensive list, but these are currently the big main features that are top of our mind and require a lot of work. All of the above additions will be added seamlessly, so every workflow you current have will continue to work or will be improved (such as better handling of images). There’s no specific timeline for this right now, but we’re working as hard and as fast as we can for you all.

Thanks for your support, and for helping us build one of the best PKMs out there :heart: :raised_hands:

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Sorry my late answer. I am absolutely in line with your thoughts @freisatz. The consolidation for workflow is mandatory IMHO. Sn gives us the possiblity to work and act from different approaches.
As mentioned in other threads here, my premise would be: Strenght the great base and then add new possible features.

1 Like
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You can also use the CMD+ARROW KEY to get back to the previous page :slight_smile:
And in case you mightz have a logitech MX mouse, you can configue the forward/backward buttons to execute a CMD+ARROW KEY in the logitech options softwear! But I agree that this is only a workaround and native ->, ← buttons should work on desktop.