Here’s a tantalizing little puzzle to chew on: One of the most interesting up-and-coming apps is also one of the most immediately familiar—outside, at least.
The app is called Skills. At this time, most of its recognition revolves around the fact that it was recently listed as a top manufacturing choice by tech journalist Casey Newton in his book. Platformer newspaper.
But while the Powers may be flying largely under the radar right now, they’re developing a small but very dedicated base of people who are both ready for something different. again eager to avoid the task of adapting to an entirely new paradigm of note-taking.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s why its new-yet-familiar approach is so impressive.
Comparisons are inevitable
Let’s get one thing out of the way: When you first unlock Skills, you’ll think: “Wow. This looks very similar to Notion. “
If you’ve spent any time with Notion, the comparison is impossible to avoid. The look and feel of the capabilities and even its basic philosophy are undeniably similar to the block-based, open-canvas framework popularized by Notion—a multi-product behemoth that, ironically, recently protected tech giants like Google and Microsoft as well. working to stake its claim in the competitive manufacturing service sector.
But for all the goods Notion offers and all the dedicated users the company now wants, the relatively small team behind Capacaties saw the need for something more—with a service that started with that core concept but then took off. to pursue.
“We think Notion did a lot of things right,” said Capacity founder Michael von Hohnhorst. “Where we differ is how we organize content and information.”
Skills are the brainchild of von Hohnhorst and his college friend Steffen Bleher, both of whom show plenty of youthful energy at the ripe old age of 28. They started the ministry when they met electrical engineering students at a German university and realized they didn’t make it. they were very happy with whatever tools they had to collect and organize the endless streams of information in their lives. It was then that they began to lay the foundation for what would become Skills, on their own and without outside investment. That is still the case today, although they now have two full-time employees and a few contractors working alongside them.
Like Notions, Skills can be difficult to define. Is it a note taking app? (Yes, in a sense.) Are you a professional editor and planner? (Sometimes, if you want to.) Is it another office space—a place where you can delve deeper into the writing and integration of multimedia ideas? (That, too, is possible.)
Ultimately, all of those things—and then some. At the simplest level possible, it’s a place to put important information, organize it, and then be able to find it again later. Other than that, the details are very much up to you.
One thing is Skills is something However, it’s hard to believe that you shouldn’t waste your time actively thinking about the organization.
In fact, Skills strives to eliminate the habit of editing your information altogether. Instead of a traditional (and, yes, similar to Vision) system of maintaining a carefully created hierarchy of sections and sub-pages, Power encourages you to think about everything you put in. thing-one that has its own natural connection, that doesn’t conflict with other things you create.
“You think a lot about links and connections between your content,” explains von Hohnhorst. “We removed a lot of organizational conflicts – like where do I put something, which database do I edit, or which folder category is my structure.”
It’s a bit of a lofty concept to wrap your head around, but once you get into the app and start trying it out for yourself, it makes a surprising amount of sense.
Basically, for anything you want to add to a widget, you choose from a list of possible object types—a page, person, project, link, image, PDF, audio recording, or file, for example—and simply type or paste whatever comes to mind into the resulting space. You can even create your own custom kind of thing, if you have a specific need the existing options don’t care.
When some things come naturally, you just say them—you use them anywhere @ symbol or double brackets ([[]])—referencing them in a linked manner that makes it easy to find and open as needed.
To be fair, Notion—and other services in this space, like Obsidian—do something very similar, right down to the specific instructions for creating such connections. But with Skills, that process is positioned as the core part of the organization’s system and the core way you use the service, apart from all the other complexity around it.
“We tried to build a tool that works very well out of the box,” says von Hohnhorst. “You don’t have to spend more time installing plugins and setting up databases than taking notes.”
To do that, Amandla also handles most of the processing for your input. For example, the service automatically creates a “Backlinks” section under each item that includes links to everything. the rest the item specified within it. It’s designed to reinforce that goal of devoting less time and energy to organizational worries and more to focusing on your core values—with skills that come from connecting and uncovering valuable past experiences as you go.
“That’s what you think in your mind,” said von Hohnhorst. “We found this to be an intuitive and hassle-free way to organize content.”
That may be the basis of what the Skills wish to achieve. But in practice, there is much more beyond this seemingly simple outer layer.
Managing your organization
For all the talk about capabilities that eliminate the need for organization, the app—available on the web and in native forms for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android, with an iPad version available for quick access—actually delivers. sophisticated systems for keeping your information organized, if he wants to accept them.
You can create many spaces to store your things, for example—perhaps one for your notes and one for work projects—and those spaces remain completely separate, without linking or communicating.
You can also manually add tags to items for an extra layer of organization and discovery. You can also switch to a chronological calendar view to see all your items based on when you created them, for another way to organize and interpret any information you add to the mix.
Interestingly, those still-slowly-manual methods highlight an area where AI may soon play an important role. Right now, Power is incorporating AI in all the usual ways—with an open assistant chatbot that can answer questions about your physical assets, write new content on your behalf, and so on.
But in the future, von Hohnhorst sees AI starting to reveal content related to your existing assets as you type—appearing and analyzing text from past objects around your active workspace, in other words, the way the launcher has profiled you. A few years ago called Heyday wanted to do. (Heyday recently announced its acquisition of virtual tutoring platform BetterUp this month.)
“You can work on another aspect and remove some friction and do something 5 or 10% faster, but AI has the potential to make people 10 times more productive,” said von Hohnhorst.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that von Hohnhorst already sees such opportunities dividing the current Capacity camp—with one group of early adopters asserting that the service shouldn’t include AI in any way and the other grumbling about the technology’s promise. With that in mind, Power keeps all AI features off by default and treats them as add-ons only, and von Hohnhorst expects that same approach to be maintained going forward.
As for that user base, currently, Amandla boasts about 120,000 registered users—many of whom are on the service’s free plan and a set in the “single-digit thousands” opting for the $10-a-month premium option that includes the aforementioned AI. assistant and unlimited media uploads and much more. (Those prices are, remarkably, very much in line with the Notion model—though the Notion requires an additional $10 per month to fully access its AI assistant.)
Speaking of pricing, that’s one area where Power plans to charge a different approach than most of its productivity apps: The service is set up to serve individuals—not groups—and it intends to maintain that focus going forward, even as it grows over time. .
“A lot of this [services] making money in the B2B space and the brand—they don’t care as much about individual users anymore,” says von Hohnhorst. “We believe in the individual and program your own, unique brain to suit you.”
For now, that focus seems to be using Skills well. And in a world with seemingly endless ideas about the perfect way to produce, perhaps there is room for both for a giant like Notion. again A player who focuses a little as skills to thrive.
Discover all kinds of special production gems my free Cool Tools booklet— one handy new tool in your inbox every Wednesday!
Source link
