PKM Weekly – 2024-06-01

Hi Everyone,

Pinch and a punch for the first of the month – Happy June everyone.

This week there has been some big news with Tana coming out of Alpha and moving to a paid Beta. Lots of other news too, so let’s get to it.

The developments from this week come from:

CAPACITIES

  • Capacities posted about “Why we focus on individuals” – We often receive questions about why we don’t offer Capacities for teams.
    • Almost all knowledge work today involves some sort of exchange between people. We collaborate, share, iterate, and discuss ideas – but a lot happens before that.We collect ideas, capture learnings, prepare drafts, and externalize thoughts. These are all very personal processes. We don’t want to share them, nor would we save them in a team wiki. These processes are fun and exciting, sometimes messy. They include a lot of tinkering and creative thinking.
    • Read full post here.

  • The Capacities AI Assistant now has the option for GPT-4o!

  • Tiago Forte’s PARA system is one of the most well known concepts in the knowledge management space, and this video shows how you can set up a PARA system in Capacities.

TANA

  • Tana announced the release of Tana Core, for those that missed it a) where have you been, b) a copy is below:

  • Looking at the online chatter, it seems that there are a couple of camps:
    • The Slack was generally very positive with lots of comments of “just take my money” – understandable as this include a lot of people vested in the app and follow the community and chatter.
    • Reddit – a bit less positive.

  • For those wondering what happens if you downgrade. You lose the pioneer pricing (should you wish to sign up at a later stage) and are limited with what you can do. Fair based on the pricing points, but just so you are aware.

  • My thoughts on Tana Core – it feels a little rushed (as if the backers had set a deadline regardless of what the devs actually achieved). Why:
    • No mobile app on day of release (yes it is “coming soon”, but if it is so soon, why not wait and release both). I suspect it is to drive up another round of fanfare once the app is released, but still.
    • No offline mode, none, zilch, nada. I leave my network (coupled with the no mobile app) and I am Tana-less.
    • No invite system / still behind closed doors. Yes, it is to offer Pioneer pricing, but why not give the opportunity to others to join Tana on release day when the talk of the town was only on Tana – feel like it is a bit of a missed opportunity.
    • AI – it feels like this is being forced down our throats and my preference would have been to have an a la Notion set-up and make it an “add-on” so the user can choose if I want it or not.
    • AI meeting agents – yes this is good and innovative, but I think, like many others, the only meetings I have are work related where having a bot appear as an attendee is a big red flag rendering this feature pointless to me.
    • Import / Export is difficult, to say the least.
    • Of course, there are positive – the free plan is reasonable in what they allow. They allow a 14 day free trial and some of the features do look impressive.

  • Maybe my above opinions will change once content on the new Tana Core becomes more mainstream. With that in mind, although there a lot of courses already available / planned, the couple which caught my eye are:

  • Fis Fraga shows his main retrieval method in Tana,

OBSIDIAN

  • For those wondering when the Database functionality / views will be coming to Obsidian, I am afraid you will have to wait a little longer to find out:
  • Regional Pricing in Obsidian? “Probably not anytime soon because it would add so much complexity for our small team (we’re 7)” Source

  • Want to try out Obsidian but don’t know how? Then check out this video on “Why Obsidian BEGINNERS really want this amazing FREE Starter Vault”. Although my preference is to start myself and make mistakes along the way so as to not feel overwhelmed by trying to adopt to someone else’s system, there are a lot of useful comments / points in this video which you can take and implement in your system.

LOGSEQ

  • Logseq is gearing up for release 0.10.10, main tweaks at the moment seem to be:
    • fix(mobile): incorrect theme color for the android status bar
    • fix(sync): cannot delete some nested files
    • enhance(ux): better highlights page name for the search result items
    • Add MSI build for windows
    • Update Electron 28
    • Update Tldraw regex to detect both x.com AND twitter.com urls to preserve embed capabilities

  • Interest in learning how a user effectively uses Logseq as a software engineer? Check out this video
  • Bit of a cheat, as not necessarily about Logseq news, but I like Bas’ content so wanted to share his recent video on First impression of the Boox Note Air 3C and will it run Logseq?

HEPTABASE

  • V1 of the Heptabase web clipper is upon us! It allows you to save and tag web content in Heptabase, and further break it down into atomic knowledge cards. Check it out in action here.

  • The latest version of the mobile app is out. You can now create and edit cards and text elements on whiteboards. There are more upgrades and bug fixes for our mobile/tablet app coming soon in the upcoming weeks. For a video on the feature, see:
  • Would you rather Heptabase:
    1. Supports opening Heptabase in multiple windows, but doesn’t allow drag & drop of objects across windows. This enables you to use Heptabase on multiple screens simultaneously.
    2. Supports only one Heptabase window, but you can split the window into two parts. This allows you to open two whiteboards (or other tabs/apps) simultaneously in separate split areas within that window.
    • Add your vote here.

That’s all for this week. Thank you very much in advance for reading and I look forward to bringing you more PKM news next week.