I am glad that the idea of backlinks, which I proposed in 2017, is finally being implemented. Take a look at my other offers , suddenly they will become mainstream in 3 years:)
This, in my opinion, is what distinguishes Roam from DL
Tables. Roam has a beautiful and simple solution for how to do this .
If you can insert any branch as a child element and change it in one place, it will result in changes in another place.
So after reading Nat Eliasonās article on how he uses Roam I was convinced to give it a try, and I have to say I really like it. This especially jumped out at me:
Notion, Workflowy, and a few others allow infinite nesting. A note lives in a note lives in a note and so on.
In Roam, notes live nowhere and everywhere. ā¦ Each note has relationships to other notes, but no note lives inside another note or notebook. All of the information is fluid in the sense that you flow between notes based on their relationships, not because theyāre all in the same folder or hierarchy.
It really does seem to work better than using a traditional outliner for this very reason. There are two things that Roam does to make this work which really jumped out at me:
The ability to create pages which donāt exist as you type. I you use #tags[[brackets]] or definitions:: those words become a page. You donāt need to first create a page and then link to it. This makes it very easy to create pages for everything. Autocomplete then makes it easy to link to those pages again.
Context. It isnāt just the existence of backlinks, but the fact that each backlink shows the reason why it is linking to that information. This is what I found most powerful. So, for instance, if I have a personās name [[Alice]] nested in a hierarchy under [[Acme_Co.]] > #human_resources then when I look at Aliceās personal page the backlink will tell me where she works and in what department. This is incredibly powerful!
There are many other nice things, but these are the two keys that really made Roam seem very different to me from Dynalist. Thinking purely in terms of the UX (because I have no idea what is easy or not from a developer point of view), I think the first one shouldnāt be a big issue. The second one might be more difficult to integrate into Dynalistās existing layout. One idea would be to have each backlink appear as an automatic note field under the item with the link.
To be honest, if Roam had a decent iOS app and a little more polish, I would be using it for many of the tasks I now use Dynalist for. Iām glad to see that the developers are watching this thread and look forward to see what creative solutions they come up with to implement some of these features.
While creating tags in Dynalist creates a search result page, it is not an actual page that you can edit. This feature of Roam is also very nice because you can make notes specifically on the tag. To do this in Dynalist you would basically have to create a new document and tag it in the notes field on the top level. Something I was already doing before I discovered Roam, which makes this much easier.
A lot of the difference between Roam and Dynalist comes down to what you do with information after it gets entered into your Inbox. Dynalist wants you to file it away using the āmoveā command, while Roam lets you leave it in place and file it by simply adding tags or turning the text itself into tags. (Roam also shows you āunlinkedā items that are related by search terms even if they arenāt tagged as such.) This is why Roam can give you a new inbox every day. I donāt think the same thing would work in Dynalist, because you really need to file things away into the appropriate location in order to find them again. I have to say, the Roam approach is really appealing! (Which is why Iāve already written three posts about it).
One thing I just want to add to this is that over the past few years of trying every digital system going Iāve really come to see that there are psychological considerations to what makes a good system over and above how well a system might work for e.g. some perfectly rational, cognitively unlimited android.
As a small example I have found that one advantage of concrete āplacesā where I make a conscious decision to āsendā things over simple tagging is the imprint in my memory. With the former, am I much more more likely to (1) know what lists I have and (2) remember where I sent a given item - itās a more active process which yes adds a bit of friction, but that friction in itself can be a positive as it creates a stronger memory trace in my mind. The GTD guy has similar concerns about this - in one of his books he talks of the problem of āinvisibleā information in digital systems - you can throw everything in there, but will you ever see it again (even if its tagged, will you remember to search for that tag)? If you do have great systems for retrieval, and good behaviour around this, wonderful, but Iāve personally found these behaviours harder to set up and maintain with āall in one box / tagā systems vs concrete separate lists than I can āvisualiseā as separate spaces and furthermore are shoved in front of my face as I move around my lists. I can really see a poorly managed Roam system quickly falling into this problem.
Not saying whatās best, just my experience (I have a bad memory generally so might be a stronger effect for me)
You say DynaList wants you to move stuff and Roam wants you to tag. I donāt see why DynaList couldnāt be used without moving.
My DynaList I have files wherein every day I create a new entry thatās just the date. (What Roam does for you, but itās literally 10 seconds a day, and I have full control.). Under that I put my notes for the day. I could tag if I choose, and use those tags to view a themed history of my work.
Now if we had cloning I could make topical documents and reference these inline in the dailies but thatās generally not necessary. If I wanted to write an essay I could make a new note elsewhere and my daily entry would be scratch pad to help draft. I think I might even prefer this as it keeps context clear whereas a daily entry containing a cloned item would become anachronistic.
The main difference is how tags work in Roam. As I said above they are actually pages, not just search results - though they are that too. But even when they are search results you can still edit them in place, without going back to the original context to edit. (You can edit in place when search local tags in Dynalist, but not when searching across documents.) This is completely different workflow which obviates the need to move, or even clone, an item. (Though I have found cloning to be useful as well, but for different reasons.)
The Sidebar is a killer feature thatās largely overlooked in favor of fancier features like bi-directional links.
While the ability to quickly cross-referencing notes in Roam is impressive, I am surprised by how useful it is to simply be able to work with multiple notes at the same time! You can open 1, 2, ā¦multiple notes in the sidebar and work with all of them real time cut/pasting/re-arranging ā and most importantly ā discovering common concepts between them!
This āmultiple notes open at onceā seems like such a low tech feature I am surprised that it might just be the most powerful feature I use on Roam!
Thatās a good point David. Dynalist works well in two browsers side-by-side, but the ability to e.g. drag and drop from one window to another would be great.
Iāve been thinking a bit about what Roam lacks that Dynalist does well:
API
Date range searches
Mobile app
Desktop app
Notes
Easy navigation and search between separate documents
Send to inbox from browser, mobile extension, API, or email
Custom CSS
And there are a bunch of features Dynalist is working on which Iām not sure Roam will support? For instance some kind of end-to-end encryption, mobile URL scheme/deep-linking, true-offline, etc.
Did I miss anything?
They are very different apps so some features (such as separate documents) might not really be āmissingā from Roam, but I am personally still not sure I want all my data in one single databaseā¦
UPDATE 2020-06-30: Since I wrote this Roam has added āDate range searchesā and āCustom CSS.ā
