An offline desktop app for WorkFlowy | Hacker News Reader

An offline desktop app for WorkFlowy

blog.workflowy.com

31 pointsjessep15 comments

I really enjoy using workflowy and have suggested others use it. What I'd like is an Android app instead of using the mobile browser.

Possible in the future?

For all those who don't know, workflowy is lists of lists of lists of lists. This is pretty much how I think.

Yeah, it kills us that we don't have an offline Android app yet.

Workflowy Agent does a decent job of being a 3rd party solution.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.karelklima....

Ugh. Really? It feels slow and is painful to use.

Faster than using the mobile browser for me.

any.do has this: an android/iphone app, a chrome plugin, and a chrome app.

any.do does not have lists of lists of lists of lists . . . . I use any.do, but sparingly. Mostly for shopping lists or short to-do lists.

I do a lot of project planning and design. It's hard for me to write this all out in paragraph form so I create lists with many sublists. Workflowy has a simple export feature to text. I give it to the PM and he can write functional specs from it or I give it to a dev to work off of.

Workflowy is one of the most useful and interesting products created lately. I was honored to have had dinner with the founders a while back ago, and they are an awesome team and I really wish them the best.

I've found sometimes, especially when introducing Workflowy to non-English speakers, the UI is a bit hard to learn, but once I show them the basics they figure it out pretty quick. The daily email diff is also invaluable.

My tip to you guys: lower the number of free items per month to get more users to pay!

I love Work Flowy and I'm glad to see offline available although I always thought it worked offline and just synced when reconnected. How did it behave before?

I would pay for a pro account if they had a better iOS experience. Right now their web app wrapper type app ain't cutting it, they need something native. That's pro-worthy.

It does sync if you go online, but if you close the page, you lose the data. Yeah, iOS app could use a lot of love.

What are you guys using to sync the app? I am creating an app as well and thinking of going with Chrome Package App.

It is a Chrome Packaged App. This is nice, because it has built in auto-update.

The way to do a desktop app using web technologies that feels more "real" is with node-webkit: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

We did this project in collaboration with Google, and they were great. We wouldn't have done it at all otherwise. But, I still do want to create a node-webkit app, because I think that's what users want, a normal app, not some weird hybrid thing.

Yeah, I looked at node-webkit as well. The reason I was thinking of going with Chrome was because it's easier to push updates and to receive payments instead of rolling my own. I went for PouchDB to sync my data which will probably give me a few issues with the Packaged Apps since it uses eval in some places but I'll deal with that later.

This was built as a Chrome Packaged App. There are some plusses and minuses with them. The fact that you have most of a desktop experience, with auto-updating, is really nice. The fact that there are some critical differences, that are confusing to the user. I wish Chrome wasn't trying to invent a new category of app :/

We released this a while ago, but were waiting to announce it until Chrome released Mac support for its apps.

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