Numerous Imperative Feature Additions and Improvements

[rootacc3ss]

Imperative Feature Additions and Improvements

Hi there @EYHN and ToEverything team!

Firstly, I just want to say that I adore this software. Notion was becoming too expensive for even myself alone, and I hated that it wasn't private. I think this software is on a beautiful track, but is not yet perfect. I REALLY want it to be even better than Notion, and I know we all can make it so if we come together.

I have a small but very important list of what I consider to be imperative additions and improvements regarding AFFiNE. AFFiNE is the absolute closest existing tool that I have been looking all over for, but the lack of these few little things have caused me to choose to begin making my own little SaaS in the mean time. I feel like if we worked together and we all contributed, it would take less time and have a better base if we just made improvements to AFFiNE.

I would LOVE to help out with PRs and/or testing, if possible. In the next section, I will outline the most pressing things to me which I wish to see in AFFiNE.

Thank you for your time!

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Audio Recording, Transcription (w/ AI)

• It would be nice to be able to do /record and record audio+video, or just audio.
• It would be really nice if Whisper automatically transcribed that audio in to text so the AI has context if that document is mentioned.
• It would be REALLY nice if we had a feature like Notion's "smart meeting notes" or Mem.ai's

Intelligent File Associations

In Notion and Mem.ai, files which are discussing similar/same/connected topics are connected to eachother. Similarly, I have a plugin for Obsidian which makes "Smart Connections". I feel like this will be extremely important for improving the AI agent. I relied on Notion AI to be able to take my very messy notes and if I requested one to be cleaned/enriched, or even just prompted the AI questions in the chat, to deliver EVERY BIT of information I requested.

For example: Even within my very messy, all over the place Notion system and databases, if I changed the name of a project and added/removed/changed hundreds of details, it would generally reply very reliably and consider as much context as it possibly could. Furthermore, if I were to do "Improve this writing" or do a prompt after highlighting text in Notion, it would consider ALL relevant context -- related documents, databases/pages/asses on the same page if relevant, links back to other documents, embedded PDFs and photos, et al

Dates, Times and Tasks System

• I really didn't like missing out on the "date" system Notion has. You could do "(@)tomorrow at 3pm" or "(@)today at 1:27am" and it would work. It was also nice to be able to choose a date range. Not having time built in is the most annoying for me; I cannot use AFFiNE for any planning due to this, sadly.
• I religiously used Notion's "reminders" which you could send via Notion Automations, or even just when a date+time was passed. It would be AMAZING if AFFiNE had even better utility for actual task management, reminders, etc.
• A timeline view would be nice; really, I'd just like to have my knowledge-base and planning/scheduling system all within one place.
• Some sort of inherent system for scheduling/tasks, even if it's as simple as AnyType's system for to-do and calendar stuff is very needed IMHO (at least until the overall system is just a tiny bit more polished, and you can throw some assets, properties and automation around and just be able to do it at will.

Implementation of a more "modular system" (plugins, community "marketplace")

The foundation for the software is there, and it's good. I think if it were easier for users to make "mods" instead of PRs. I don't feel that this one needs much of an explanation. You guys would probably have far better ideas than myself regarding this, to be honest.

Nit Picks

These are misc. complaints which do not need as much context.

• The set up for self-hosted and local AI needs to be revamped. You could easily borrow from OpenCode's source code; they have that whole thing done right.
• It would be nice to have a more robust automation system, but I'm not too worried about that right now. With Notion, we could even have webhooks called on certain changes/events, so I'd use N8N to send emails, contact my AI agents, etc.
• I can't really find out how to put "templates" from the showcase on the site on to my desktop app.
• please make clicking the AI toggle in the bottom right hand corner bring up a chat box instead of shoot you to a different menu!

I have some other ideas, such as additional agentic ability / tooling for the AI, etc (deeper research using both context within the software, but the web and other sources). But, I think I've left enough feedback for now. Super sorry for the ramble.

Thank you guys for your hard work, and if I can do anything, please let me know! For now, I am going to continue to explore (or, re-explore) AFFiNE, Appflowy, Notion, Mem.ai, Anytype, et al, and I will do my best to make something to appease my autism in the meantime. Hopefully I can contribute, either way!

Sending love -- thanks again guys.