"Roam Research" -- New web-based personal wiki

Posted by Luhmann
Mar 17, 2020 at 02:10 AM

I finally tried Roam and am really impressed. What I really love is that you don’t have to move items to file them away. This is a big problem with outliners and task managers, where you constantly have to monitor and sort your inbox. Roam’s ability to generate pages related to any keyword or tag means that you can move something just by tagging, while it still remains in its original location. This is important because items always remain their context: whether that context was a document you were reading, a journal entry, meeting notes, whatever. And it shows you that context as well as the linked text. For me this is the real genius of it all - the way context is preserved. If I tag a quote from a book, when I look at the page for that tag I’ll see the title page for that item which is the name of that book. So not only do I not have to move my quote from the book page to a new page of selected quotes related to the topic and then copy all the meta data over as well, I can just add the tag and see the item on the new page along with the metadata! It is really a much better way of doing things. It basically is a zettelkasten without having to do all the annoying work that makes it impossible for most people to maintain a zettelkasten.

Right now the biggest problem for me is that the mobile version of the app doesn’t work well on the iPhone’s mobile safari web browser. (I couldn’t delete a node, I couldn’t upload a photo, the page always defaults to a quick entry screen instead of the page I was last using, etc.) But if that were all to be fixed, I could really see myself jumping ship and moving a lot of my Dynalist data (or all of it?) over to Roam. Right now though, Dynalist remains a much more polished product. Their mobile app is not great, but compared to Roam it is far superior. Also, Dynalist’s sharing interface is much more advanced which makes it better for collaborative projects or just making individual outlines public. I’m glad to see the active discussion of Roam on the Dynalist forums and I hope they can figure out a way to capture some of what makes Roam so revolutionary.

Roam is so different from anything else it really takes some time to explore, but I really think it is a new paradigm. I look forward to not only seeing it develop, but also seeing how other developers get inspired by this approach. It would be great to see something like VoodooPad be developed which could bring Roam’s approach to a native app for Mac and iOS. This would allow for more secure data storage, offline access, and tighter integration with other apps…