George Corrigan

I may have overstated. The community is very very supportive. So much so that this person showed me how to construct the code I wanted, all while saying "you're missing the point of Tana". He may be somewhat right. But the Tananaughts who are super dedicated are taking something that could be quite beautifully simple and making it wildly (in my eyes) complicated. I've moved all my WF over to Tana. It hasn't been easy. And some things still drive me bonkers (like the mobile app speed, and when you click on an internet link it often takes you to a tana link and not the www. version). My hesitation is that I (who don't typically shy away from complexity) got so twisted up trying to make this work, I wonder how "normal" people with average skills and patience are going to make it work? And the customization is so great, but so tricky - the support I've got has been amazing and essential, but how is that going to scale? So if they can't scale then what is the viability - and the export of the data OUT of Tana is not really supported. WF went another way. Skeleton crew, minor changes, reliance on a host of outside resources (PowerPack, web input etc), so reliable but just frustrating to deal with. I'd be interested in the over/under of who lasts longer. WF might be around until the sun goes dark - but with the functionality it has. Tana is going to go bananas, but it also might have difficulty extending its reach beyond its core, and so may not be able to keep its large team going. Its kinda nailbiting. I'm hoping Tana starts thinking of itself as almost an OS and then people build wrappers over that. Its starting to happen with templates. I drive WF like my car. With care, but not too much. Not much bad can happen. I drive Tana like my bike. With extreme caution and looking both ways at all times - it can do weird things from time to time that are hard to understand or rectify without skill. Once you have the skill its a delight. And having a responsive professional team with a vision that makes sense is lovely compared to the WF backwaters. But its not without its challenges. Good luck friend!

I realize that Tana is "more powerful" because you can tag anywhere, and smart nodes collate the results. But what that leads to is stuff all over the place and working with search nodes all the time. I still haven't got comfortable with that - I want to see a list and add to a list. Manipulating the mirror list isn't quite the same and sometimes goes wrong "you can't move this item under a search node" for example. I see lots of places where people ask "I want a fresh sheet and to start over" - I've never seen this request in any other tool. I'm convinced the reason is that people don't come at this with hierarchy in mind, and then just create a total dogs breakfast of a mess where they now have to remember tags and all that jazz. Yes I want supertags and to have interrelations. But the move to almost dismiss hierarchy is not human friendly or how writers / creators work. We want a list and to be able to sort it. I have a button that moves tags to their homes - and its been pretty well mocked over on the slack channel, but honestly I think it should be a core feature - ie "when I tag this, I'd like to move it to this part of my outline so I can manipulate it more easily". I'm glad I came from WorkFlowy which reveres the hierarchy. The linking is more powerful. But linking with no sense of hierarchy or organizing principle leads to chaos - and I fear thats where folks who don't have an outliner background are slowly heading - hence the "reset" questions.