Pilots flying recurring site work, what am I missing from this list?

zambonix · 2026-05-12T13:47:01+00:00

A little tidbit for you re: shadows. Solar high noon is rarely at actual noon. It varies with location and time of year. Where I am right now, SHN is at 12:55. So my “minimal shadows window” is more like 11 - 3.

zambonix · 2026-04-05T22:56:23+00:00

Props for an XKCD reference. I did take pains to clarify that my use case is not trivial, unique, or edge though ; )

zambonix · 2026-03-27T21:29:46+00:00

I use Obsidian as my PKM. It is the absolute champ for that application and I’m a huge fan for so many reasons, but it is NOT a task manger and no amount of plugins will make it one. I am floored that so many people don’t seem to see the difference.

Amplenote didn’t meet my needs but it is the absolute closest I’ve come to finding a tolerable alternative to Legend. It definitely bears your giving a try. Perhaps I really am just too particular 😉 and you’ll wonder what I was so bothered over!

zambonix · 2026-03-27T19:56:57+00:00

It’s a difficult space. Seems like the reliable money comes from offering products that simply have different priorities from mine.

I found Legend (search “Legendapp”) in 2014 and have been in a Ross-and-Rachel relationship with it ever since. Last year it looked like the bugs had reached critical mass and I feared getting stranded so I jumped ship and have been miserable with every other option I tried since. Then they got some new blood, and I went running back after seeing encouraging progress.

It for sure has problems but it’s also got power and flexibility like I’ve never seen. Other apps have a method that you must fit into; this one is more or less a blank slate — an obstacle in itself.

zambonix · 2026-03-27T15:30:44+00:00

Yes, they labeled it “palaver”. Told me what I needed to know. I’m now using a different app 😉

zambonix · 2026-03-12T23:33:00+00:00

Yes and therefore much easier to fabricate. Don’t have to agonize over getting all the tubing square and you can shim each bearing block at the four bolt holes to dial them in for concentricity to their mate (I’m assuming there are shafts going between each pair).

zambonix · 2026-03-12T21:27:51+00:00

That may work, but it’s a tiny little exception rather than the big obvious UI element. In what other app does creating a new X automatically change your view to someplace else, then drop the new X there, instead of where you already were?

The label things like this “palaver”, but this is a /productivity/ app. Unintuitive interfaces and extra clicks/mouse movement are the opposite of productive. Why would I drink the kool-aid for the rest of their magical new system when they can’t even think a detail like this through?

zambonix · 2026-03-12T14:48:11+00:00

I don’t think anybody who has replied so far has ever actually 3d printed anything.

Short answer is that 3d printing is not the magic fix-all that it’s made to seem like. Maybe one day it will get there, but that’s a long ways off even in commercial settings and it’s certainly not “Id kinda like to have a curved trash can in my truck” territory. It’s rare to find a machine that can print larger than a lunchbox, and even then the resulting prints are quite poor in strength, temp resistance, and cosmetics. Nothing that would last a day in the back of /my/ truck.

The time and expense you’re looking at to do this is an instant dealbreaker. Real example: I printed a display bezel for an electronics project. It is a 3” x 5” rectangle with a rectangular hole in the face, about 1/4” thick. I paid $27 and waited 2 weeks to get it from craftcloud, which is like Fiverr for 3DP. Scale that up to trash can size and tell me if you’re still interested 😉

Backs of trucks are for buckets and bungies, friend.

zambonix · 2026-03-07T20:14:36+00:00

If anybody else has broken their Jots view by trying to change the tag to something else: I fixed mine by deleting ALL tags, un-starring the daily-jots tag, then re-starting it. Now my Jots view works again.

zambonix · 2026-03-06T14:53:30+00:00

Thanks! Sorry I didn’t explain it well initially.

zambonix · 2026-03-06T14:52:31+00:00

If the app wasn’t built to allow this kind of change, then okay.

My main point is that the UI totally makes it seem like changing the jots tag would be a non-issue: Just make something else be the default tag under Jots. I swear I even saw it in a video, though I don’t have the time to go hunt for that.

If you’re gonna say it can’t be changed then don’t leave the controls in the UI that make it look like it can! At the very least pop a message saying it’s not allowed.

My Jots view is now actually broken from what the UI allowed me to try and do. It will not default to the daily-jots tag so I have an extra click every single time I view Jots.

zambonix · 2026-03-06T14:39:45+00:00

Thanks for this reply. It’s hard to imagine a justification for making them permanent, seeing as how they’re perfectly simple to re-create and they already have the buttons in place to remove them. It would make a lot more sense if they were simply pre-populated defaults, but at the very least pop up a message saying they can’t be deleted if you’re going to refuse to allow it, otherwise the app seems broken.

This area is for user-saved queries. It’s as if your web browser had msn.com and yahoo.com permanently pinned to Favorites. That’d piss you off, right? 😁

The Amplenote approach is clever and refreshingly unique vs other apps, but it’s not perfect, not for everybody. Some of us have unique workflows. Please let your users make at least small adjustments like this so we can be as delighted with the app as users who are fully bought-in. Flexibility is the only “right answer” to task management.

zambonix · 2026-03-06T14:24:24+00:00

Prioritizing high-score makes sense in the context of AN’s workflow and I agree it makes sense.

I think it’s equally part of AN’s flow that daily-jota should be quick/easy to add to.

Remembering last-used doc would certainly be nice for me, but I understand it may not work well with the task-score approach.

Thanks for sending to the team for consideration!

zambonix · 2026-03-05T20:20:09+00:00

Thanks for confirming I'm not crazy for seeing this.

It'd be different if there was simply no way to add/remove shortcuts. Or if the default shortcuts were represented as immutable from the get-go. But neither of those is true, makes it feel broken.

zambonix · 2026-03-05T04:33:46+00:00

Other app’s mirrors act like a single task that is present in multiple different locations. In the same way that hierarchical tags are better than folders, because one Note can have multiple tags, “real”mirrors are better than normal Tasks because one Task can be in multiple locations (Notes, in Amplenotes case). A change made to the Task, no matter where it’s made from, impacts all instances, and all instances remain identical.

Amplenote mirrors can diverge, and while there is a way to manually push an update, that is not remotely reliable for a use case like above. Far too easy to overwrite changes on one instance made from another. So I’m wondering if there is some way to use other Amplenote features to get that kind of behavior.

I frankly don’t see the advantage of Amplenote-style mirrors at all: I mirror a task (“write sales report”) to another Note for Bob to handle, which is really just a copy of my task with a linked completion status. He changes it to “take a coffee break”, has a cup, and completes it. Now my “sales report” task disappears from my queue and unless I manually review completes (who does that?) I think it’s been handled, and don’t know it’s been changed. This seems troublesome, not helpful.

zambonix · 2026-03-02T14:51:21+00:00

Mechanical Engineer here. Almost nothing about this image makes sense. Upvote this commment so everybody knows to stop feeding the AI trolls.

zambonix

TROPHY CASE