Comment by jitl
2 years ago
(I work at Notion)
The Anytype model is really cool - in a way, they’ve rebuilt Lotus Notes with 21st century E2E encrypted protocols and technology. They’ve built a really solid personal knowledge app with many of Notion’s features - and some clear improvements over Notion.
However they also demonstrate the complexity and tradeoffs of the E2E approach. Anytype has been a work-in-progress since at least 2019. Their docs still state:
> Future versions will allow you to share your work and safely collaborate with others
> There's no browser version of the app. Anytype is a stand-alone software, that works on desktop or mobile devices. There are many points of vulnerability in-browser apps that would compromise our commitment to data security and encryption.
Without these features Anytype is in a much smaller market (PKM) with less distribution than Notion/Coda/Dropbox Paper/Quip/Confluence/…
Google Docs have somehow solved E2E encryption with safe sharing and collaboration. They haven't advertised it much, just a mention here and there as an enterprise requirement or something, it's good how they've implemented it on top of an existing web-first collaboration product.
They do have technical challenges implementing add-on services on top of content - For example, the grammar checker or any content assistance is disabled in E2E encrypted docs, which makes sense.
Surprisingly they support spellcheck: I guess they are shipping dictionaries to browsers and use a local lookup. (Google Docs doesn't rely on browser's dictionary because their editor is not based on `contenteditable`)
Operating systems should be providing spellcheck to textboxes everywhere anyway.
Makes no sense every app rolling their own and not using my operating system dictionary with my own corrections.
Extremely frustrating every Electron app just rolls their own rubbish spellcheck, or doesn't have it at all.
I worked on spell checking for a web app. It would have been really, really nice if there was just an API to interact with the browser spell checker. We couldn't use the spell check you get in a text area, because like google docs, we rendered the text ourselves and had a custom context menu. And we had very good reasons for doing those things.
However, I think it would be difficult to create such an API without leaking information about what words are in a users custom dictionary (which could be used for fingerprinting). And allowing an app to add custom words would probably have some security implications.
Maybe if there was an API to open a spell check popup that was native to the browser and the only info you get is what word (if any) they chose to replace. But, besides having a suboptimal UX, that doesn't help you know which words to highlight as misspelled.
I've always thought that textboxes should have some sort of browser-to-os plugin feature, possibly on-demand.
I would love to edit my textboxes using real emacs somehow, even a popup window would be good.
That's an interesting take on things. Would you want your operating system to provide a web browser, pdf viewer, and spreadsheet as well?
To me it makes no sense that software does not interoperate very well. I think most of this is due to the historical evolution of computers and software. A spell checker used to take up an insane amount of memory, a browser is a competitive product, and interfaces for proper interaction have to be standardized worldwide, for which we still lack some kind of governmental body.
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Did they? https://support.google.com/docs/answer/10519035?sjid=6574250...
> Multiple collaborators can work on the same file at different times, but you can’t collaborate in real-time in encrypted files
It is so interesting that you are mentioning Lotus Notes because that is exactly what I was thinking when I was setting up our Confluence pages: it is exactly like Lotus Notes' Knowledge Base template, with some additional funtionality. Crazy how we keep reinventing things.
By the way, and this is just my point of view: we moved from Notion to Confluence because Notion has no free tier for small teams (4 people). We were working on a project for a not-for profit org and their money is always tight.
Since you already give Notion free, have you ever evaluating doing like Atlassian that up to 10 (or 5) people the thing is free?
> Without these features Anytype is in a much smaller market (PKM) with less distribution than Notion/Coda/Dropbox Paper/Quip/Confluence/…
I can tell you that e.g. the whole education market in the EU is waiting for something like AnyType, as soon as they have implemented collaboration, which is very high on their roadmap. As a teacher I just can‘t use Notion or any other US-service based on US cloud services. All claims concerning GDPR are nonsense due to Privacy Shield. I am not allowed to use such services.
Therefore I hope AnyType copies as many good Notion features so that I can leave Notion and its abysmal performance and lack of offline mode for private stuff as well.
Why not use some EU-based product that hosts on EU servers?
That's like trying to find a unicorn on Mars, at least if your definition of unicorn goes beyond a frozen donkey with a mop fastened to its brow...
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So, yeah, unless Notion becomes Free Software and actually secure soon, there's the Notion killer.
It would be interesting what you can say about http://fibery.io ?
I tried Fibery when it came out and clicked around some of the newer demos linked from the homepage a few weeks ago, so I’m not super knowledgeable, although I do read the email newsletter sometimes.
I really like Fibery’s plainspoken marketing, but it’s not for everyone. They’ve toned it down a bit on the homepage to be more “professional” now which is a good sign.
I think Fibery’s UX is too complicated for most people. As a programmer I get all the data modeling stuff, but there’s still a lot of complexity in just the UI that I find surprising. Notion gets a lot of feedback that it’s “overwhelming” and I feel the same in Fibery. My impression is that the up-front cost to figure things out in Fibery is still a challenging barrier for the product.
I’m not sure how good Fibery is for writing or on mobile, or if it has any local cache for offline use.
I’m really happy that everyone at Fibery made it through the Ukraine war okay so far.