New Release: Command Palette

And lots more

Today we’re launching an updated Command Palette. We want to make Reflect as fast as possible, which means never leaving your keyboard—this new Command Palette gets us closer to that vision.

For example, you can now type ‘tomorrow’, ‘next week’, or ‘3 days from now’ from the command palette (cmd+k) and you’ll be delivered to the correct Daily Note. We also offer the same functionality when creating backlinks. We’re finding the main use-case here is writing notes and TODOs to your future self.

The philosophy of note-taking

The more I work on Reflect I’m realizing that people don’t just want another note-taking app. No, they want to be immersed in the philosophy of note-taking. I think instinctively most people realize that taking good notes would improve their thinking. They’re just not sure the best way of going about it.

I’ve started writing down some basic rules of note-taking inspired by this article on the thesephist.com:

Alex MacCaw @maccaw

4 rules of note-taking: 1. Append only 2. Default to Daily Notes (to associate notes with time) 3. Backlink entities 4. Tag categories (lowercase singular)

My plan is to first turn this into a document, and then a course (available during check-out).

iOS app update

Many of you are asking about an iOS app. We’ve made a lot of progress on this and now have a TestFlight working with end-to-end-encryption, syncing, etc. There are some key bugs we want to squash before opening it up to a wider audience though. Expect more here soon!

Revenue update

Reflect currently costs $120 USD/year, but we aren’t yet enforcing pricing. Even under these conditions we have 43 ‘voluntary’ customers.

At our current burn we need to add 140 customers a month to be profitable (which seems very doable).

On the 1st of September pricing will rise to $160/year (but we’ll of course grandfather existing customers). And at that point we’ll start enforcing it.

We have roughly 7000 people signed up to the early-access wait-list. We still want to limit access to a subset while we iron-out some important product details.

However - we do have a lot of people clamouring for access. So later this year we will offer a paid way to skip the queue (currently the only way in is to be invited and onboarded by an existing user).

Full changelog

• Specify relative and absolute dates in backlink picker and command pallet. For example, press cmd+k then:

  • One day from now

  • October 10th

  • Tomorrow

  • Next week

• We've added a keyboard shortcut for completing TODOs: cmd+enter

• Backlinks automatically rename when their linked subject changes

• Lots of search performance and UI improvements, especially with scroll

• ctrl+n and ctrl+p now work for going up/down in select menus

• Scroll-bars styling is now fixed in dark mode

• Increased click-size of bullets for easy minimize/maximize

• Stopped phone-number regex matching new lines

• Press cmd+enter on a backlink to navigate to it

• It's now possible to drag/drop attachment blocks

• We now check underscores have a space preceding them before italicizing

• We have removed the note subject from the url's path (for privacy reasons)