[OT] Video comparing other note taking tools

[Mat]

I didn't listen carefully but it is still an interesting video comparing the features of some prominent note taking software. It may be interesting to see what specific features they bring up so if TW wants to compete then....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opSENgc45Sw

<:-)

[bimlas]

I think from your video and this Stroll presentation, I understood why TiddlyWiki most of the time isn’t mentioned besides Roam Research, Obisian, and Notion, even if it surpasses them in several ways: it is not aimed at the average user, but at those who are willing to take the time to make their own wiki unique (almost even at the level of a hacker).

PMario had a good idea on how to make TiddlyWiki easier to use for complete beginners, but it wasn't merged mostly because "Generally, we're missing the opportunity to teach new users how to accomplish things, and instead we're giving them a small and inscrutable choice of customizations with a non-standard UI" (reference)

In fact, I think usability should be made simpler instead of teaching everyone how to make TiddlyWiki omnipotent. If we want to make TiddlyWiki more "famous", we simply need to make it easier to use (as I said in my opinion about the pull request), for example, with solutions like Saq is introducing nowdays, or David's Stroll or any other plugin of this group (I didn't want to personalize, I just gave examples, I respect everyone's work).

Hack availability should be just an option, not an expectation. for example, to add a ToC, you also need to read a tutorial, although logically it would be enough to just tick an option.

I think TiddlyWiki has only two drawbacks: one is cumbersome (though with an infinite number of options) personalization, and the other is saving. Customization would be greatly facilitated if there were a "community plugin repository" next to the official one in the control panel, but this was already mentioned in another thread, I just don't remember the end result.

[arun babu]

Hi all, I am a new TW user. I am a doctor(radiologist). I was using onenote as my note taking app since 2012-13. My notes were predominantly text files, images and onenote was enough for my requirements during those times. 

But recently I started following radiology related data in twitter, telegram groups, YouTube and other sources. So there was a need to embed tweets, YouTube videos, webpages and short clips of CT and MRI scans in my notes. This made me look out for options other than onenote and I started searching in YouTube. Then I came across Notion from Ali Abdaal's YouTube videos. Notion had many of my requirements, but their free plan limited single file uploads to 5MB. That was a bummer since many of my short videos were bigger than 5MB. The search again continued. 

Then accidently I came to know about Roam Research, again from a YouTube video by Thomas Frank. But Roam Research had stopped taking beta user by the time I checked their site. By the time they opened their walls, it had become a paid app and was out of my option. 

So I started searching for apps similar to Roam in YouTube and came to know about TW, obsidian and remnote from a YouTube video on Roam Research alternatives by Shu Omi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJdnZpUXluQ&t=122s). This was about 3 or 4 months back. It was a short 4 minute video and only a brief overview of each app was given. I tried out each of those apps one by one since there was so much time available due to the corona situation. 

I started using remnote first and was happy with it. But being in its early stages, remnote didn't had all the features I needed so that I could make it my only note taking app. 

So I tried out Tiddlywiki in between while still using Remnote as my main app. Although I liked TW, I was not able to make it my go to app initially. I don't remember exact the reasons for that. May be I was biased to remote or I was not fully aware of the abundance of options with TW. And saving TW every time was cumbersome for me. But slowly I started experimenting with TW - installing different plug ins to find something which suits my taste. TW toolmap in dynalist was helpful and  I also started reading google group discusions. 

It has been almost 2 months since I started my experiments with TW. Still I haven't found the best combination. Some of the plug ins in TW which like to use are - Muuritouch, Krystal horizontal story river, TWCrosslinks and Dailynotes from Drift, tidgraph, Project manager, editor auto list, two story river, refnotes, bibtex importer, Twitter plug ins, tobibeer preview, Cardo, themes by JD and adithya and much more. But some have compatibility issues with each other.

The problem I find with tiddlywiki are:

*Although its one of the most powerful note taking app if the plug ins are used properly, many of the plug ins are not compatible with each other - how can this be resolved?

*Some of best plug ins are not updated to work smoothly with newer TW versions and newer plug ins.

*Its difficult to understand the full capability or usage of 'some' of the plug ins unless the user is experienced in technical details.

Even after two months of continuous use, I still haven't read even 10% of the documentation in the tiddlywiki website. Even though there are YouTube videos on TW, most of them are hangout videos, which are too long. It difficult to clear doubts from such videos.

