I just posted an article about the outlining app Legend on Medium, if any is interested in this app:

https://stephenjzeoli.medium.com/the-fine-knowledge-management-app-no-one-talks-about-9b4aece1b230

Legend won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I appreciate the ambitions of the developer. He is trying to build a lot of cross-functionality into an outliner. I think he basically succeeds... or is on his way there. Anyone who likes the spare functionality of Workflowy or Dynalist, will probably find Legend a bit overwhelming. Truth is I do sometimes. But I'm trying to get comfortable with it.

Anyway, anyone I'd welcome comments on the article from the knowledgeable folks on this forum.

Thanks.

Steve

Hey Steve,

I enjoyed your article, which I thought gave a very fair account of Legend.

It’s an amazing app, but can end up being quite confusing. After spending a little time trying to make the most of its ingenious concepts, I confess I ended up deleting it. I found it peculiarly difficult to “localize” myself in the app and ended up getting quite frustrated.

But it’s one I’m keeping an eye on…

Cheers!
Bill

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I just posted an article about the outlining app Legend on Medium, if
any is interested in this app:

https://stephenjzeoli.medium.com/the-fine-knowledge-management-app-no-one-talks-about-9b4aece1b230

Legend won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I appreciate the ambitions of
the developer. He is trying to build a lot of cross-functionality into
an outliner. I think he basically succeeds... or is on his way there.
Anyone who likes the spare functionality of Workflowy or Dynalist, will
probably find Legend a bit overwhelming. Truth is I do sometimes. But
I'm trying to get comfortable with it.

Anyway, anyone I'd welcome comments on the article from the
knowledgeable folks on this forum.

Thanks.

Steve

Hi, Bill,

Thanks for the nice comments about my article.

I understand that frustration with Legend. I have experienced it myself, giving up on the app the first couple of times I tried it. Even now I struggle with that disorientation. I've found that one way to deal with it is to make great use of the Boards. I try to be very deliberate with how I set them up and then try to note change them too much.

But that's just a thought in case you decide to give Legend another go at some point.

Thanks again.

Steve

Steve,

I also enjoyed the article, and it was fun to see it published in Medium & to follow someone familiar to me.

I gave Legend a try upon learning about email integration, but I probably should have set it up on my laptop, instead of on iPad. Once I selected a plan, Legend went a little berserk. Not a big deal, though. When the idea of new software sounds truly fun again (and it will), I'll give it another try.

I have a very limited tolerance for company concocted fluff, so again, I enjoyed this article. You're a trustworthy source and have so much experience, maybe you should write more articles like that? Maybe you have, and I just haven't seen them.

Anyway, thanks for sharing it.

Thanks for the nice comments, Sarah.

I think that was the first software article I published to Medium. I haven't done much on that platform yet, but I'm making an effort to do more. We'll see how that goes.

I like Legend a lot, but understand the difficulty people have with it. The developer is really trying to do something different. That's laudable but fraught with the possibility that users won't take to it. I wouldn't write about an app I didn't think had merit.
Thanks again.

Steve

Hey Stephen,

Nice article!

I just checked out your Dynalist doc too. Now that's awesome!

Hi Stephen,

A very interesting article. Thank you very much for sharing.

Legend appears to share a lot of functionality with InfQube:
- Outlines for organising information in the form of blocks/items
- Any block/item can be a to-do or go on a calendar
- Selective views of blocks/items via boards/grids
- Adding notes to a block/item in a separate editor

So in that sense I can image that people find it hard to grok. But since the multi-faceted aspects of InfoQube are so useful, I expect Legend to be so as well.

Hi, Legend developer here. That's a great article Stephen!

I appreciate all the comments here, and I understand the difficulty getting started. We've never done a great job of introducing new users. But we have a new Help page (https://legendapp.com/help/ and we've started making introductory videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpHN8CYLLvs

I would love to know what you've found confusing. We can work on making those things more intuitive or try to explain them better. Do you think more videos or more articles would help? Or are there some concepts that are just too hard to understand as they are now?

Thank you!

Yo Jay,

Thanks very much for joining the forum – great stuff!

First – it’s a great app. But unlike other outlining apps (which is effectively what Legend is), it doesn’t really show you exactly WHERE you are in a complex document spread across multiple windows. This is really a UI issue; mapping the relationships between the various perspectives provided by the different windows. The thing I’ve found most irritating is the creeping suspicion that crucial information is effectively “invisible”, and I’m not sure exactly where to find it. Some kind of “overview” is, I suggest, the solution here – making it easy to establish exactly where you are in the information matrix, zoom out to see the whole, and then zoom in again (in various ways, as enabled by your lovely multi-window concept).

Rather than focus on training vids etc., I suggest a really objective look at the UI/UX is the way forward here. Because the concept is brilliant and I’d love to use Legend in anger (as it were!).

Cheers,
Bill

Jay Meistrich wrote:

Hi, Legend developer here. That's a great article Stephen!

I appreciate all the comments here, and I understand the difficulty
getting started. We've never done a great job of introducing new users.
But we have a new Help page (https://legendapp.com/help/ and we've
started making introductory videos
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpHN8CYLLvs

I would love to know what you've found confusing. We can work on making
those things more intuitive or try to explain them better. Do you think
more videos or more articles would help? Or are there some concepts that
are just too hard to understand as they are now?

