Honestly, we haven’t even considered allowing a test drive without an account but the community here has given us some really great opinions in why that is so important. We’re going to discuss this and see if there’s some way we can do that. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!
Also, please don't forget that HN can be a very strict bubble that is not representative. Most apps don't give you the option to test-drive that without an account. So I wouldn't implement this feature actually if it were me.
Beware this adds complexity for you, and all added complexity slows forward momentum. If you’re getting ENOUGH traction/feedback without this change I’d consider punting it for later when you’re closer to scaling mode not learning mode.
It doesn’t have to be much, even if it’s just a note embed in a demo page that you can’t edit, or a few components one could look at up close. When I go to your website I have to judge the entire product on 3 small images. Even a video would go a long way.
I also think you should show a tutorial before the sign-up page on your app. You may get organic traffic through the app store and potential customers have no idea if the app is for them before getting hit with a sign-up page.
This is something we are constantly exploring. They are in fact the same under the hood but it’s been a tricky UX challenge to provide a seamless and intuitive way to toggle between the two. Always thinking about this though. Have any thoughts on it?
A Document is not the same as a Surface, it is a special case of Surface with formatting and positioning restrictions. So while you could "toggle" from Document to Surface, it can't be done the other way around without losing spatial placement information.
The landing page says "Write, sketch, and embed on an infinite canvas." Why not stick to the promise? I'll reiterate my suggestion: make all pages infinite and remove Document as a "root" page style. Its functionality can be exposed as a "rich text" block.
Would love some details on your device type and what about the app in unbearable. There’s plenty of room for improvement and we’d love to fix up whatever is affecting your experience.
It’s really about not having the controls to do the things I normally do on a phone. A few examples:
- checking checkboxes is a nightmare. 7/10 times I attempt to check a checkbox on mobile it thinks I want to edit the block (assuming it’s because the touch points are too small - a native app would give better controls over explicitly editing certain parts of a block).
- reference brackets always produce something like this [[[something]] with the extra “[“. No idea why this happens, but it’s really annoying to type out [[, start typing my text, then get [[[ and have to manually move my cursor (which is already cumbersome on iOS) to delete the extra bracket.
- copying and pasting is easily my most used feature on mobile for almost any app. Copying in Roam on mobile is very unreliable. Sometimes text is selected, other times an entire block (which doesn’t actually produce a copy to my clipboard when I copy) is selected. A mobile app (or I guess a pwa could do the same) would allow for something like a copy button.
- lots of other small little quirks that I’m less concerned about: having to double click to create a new block, mobile menu bar is partially cutoff, etc.
Hey there,
We don’t have block referencing in the same way Roam does it… yet. We allow you to copy a block link and paste it which will create a link to the block with text preview. We hope to add improved support for this soon.
A 75k page import is quite the load. We have bulk markdown import but that may test its limits. How would you ideally perform that and where are you importing from?
Could be markdown, json, or edn right now. Ideally an api integration to other tools (Roam, Notion, etc.) to preserve as much structure as possible, but I understand that’s a long shot.
Thanks for sharing. We do feel a need to provide Android support even for personal use cases, so we're working on that. Completely agree that it's critical for teams, too.
Transitioning infinite space on mobile works to varying degrees depending on the content. Treating the documents like editable maps works relatively well especially for the consumption experience. We're iterating on some ideas on how to improve editing there as well. We've seen some tools completely ignore coordinates and place everything in one scrolling section, but we feel that is very detrimental to the mental model you construct of your documents and aspire to maintain space while still providing a smooth UX.
If anyone would like to create a GeoCities-inspired site of their own using a no-code builder, we got you: https://clovercities.com.