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Homescreen #3: The Never-Ending Search of a Knowledge Base

I still don’t know which is going to be The One

Giacomo Barbieri

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.


The Never Ending Search

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:

  1. when I saved things, they were not rendered well, and I couldn’t just save ‘the link’

  2. When I could save just links there was no way to link them together

  3. 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 too expensive

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.

save.space is too simple

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

Collect this post as an NFT.

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