Thank you!

Hi, Jay,

I just read the comments by Bill, which I agree with... except that I think videos are always helpful in two ways:

1. Showing how an app works
2. Demonstrating use cases that can help people visual how they could use the app

So I would encourage you to do more videos.

For beginners (at least this was the case with me), I had trouble understanding the differences between documents, panes and boards. Once that became clear to me, I picked up Legend pretty quick. I haven't yet sussed out how to make use of the email client in Legend. For me, at least, seeing a video about how to set that up and how to use it would be very helpful.

The other thing that can start confusing me is when I have a board set up with multiple panes. But during the course of the day, I navigate around in one of the panes... and then when I come back to that board a day or more later, it is in the state I left it and not the one I originally set up. (Does that make sense?) If there were some way to set a particular configuration as the default configuration and then have a button or something that would restore it, I think that might help.

I agree with Bill that some sort of overview would be helpful, though I have a hard time visualizing how that would work.

Thanks for checking in.

Steve





Jay Meistrich wrote:

Hi, Legend developer here. That's a great article Stephen!

I appreciate all the comments here, and I understand the difficulty
getting started. We've never done a great job of introducing new users.
But we have a new Help page (https://legendapp.com/help/ and we've
started making introductory videos
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpHN8CYLLvs

I would love to know what you've found confusing. We can work on making
those things more intuitive or try to explain them better. Do you think
more videos or more articles would help? Or are there some concepts that
are just too hard to understand as they are now?

Thank you!

Hey Bill,

Legend has a feature called an "Overview" - if you click on the hamburger icon in the top left of a Pane it will show an overview of all of the documents (and their children) to show where you are, and you can click around in it to zoom. Is that what you're looking for? Or can you point to an example of an overview done really well that I could check out?


Stephen,

There is actually a feature for setting default configurations :). Right click on a Board and "Save view as default" then later you can "Restore default view". Is that what you're looking for? I can definitely see how that right click menu is not very discoverable though - we'll have a think about adding a button to open that menu.

Hi, Jay,

It doubles my appreciation for any app when I suggest useful features and find they already exist. Yes, that default view feature is what I was asking about.

However, I don't even see a hamburger icon in the pane. (Just to be clear, I know that a hamburger icon is three horizontal lines.) At the top left of a pane I see 1. Show documents button; 2. Pane name; 3. Edit pane name icon. That's it. How am I missing it?

Thank you!

Steve

Jay Meistrich wrote:

Hey Bill,

Legend has a feature called an "Overview" - if you click on the
hamburger icon in the top left of a Pane it will show an overview of all
of the documents (and their children) to show where you are, and you can
click around in it to zoom. Is that what you're looking for? Or can you
point to an example of an overview done really well that I could check
out?


Stephen,

There is actually a feature for setting default configurations :). Right
click on a Board and "Save view as default" then later you can "Restore
default view". Is that what you're looking for? I can definitely see how
that right click menu is not very discoverable though - we'll have a
think about adding a button to open that menu.

Oh sorry, I meant the Show Documents button. It was a hamburger icon for so many years that I forgot we changed it ߘ‚. Clicking that opens what we call the "Overview." We may want to change the tooltip to "Show Overview"?

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Hi, Jay,

It doubles my appreciation for any app when I suggest useful features
and find they already exist. Yes, that default view feature is what I
was asking about.

However, I don't even see a hamburger icon in the pane. (Just to be
clear, I know that a hamburger icon is three horizontal lines.) At the
top left of a pane I see 1. Show documents button; 2. Pane name; 3. Edit
pane name icon. That's it. How am I missing it?

Thank you!

Steve

Jay Meistrich wrote:
Hey Bill,
>
>Legend has a feature called an "Overview" - if you click on the
>hamburger icon in the top left of a Pane it will show an overview of
all
>of the documents (and their children) to show where you are, and you
can
>click around in it to zoom. Is that what you're looking for? Or can you
>point to an example of an overview done really well that I could check
>out?
>
>
>Stephen,
>
>There is actually a feature for setting default configurations :).
Right
>click on a Board and "Save view as default" then later you can "Restore
>default view". Is that what you're looking for? I can definitely see
how
>that right click menu is not very discoverable though - we'll have a
>think about adding a button to open that menu.

Thank you for the clarification. I've looked at the Document overview many times, but I haven't thought to unfold the headings to navigate through my outlines. I will be interested in hearing what Bill thinks of this as a solution for his concern.

Steve

Jay Meistrich wrote:

Oh sorry, I meant the Show Documents button. It was a hamburger icon for
so many years that I forgot we changed it ߘ‚. Clicking that
opens what we call the "Overview." We may want to change the tooltip to
"Show Overview"?

Is there a way to export a document from Legend?

Yes. In the Options menu (bottom of sidebar or right side of top bar) there's an "Export Data" option, where you can export to our backup format, HTML, OPML, plain text, or Markdown.

tightbeam wrote:

Is there a way to export a document from Legend?