After using dynalist for a week

💬General
#1

I have been using dynalist intensely for a bit more than a week now. It’s a great tool with a very clean interface. It loads fast, the keyboard shortcuts are a real plus to help productivity.

I’m using it for GTD (all of my todos), project management and knowledge management.

Still I have a few remarks.

Item sharing : that’s the big missing feature for now. I have one doucument per project and I would like to be able to share just one item (the same way I can share one document). One use case would be a tickets list for my customers. They wouldn’t need to create any account, I give them the link to the item and they can put their tickets without seeing the rest. This feature has been heavily requested and is not even planned yet.

Items/documents permanent link : when we move an item around its URL changes. That’s very annoying because all the backlinks are dead after moving it. A quickfix would be to automate search and replace the url in all the documents. The ability to easily move things around is one of the feature I use the most. But it’s a pain in the ass if all my links get broken every time.

Document structure : the document structure as it is easy to understand but not convenient if we have a big amount of docs. It would be great having a forth pane that woud work like evernote. A list of all my notes with a snapshot of the first lines and a dropdown menu to filter by folder.

Capture to inbox : this one is minor but it wpuld be great having a popup over the current window instead of bringing all the dynalist software when I press cmd shift I. This popup would disappear as soon as I press enter so I can continue with what I was doing.

I’m reaching the end of my free trial in a week and I’m still hesitating. I’m also afraid to invest a lot and to see that the service is discontinued. The devs are very active but they are only two people from what I understand.

What are your thoughts ?

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#2

Dynalist is constantly improving and the developers have been very responsive. It’s an incredibly versatile framework for outlining and manipulating information. There have been very few problems with data or reliability.

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#3

Big or small projects get discontinued all the time. That is why exportability is so important. So In my mind you can never go wrong with text outliners like Dynalist, Checkvist or Dynalist.

I agree with Itemsharing but in my experiences most of my clients don’t really use it that much anyway. So I haven’t really missed it much. But it would be nice to have sharing like in workflowy

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#4

Fabien, I got caught by Dynalist because it works very well, it’s stable and devs take care of it to the finest level. This is the most important thing for me, I can live without a non-core feature but I cannot absolutely spend time to workaround an issue. For instance, sync never missed a bit, and consider I work while commuting with disconnected connection.

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#5

Hi Fabien,

I agree with most of your remarks.

Want to assure you that we have no plans to discontinue Dynalist and we’re still actively developing and maintaining it. If you experience any issue you can reach out to us! :slight_smile:

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#6

For me, when I’m choosing software/services, lightweight and portability is top of my list. Any project that puts those first immediately puts me at ease. It’s important that if anything happens to the service, I can pick up and move to a similar service without changing my workflow too drastically. There’s always a chance that a project could cease, regardless of size.

I’m more hesitant to go with the larger services in this space that lock you into a proprietary workflow.

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