Zenkit Hypernotes - closed beta

Posted by jsamlarose
Mar 10, 2021 at 12:26 PM

Thanks for posting this! Some first thoughts, having just taken a look:

- Keyboard/mouse bias (“click to start writing” in a new note ). On iOS, that’s disappointing…
- It’s easy to move nodes by touch— makes up for the bias towards keyboards and mice in some of the language…but I haven’t found touch alternatives for some of the more “pro” user controls (e.g. open page in side panel, and many of the graph control keyboard shortcuts…). This is one of the reasons I rarely take on any of the contemporary knowledge management tools (apart from the fact that I’m reasonably happy with my current set-up)— I work between an iPad and a Mac, and up until very recently I was iPad exclusive. I treat my mobile devices as serious work tools so I’m always a little put off when an app doesn’t support mobile devices with feature parity.
- Outliner format. Very cool. Makes use of block-level thinking, organised into pages.
- Breadcrumb works nicely. Also, good set of interface models for content— card style pages layout, a table, daily notes as an area in its own right, tasks also in a separate area/screen, and a graph.
- How to open pages from the graph? Doesn’t seem to work, or is counter-intuitive. Bug?
- Feels like it should come with an example notebook with more sample items in it. Anyone who’s new to this class of app will fail to appreciate the value of the graph until they’ve generated enough linked pages to make the graph meaningful.
- Autocomplete pairs— nice!
- Bit of conflation between tagging (#) and wiki-linking. You can use both… basic guides suggest that wiki-links are for references that include spaces. So tags are essentially pages here.
- Easy to select all nodes in a page and invoke share extension to push content to another app.
- Web clipper (iOS share extension) captures link but not selected text? Creates new page, but can’t see how to add selected content to a new page. And what of images? Also, title of web page doesn’t seem to be auto-detected, so new page is created with URL as a title. Curious to discover the best way to get content into the app (beyond manual typing…)
- Very interested in the notion of publishable pages and the fact that it offers collaborative use from the get-go.
- Easy insertion of block references from /slash command palette. Nice.
- Also easy to upload images, though image doesn’t seem to display inline in the iOS version (bug?)— fine in the web version…