Welcome to the second issue of Homescreen, and Happy New Year! Here you can find ideas, thoughts and reasons why I choose which app deserves to stay on my phone and my tablet (and of course I didn’t write this today!).
This week, I give updates about my never ending search for a knowledge base app by trying a couple more apps and giving my honest take.
In the previous issue, I talked about how I still can’t find the perfect read-it-later app, and how I settled for Reader by Readwise for the moment. The thing is, Reader is a perfect app - it just costs too much for my idea of how much an app like this could cost. It’s not open source, so I couldn’t customize just the way I like it if I wanted, but it’s overall a very good option, and I could see myself just keep using it for years - like I did for the past two.
The knowledge base app, instead is an open quest. I literally couldn’t find anything that pleases me enough to make me settle.
But first, two questions I feel I need to answer to put everything in the right context:
1) What’s a knowledge base app
2) What’s been my default so far
For those who don’t know it, a knowledge base is a system that lets you organize everything you find, read and save in a collection of sort. It’s different from the read-it-later app because the read-it-later app helps you catch the flow of information, while the knowledge base helps you sediment the ideas in a more structured space.
That is, I could save articles I find through Reader feeds in a knowledge base, either if I read them or not. For me, an item for a knowledge base can be:
an article, but just in some cases
Wikipedia articles
X threads
E-commerce links
Screenshots
A collection of articles that I need to study and act on
Everything that I find useful to remember in an unspecified date
I tried a lot of apps over the past 10 years. I tried Evernote when I was in university, then I switched to Google Drive (!), then again I tried to use Notion, Obsidian and Raindrop and I still wasn’t satisfied. The reasons were:
when I saved things, they were not rendered well, and I couldn’t just save ‘the link’
When I could save just links there was no way to link them together
When I could link them together, the system was too complex to maintain over time, and actually required more time to organize than to use it
This was years ago, and now I believe there’s a good chance that GPTs (AI) can solve 3., so that the bigger concatenated issue can be solved. I tried a couple of apps already that use AI to organize knowledge automatically.
Mymind is an app that costs around 13$/month and lets you save any link from the share sheet on the iPhone, and it also has an iPad and a macOS app, a browser extension and a web app.
It is great because it uses AI to help you find things better, and automatically categorizes each item you save with a selection of tags and a brief AI summary, but it doesn’t render items in-app, meaning that you need to open the link in a browser on in the app you saved it from. This is tedious, because it means that I need to click more than once and it’s not fast if I need to quickly switch from one item to the other to reconstruct the steps of a thought I had, or simply to do research.
Also, its UI is not ideal: it displays items in boxes, very large boxes that are unnecessarily big in my opinion. And it costs 13$/month, which is even higher than Readwise which is less than 8$/month and I use it way more.
I like save.space’s UI, it has small boxes for each item, and uses a similar AI that Mymind uses, but it only uses for summarizing items, and not for tagging them. Also, it’s only available for iPhone - there’s not even an iPad app, let alone a web app or a macOS one. And it’s also free, which I like, but it’s not that complete, at least not yet.
So my quest for the ultimate, definitive knowledge base app continues. I’m now using Notion as a knowledge base for a side project that I started a few weeks ago, and that only works on Notion because I have a small data set, so it’s very doable, but it doesn’t work for an endless, unorganized mess of links like I do with ‘my mind.’
Thanks for reading!
If you find knowledge base apps worth looking at, don’t hesitate to shoot an email to hey@jaack.me
