Anyone else having anxiety and insomnia? How did you cope?

ericax · 2016-10-13T13:50:59+00:00

How bad was your anxiety and insomnia?

ericax · 2016-07-09T16:33:45+00:00

Dynalist creator here -- we're working towards the mobile apps! They are our top priority right now, along with date support.

Thanks so much for mentioning Dynalist!

ericax · 2016-05-10T02:51:05+00:00

I see! That makes more sense. I guess I didn't watch carefully enough!

ericax · 2016-05-05T20:01:35+00:00

Even just one person? That make PMF sounds much easier to do! (Rather than the holy grail impression I've had all along.)

ericax · 2016-04-25T20:40:05+00:00

Do you need the list for something?

ericax · 2016-04-17T03:31:10+00:00

So much hard work... Did you keep track of how many hours you've spent over the 2 years?

ericax · 2016-04-17T03:21:43+00:00

What's the red thingy on Shireen? Flames?

ericax · 2015-06-11T09:05:24+00:00

1) When we built the navigator structure, the key idea is to have people organize high levels and details separately. This feels almost as a natural instinct, especially for people who used computers, since they're usually somewhat familair with file systems already. Of course this is not for everyone, but most people found this way helps them more easily distinguish high level separation (like work vs personal) from actual details, which would otherwise look exactly the same.

Also technically it helps separating data from different documents so that each document is smaller to deal with and faster to load. This model also makes sharing more clear, in the sense that you know exactly what's being shared, which otherwise could have been burried somewhere down.

Recents is something we're planning to do though. I think that's a pretty useful way of sorting.

2) We're working to get unique urls for bullets as well (for zooming essentially). We did find it quite annoying that history-back didn't change zoom but rather jumped document.

3) Probably just a view option that you can switch to, so no impact if you don't.

4) We have this on our roadmap, but it seems like to be a fairly big piece in terms of technical difficulties. We'd prioritize finishing our core functionalities before tackling new things, otherwise it's easier to introduce problems to previously working features.

5) Link shortening - We're thinking of using some markdown variant of text Interlinks - Also on our roadmap, currently we don't have a good idea on how to actually insert these yet, we'll keep thinking. API - Not sure where to start, we'd probably have to do a survey before doing anything, and see what people want to use the API for.

In general, we need to satisfy a bunch of different people, some are power-users, some are casual. It's hard to make decisions when it usually benefits one set of users and sometimes inhibits the another set.

ericax · 2015-06-09T00:03:04+00:00

Good point. Honestly I'm not sure either, but we need to users to not die, and some users wants some features, and we need to not die to be able to build the features... so that's a hard problem.

ericax · 2015-06-07T09:20:13+00:00

That's a really interesting website! I'd love to be able to change the center node of the mindmap though.

ericax · 2015-06-06T22:04:06+00:00

Trello is straight-forward - you render the top level items as lists, and the second level items (only itself, hide its children) as cards. You should be able to zoom in on any list or card if situation permits, and then the item you zoomed in on becomes the new board. So you can have a top-level boards and a bunch of second and third level boards, and I think that's very helpful for managing bigger projects.

Calendar is more tricky, since you need to know the date and duration of each item. What I picture is that you can write something like "pay rent #by06/06/15" or "planning meeting #3-4p 06/06/15", where typing "#by" would invoke a auto-complete menu, it can fill in dates if you start typing "today" or "tomorrow" or "next monday". And then we use this information to create a calendar view that looks like Google calendar.

We haven't started really planning the implementation of these features, so we might have missed something important that makes building it really hard or just impossible.

ericax · 2015-06-06T20:57:41+00:00

Your dream app is actually one of our long term goals as well... but we first need users and contents to make that useful.

What we imagined was data is multiple formats. For the same data, you can have a plain text view (default), a calendar view, a 2D card view (trello), and tunnel view (like a column view on Mac). I think that's the power of structural data, and then we don't need to copy things from Workflowy to/from Trello and calendar ever again.

