Recently, we have upgraded our insight generator. The quality of the generated insights should be much better than before. If you're using the insight generator to assist with reading long articles, transcripts, or book chapters, feel free to try it out and let us know what you think!
In addition to the improved quality of insights, you can now drag them into the whiteboard to create connections or read them together. We hope you enjoy these enhancements!
Recently, we’ve introduced the "Give $5, Get $5" referral program! You can now share your referral link with your friend. If your friend completes the trial and subscribes to Heptabase through your referral link, both of you will receive a $5 discount
Whiteboard: Add "Full title for folded cards" mode.
In the latest version, you can display the full title of the folded card and edit the title with our rich-text editor! If you have cards with long titles, you can now better see the big picture of your knowledge, even when the cards are folded.
We hope that these updates will improve your experience on Heptabase and make your learning easier and more enjoyable.
If you have any feedback or suggestions, or you want to share your use cases or contents related to Heptabase, please don't hesitate to chat with us through our in app support.
Stay tuned for future updates, and we hope you have a great day!
Recently, our CEO Alan hosted his first AMA (Ask Me Anything) event on our Discord community. The session featured intriguing questions such as "Heptabase's position in the PKM market and its attitude toward AI?" and "Heptabase's attitude toward interoperability?" You can find the complete AMA record on our public wiki.
We're planning to host more regular AMA events in the future. If you'd like to participate and ask questions, be sure to keep an eye on our announcements in the Discord community!
In the latest version, you can use the Insight Generator, an early alpha feature that allows you to generate atomic insights from long articles. It is designed to help you grasp the knowledge structure of a long article ten times faster and quickly navigate to different parts of the knowledge source that are useful or interesting to you, without the need to always read from beginning to the end and bear with the boring or irrelevant parts of the content.
This feature is currently in early alpha and has a lot of room for improvement. Since the AI model is costly, we have set a monthly usage limit for now. If you reach the usage limit, you'll see a feedback form to join the waitlist and provide feedback on the current version.
In the latest version, you can open multiple Heptabase windows at the same time!
To open a new window, just press the keyboard shortcut:
Mac: Cmd + Shift + N
Windows/Linux: Ctrl + Shift + N (please do it outside a whiteboard)
Note: If you're a Windows user and don't see the "New Window" option when you right-click the Heptabase icon, try unpinning the Heptabase app from your taskbar and then opening it again to see if that fixes the issue.
We thoroughly enjoy Greg's high-quality Heptabase tutorial videos, and this one is no exception. In this episode, Greg shares five valuable tips. We particularly like two of them: "Turn your note titles into questions" and "Make clear and specific titles for your notes."
You may also discover valuable insights from his workflows!
We hope that these updates will improve your experience on Heptabase and make your learning easier and more enjoyable.
If you have any feedback or suggestions, or you want to share your use cases or contents related to Heptabase, please don't hesitate to chat with us in our Discord Community or send to team@heptabase.com .
Stay tuned for future updates, and we hope you have a great day!
Last week, another new full-stack engineer, Jack, joined the Heptabase team. Feel free to give Jack a warm welcome when you see him in our Discord community!
Subscription update: Value-added tax (VAT) in certain jurisdictions outside the U.S.
Due to the increasing number of customers globally, our company is now legally required to register in the following jurisdictions and collect VAT from the existing subscriptions: EU, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Canada (Saskatchewan), United Arab Emirates, and South Korea.
If you’re from one of these places, please note that there will be a tax applied on top of your next subscription invoice, and the tax rate depends on your jurisdiction, which can range from 5% (if you’re from Canada and UAE) to ~20% (if you’re from Europe).
We know this is definitely not exciting news, and we appreciate your understanding that while our customer base is scaling globally, ensuring compliance is as important as shipping products. If you have any questions regarding VAT or the recent invoice, please contact us for support. We’re here to help!
In the latest version of our mobile app, you can open a card in the split panel on your iPad devices. We’re working on implementing it on Android tablets as well and will release it in the upcoming weeks!
In the upcoming weeks, our team will focus on three things:
Improving whiteboard experience, such as a new design for folded cards, better alignment guides, batch resizing, dotted grids, mindmap usability, and more.
Wrapping up our recent focus on mobile and tablet app development with an improved capturing experience, such as the share sheet and quick capture design.
Introduce a beta feature that we’ve been testing internally for a while to help you better process really long articles or transcripts into atomic knowledge insights.
In the meantime, we are wrapping up the whiteboard collaboration feature that we’ve been testing internally. Important knowledge work is rarely done independently, and we believe the ability to invite others to your whiteboard to collaborate and discuss with you is crucial for learning and researching complex topics. Because Heptabase is an offline-first app that aims to ensure you can access all data without an internet connection, the collaborative feature is much more complex to build than most cloud-first apps, and there is a lot of system-level work we need to implement before releasing it to you.
We are halfway through the challenges and will try our best to release the first minimal version to you this year and iterate from it.
We hope that these updates will improve your experience on Heptabase and make your learning easier and more enjoyable.
