[symstym]

Long ago I got tired of Evernote's bugs and creep of extraneous features and switched to Workflowy [1] for the majority of my general (plaintext) note-taking. I love Workflowy and can't imagine life without it.

[1] https://workflowy.com/

[jay_kyburz]

Serious question. If you are just making plaintext notes how come you are not just using your text editor of choice? Vim, Emacs, Sublime, Atom etc etc

[thanatropism]

This is why all my App Store purchases of late have been text editors with Markdown and Dropbox support.

Seriously: I have three text editors in the lower four icons of my iPad (four if the ssh client counts): one to have the important work thing open (Editorial), another with my personal note folder (1Write) and yet another for just typing text quickly (iA Writer), jotting quick lists, etc. The "office girlfriend" will often grab my iPad during a meeting to tell me something in private or start writing down notes, and she knows she's only allowed to open the third one.

Startup-er folk: pay attention to "enhanced Markdown editors" like Editorial (good inline preview) and 1Write (decent to see an entire folder at once, much like the Evernote UI), not to mention the "todo.txt" category. Make comparable desktop clients (so I don't have to muck about in Sublime Text or Notepad++ trying to reproduce the folder view situation).

Sell the world the beauty of plain text, including budding formats like todo.txt and the kind of YAML+markdown that static blog generators use.

(When I was young and very abstract/naïve, I dreamed of starting a company to sell custom DSLs. But this is the next best thing: develop text-based DSLs for tagging, todo lists, meeting notes, etc -- readable-but-standardisable standards like Markdown. Make great UIs, make them multi platform.)

[saturdaysaint]

I love Dropbox, but is it a platform for an investment-worthy business? Anecdotally, I know a lot of people that have a free account that's completely full and have no intention of paying $99 a year and would probably need to have their password re-emailed to them. I agree that there are potential (and actual) great apps, but this kind of onboarding experience restricts the audience greatly.

[saturdaysaint]

I use Workflowy for easy cloud synchronization, great mobile apps (so I can quickly pull up a shopping list I created at my work PC) and generally the way the "infinite outline" model suits my mental organization. I'd be genuinely curious to the extent that some/all of these could meet some/all of these requirement, but Workflowy is so well designed and completely reliable that I haven't been particularly tempted to look around.

[brianclements]

For me it was:

1. a similar interface across all platforms with similar features and behavior (android vs desktop text editing is a very different experience)

2. tagging/enhanced search

3. hyperlinks to other nodes and the Internet. This is incredibly powerful to me for nodes that are relevant in multiple contexts. You can put copy/paste the URL of any node into any other and viola, workflowy symlinks!

4. FOCUS. I have ~15k lines of notes in workfowy, but am still able to "zoom in" and focus on the content of just one note. That is super powerful for my productivity. A text editor with 16 spaces of indent and squished text to the right just does not do that for me. In fact, that will probably stress me out more.

[dasil003]

Workflowy is a really really cool tool. It totally hits the sweet spot for the way I conduct my day to day work in terms of a todo list which is infinitely nestable, but also focusable, so I can keep track of where I am even on a long yak-shave.

I don't really like it for free-form text since it is list-oriented, but it's taken a surprising chunk out of what I used to keep in nvALT and OmniFocus.

[ericax]

We made something similar to Workflowy called Dynalist (https://dynalist.io/), there's a live demo you can try at https://dynalist.io/demo (no signup required).

We made this because Workflowy has a lot of things that we thought we could improve, and they're kinda slow in development, but that's another story.

[brianclements]

Great addition to the workflowy style ecosystem. I will definitely keep an eye on this one. When you plan OPML import support?

[ericax]

It's planned! See our roadmap on Trello: https://trello.com/b/z0HxDPNo/dynalist-roadmap

[yitchelle]

Just tried workflowy. I really love the way that they guide you through the demo, they are onboarding a potential user in the demo! What a great concept.

[paradite]

Just tried it and it looks really cool. I wonder why I haven't heard of it before.