DZdzsekijo·May 13, 2020
Nice stuff.
Some nit regarding the user experience:
- Sorry, but I just can't wrap my mind around your choice too emulate a handheld device's screen layout on desktop. It actually makes me feel like running some mobile app in a cranky emulator! I also checked org-web on desktop, I think their layout is much more handy (sorry for the bad pun).
- It's really annoying to not properly prepare users to get started for using the tool for production. OK, there is the landing page. Quickly that gets me to the sample doc, which is nice, extensive and useful. So far so good, appetite is whetted. Now let's get to do some real stuff, let's start a document! ... ehm, no way to do that. Maybe login is necessary for that? At which point I start to scratch my head -- given that the tool is touted as client-only software, why do I need to log in anywhere
Read the rest
to create something? Anyway, getting beyond that... OK logged in. It drops me to a file browser... but still no "Create" or "New doc" button. Slowly it dawns on me that the org files need to pre-exist on backing storage to be able start work on them. The level of frustration is pretty high at that moment, the only reason to not run away right away because it addresses something I am interested in. So while I think it would be part of a full feature set to allow to create docs, its lack wouldn't be a big issue if users were properly guided through the setup the workflow, which involves uploading their initial org files to the storage.
By the way, why do users have to configure a storage backend and can't just import/export org files? I see stuff like https://github.com/qbit/gavin is being worked on, but it feels a bit upsidedowny to me... if there is demand to use this tool without cloud hosting, wouldn't it be simpler just to add import/export facilities than the ancillaries of pretending to have a host? (Does it maybe have something to do with Apple's recent decision to kill local storage?...)
Other things that would be nice to have:
- When focusing in a subtree, would be nice to have a place somewhere that indicates the absolute path (sidenote, I also wonder if such a setting is available in Emacs...)
- I read https://200ok.ch/posts/2020-02-09_creating_org_mode_sparse_t... and I appreciate the work on the internal search engine, but the UI provided does not match sparse tree. It's just an ephemeral pop-up, not a filtered live view of the content.