Question
What's the best new software from 2020?
What's your favorite software that you've started using this year? Anything special that improved your workflows and helped you be more productive in 2020? Or were there any major updates to software you already used that made you like it even more in 2020?
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This is the year of the 'backlink'. Obsidian and RoamResearch (and a bunch of other new or enhanced apps) are amazing and seem to be fueling their own note-taking resurgence. I never thought I'd hear 'Zettlekasten' in normal conversation. Not a Notion person but uh, be hard to ignore that beast too.
Absolutely, feels like wiki-style linking is the breakout software feature of 2020, from Roam Research buzz in the beginning of the year to Notion adding wiki links later this year. Had you used the Zettlekasten method prior to 2020, and if so, what were you using it in?
Nope. Had heard of it, mostly in the index card form some people had tried from Luhmann. I was not going to do that. I used to read some really good articles at Zettlekasten.de too, they have some great content. But like so many, I was brought in by this slick new software.
Gottcha! I'd heard of backlinks prior to Roam thanks to "As we may think" by Vannevar Bush, but it's the tool that got me actually using them.
Interesting, a cross-platform notes app with a terminal app, too!
What's your favorite thing about Joplin so far, and what were you using for notes before?
The fact that I can self-host and it's e2e encrypted. I was using Evernote before but realized I had super sensitive personal data on their servers.
Great point—that’s one aspect of SaaS that’s often thought thought about enough.
Canva is surprisingly powerful; I'd rediscovered it earlier this year as an easy way to make social media banners. They've done an incredible job at curating templates, too.
It's wild how little Audicity seems to have changed since I last used it. Still gets the job done, I take it?
- Clickup
- Obsidian.MD
Both fundamentally changed the way I work and our company strategies.
That is awesome to hear. Are you using Obsidian collaboratively with your team, or just on your own?
It's less about the scale, I suppose, and more about the structure/design of the product. I think it is certainly capable to scale (and has a good price as well!), depending on the use case.
I'll second Integromat. Have been a big Zapier user for years (I consult and teach it) but have put off learning Integromat.
Some of the stuff I've automated for our biz wasn't possible in Zapier and it is freaking awesome to have it sorted now. Wish I started sooner
Fascinating, I do need to give it a try, as my automation workflows are entirely colored by my Zapier experience.
What are your favorite Integromat automations so far that you couldn't do in Zapier?
One of the main ones, which is what drew me to try Integromat in the first place, is iterating over every row in a spreadsheet to do some kind of operation.
For example, I built a backlink checker to make sure people aren't pulling our links.
Another one is the synchronization of contacts from our billing system to Intercom. The Zapier contact lookup doesn't work very well. Integromat allows you to query the API manually, using the "authenticated API call" action - THIS is huge. If you know how to read API docs, you can do anything with the API.
Right now you can't do that in Zapier
Those both would absolutely enable a lot of more advanced workflows. Thanks for sharing. On spreadsheets, I've always done that with Zapier by updating one column in the spreadsheet, but that does require that manual step.
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Roam as a product and wiki-style linking as feature absolutely feel like this year's breakout. Did you start using Roam this year? And have you continued to use it throughout the year?