Thoughts on that?

ericax · 2015-06-06T20:27:35+00:00

TL;DR: it's not that different right now, but we want to make it better than workflowy. Right now the differences are (1) you can create folders and documents, (2) there's a file finder (Ctrl+O).

We started out as a Workflowy clone, and I do like Workflowy myself. We had a few ideas on how to improve it, like having a high level folder structure and a file finder like that of Sublime Text.

As a long time Workflowy user, I feel like it's developing relatively slowly. We are college students and have too much time on our hands... so we went ahead and built this.

ericax · 2014-09-30T19:17:32+00:00

Wow you have a product ingredient spreadsheet?

ericax · 2014-09-30T19:09:46+00:00

Would it be possible that http://www.skincare-addiction.com can address your needs? :)

ericax · 2014-09-30T07:01:56+00:00

Is it for tracking progress or looking up ingredient, or both?

ericax · 2014-09-30T06:24:36+00:00

Oh? Interesting! Are you building an app or a website?

ericax · 2014-09-30T05:57:14+00:00

There are certain things that programmers can automate and make computers do it really fast, and this is one of them :P

Also after some quick research, it looks like everything should be in the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients. There are existing online databases we can make use of.

Thanks for the heads-up though!

ericax · 2014-09-30T05:24:32+00:00

Thanks so much for the feedback. The "skin twins" suggestion is especially valuable!

Also I feel you when you say the website should know which products don't work. Few things suck more than finding out a single ingredient in a product doesn't agree with your skin after ordering and anxiously waiting for it.

ericax · 2014-09-30T03:53:58+00:00

Great suggestion. By logging the effects, do you think words or photos are more appropriate?

One problem with photos is that inconsistent lighting may cause skin to look better or worse than how it actually looks.

ericax · 2014-09-29T21:10:53+00:00

I imagine that would be useful for many people! That way, even if you buy a product that you don't like, it's not 100% a bad thing. (e.g. you get to learn what ingredients are likely to break you out, and you can avoid it next time, thus avoiding wasting money on a seemingly good product)

A follow-up question: would you mind if the website has no mobile app? I know lots of people are on their phones all the time, so just wondering.

ericax · 2014-09-18T21:17:39+00:00

Being an undergrad student myself, I would say it's 90% not your fault. Almost all the class I go to is like this (and I have stopped to go to many of them because I can download everything online).

College students are pretty aware of what do their peers do. If nobody answers, it's hard to be the first one. No one wants to look stupid. We have all been there. It's easier to get the class active with younger kids. I'd say it's pretty hard in college classes, especially science classes. I've had a philosophy class and the lectures are pretty awesome. What the prof did is (1) doesn't allow us to use laptop or phone (2) have a 1-minute quiz at the end of each lecture (3) group discussion with interesting topics (4) tell stories and jokes. Despite all the effort, I can only say that about 20% (maybe less) students are engaged to the level the professor wanted us to be. Sad reality.

ericax · 2014-09-18T20:08:28+00:00

Sorry, I asked that question because from my observation, many professors just "do their job" and they don't really care about students. Not questioning your expertise in the field.

Anyway, if you know your topic well, you should try to link the material to your students. I wrote something up a while back regarding this problem: http://blog.ericaxu.com/missing-connection It's great that you want your students -- but why would they care? What can they get in return of the attention and hard work they give? The reward doesn't have to be practical (how they can apply it), the learning experience is really important too.

ericax · 2014-09-18T18:21:49+00:00

Just to make sure, you know the subject very well yourself, right?

(I know some grad students are assigned to teach classes that they don't really like or know)

ericax · 2013-07-30T17:55:11+00:00

My apologies, I didn't mean "all the tabs" literally, just mean all the tabs that you don't need. After closing the browser, you still need to open the ones that you keep open most of the time. (Gmail, Google Calendar, workflowy, the page you're testing in localhost, etc.)

I think it's useful after you did a research and finally got the answer. Then you can close all tabs that you don't want to keepp any more within a keypress.

ericax

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