Despite so many hiccups, I still plan to use tiddlywiki as my main note taking app since it meet almost all of my requirements. Hoping for a better tomorrow.

[TW Tones]

Mat,

Thanks for sharing this. I watched it and I am confident tiddlywiki is ultimately superior, being able to address all, if not most features across the range. The key difference is Tiddlywiki provides the toolset not the finished product, and possibly most people want the finished product to meet the 80/20 rule. What would you prefer one plastic toy or a lego set?, a model crane or a mecano set?

The Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, states that for many phenomena 80% of the result comes from 20% of the effort

It is quite possible that editions of tiddlywiki can be developed to respond in the same way as the named apps. 

However ,where I believe the investment in learning how to build things pay off many times over, is the user can dictate and customise the result, they can innovate, reiterate and evolve their solution. Tiddlywiki is an algorithm storage and activation machine among many other things.

However it costs time and money to polish a solution and people are usually happy to get on with the next innovation, rather dedicate time to polishing the result, that is why tiddlywiki often has a makers and hackers look. However polishing can reduce flexibility and actually involves enforced simplification, so perhaps polished is not as flash as it could be.

Can we join the world of polished solutions with tiddlywiki?, perhaps!, should we ?, I think that is debatable! Not withstanding that, we can make a plugin or package for that polished look.

Personally to me, there is more value entering an open source eco-system, based on common open technologies, than taking a bet on a third party. If Tiddlywiki ceased to be a going concern from tomorrow, I still have a life time of opportunity already on my computer. Through open source, we benefit from the pooling of effort, the wisdom of crowds, diversity of community and generosity of strangers, as well as a culture capable of growth and reinvention.

As someone who monitors innovation in Information Technology, I observe most innovations out there, are amenable to implementation on tiddlywiki, in open source, anything can be done, if you gather a cohort of people who see sufficient value in enabling such innovations. The more the need, the more the likelihood.

Regards

TW Tones

[TW Tones]

Bimlas,

If you read my reply to Mat, you may see how my view perhaps diverges from yours.

However much of what you say points to areas where some effort will be of value. 

Only now am I coming to question the value of TiddlyWiki becoming famous.

• Aiming at the average user is possibly a path to the mediocre.
• Fame should be the result of good works, not fame in its own right

Where I disagree, ie "hackability should be a principal", and is an expectation of mine, not because I am a hacker (Which I am) but because hackability is flexibility. Tiddlywiki never would have its functionality today, if this were not the case from the very beginning, it would not be capable of implementing most other solutions if it were not for this "in its bones". 

But your point still has much value, as tiddlywiki can transform into anything, then it should also be able to transform into a polished focused solution as well.

Finally I think maturity will bring forward many of the things you seek, but one limitation is that its main distribution is empty.html which should always be available as the minimum install, buit it should not be the first edition someone new looks at. Either they obtain a custom edition or what I call a Standard edition, a non-minimalist edition with tools for the new comer already there, like the TOC, access to Page Controls More and a few other items. I also believe higher prominence to playgrounds like my own at https://anthonymuscio.github.io/playground.html and https://anthonymuscio.github.io/playground.html which allow experimentation without saving, once someone learns its value, they will push past the complexity of choice of saving.

Yours sincerely

Tones

[talha131]

Tones, you have hit the nail on the head.

TW is insanely powerful, but not everyone has the time and inclination to tinker around. This observation is accurate for all the tools, Linux vs. Windows for the desktop computers, Vim vs. Visual Studio Code, etc.

I like to customize my tools, and I have done so with many tools I use, like my text editor. But I had to take a break from TiddlyWiki customization because I was busy in other projects. I tried Obsidian but came back to TW, only because I had already collected hundreds of TW notes.

Different TW editions will fix this problem considerably. Like we have several Linux distributions to choose from, we should have at least a few well maintained TW editions.

Another reason is the lack of a centralized plugin and theme library. If customizing TW mostly involved installing and updating a few plugins from inside the TW, it would mitigate the difficulty for newbies.

Currently, you have to scour the forum, Dynalist Toolmaps, and some other TW to find the appropriate solution.

It's fun to hack, but it requires resources, most important of which is time. Not all users are time-rich.