If you have any feedback or suggestions, or you want to share your use cases or contents related to Heptabase, please don't hesitate to chat with us in our Discord Community or send to team@heptabase.com .
Stay tuned for future updates, and we hope you have a great day!
Recently, we've been working on improving the whiteboard experiences. If you have any issues with the whiteboard and want us to fix them, please contact us through our in-app support!
In the latest version, you can turn on "Large text at small zoom" in the options menu at the bottom-right of your whiteboard. When you zoom out below 30%, you'll see only card titles. At 15% and 10% zoom levels, the titles get even bigger.
If you want a better overview of your large whiteboards, this feature is for you!
Believe it or not, the YouTube channel Greg Wheeler has produced three Heptabase tutorials over the past few days 🤯
We want to share all of them with you because we think these tutorials will be very helpful for all Heptabase users!
We hope that these updates will improve your experience on Heptabase and make your learning easier and more enjoyable.
If you have any feedback or suggestions, or you want to share your use cases or contents related to Heptabase, please don't hesitate to chat with us in our Discord Community or send to team@heptabase.com .
Stay tuned for future updates, and we hope you have a great day!
In the latest version of our mobile and tablet app, you can import cards from your library onto whiteboards. This is another highly requested feature, and we hope you enjoy it!
In the next few weeks, we will bring more features to our mobile and tablet app. Feel free to check out our roadmap for more information!
In the past, if you had resized cards on a whiteboard, it was hard to turn them back to the default width and height. You can now select multiple cards and reset them to their default size in one click, just like when you import them from the card library. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll ship more updates to improve the experience of using the whiteboard. Stay tuned!
In the latest version, you can import backlinks of selected cards to a whiteboard through our import panel. We hope this feature gives you a smoother experience!
In the past three months, we have been hiring new software engineers because while our user base is growing rapidly, we’re a bit short on hands. While interviewing and onboarding new members has taken us quite some time and slowed down the development a bit, we believe having them on the team is crucial for Heptabase to reach its long-term vision at scale. We’ve finally wrapped up the hiring process now and want to thank everyone who applied for the position or shared the job openings with their friends!
We hope that these updates will improve your experience on Heptabase and make your learning easier and more enjoyable.
If you have any feedback or suggestions, or you want to share your use cases or contents related to Heptabase, please don't hesitate to chat with us in our Discord Community or send to team@heptabase.com .
Stay tuned for future updates, and we hope you have a great day!
We've recently improved the performance of our mobile app's whiteboards. If you previously experienced slow speeds or frequent refreshes, please update to the latest version and see if the performance has improved.
If you continue to encounter issues, please contact us. We will keep improving it!
Use Case: Use Heptabase to Draw a Travel Map
This week, we want to share a use case provided by one of our users, Ian. In his article, "Three Steps to Plan Your Trip and Travel Itinerary with Heptabase" (written in Mandarin), Ian presents a straightforward example of travel planning in the following three steps:
First, he wrote down all the places he wanted to visit and turned them into multiple "attraction cards.”
Next, he used Google Maps to sketch a basic route of the places he wanted to visit. Then, he went back to Heptabase and organized the cards of attractions based on their real locations on the map. He started drawing direction lines and arrows between the cards and noted the distances in the description field.
Finally, he filled out each attraction card with details and grouped them into different journal cards for the trip. He also turned these cards into a todo list, so he could track which places he'd visited and which he hadn't.
By following these steps, you can easily create detailed and friendly travel maps and share them with others. Go ahead and give it a try!
This week, a new full-stack engineer, Alex, has joined us as the 7th member of the Heptabase team. If you see Alex in the Discord channel or in our in-app support chatroom, feel free to say hi to him! 👋
Heptabase First Impression
This week, instead of a use case, we're sharing an introduction video from a new user, Game & Tech Focus, who has just started using Heptabase.
The video provides a comprehensive overview of Heptabase's basic elements and workflows. We really appreciate how it thoroughly discusses topics such as data longevity and customer support, in addition to the product itself. These insights are typically absent from quick general reviews, but we know they're important considerations for many people when deciding whether to use Heptabase long-term.
If you're new to Heptabase, we highly recommend watching this video. There is also a blog post version of this video. You might discover some hidden features or interesting ideas!
Your feedback is important to us. If you are new to Heptabase and have been using it for less than 1 month, we would love to hear your feedback through a 15-minute chat.
Feel free to schedule a user interview with us using this link. The link is available on a rolling basis, and every week we will open new slots.
During the interview, we can speak both English or Mandarin, depending on your preference.
P.S. If you've been using Heptabase for more than 1 month, please do not schedule it for now. We will create another link for that in the future.
Use case: Play interactive games with Heptabase’s focus mode
This week's use case comes from one of our Discord community members, Ian Hsiao.
Ian said, "I just discovered that we can play interactive games (choices matter games/storyboard games) with Heptabase focus mode."
We agree with this finding! When you enable Focus Mode by toggling the button at the bottom-right of the whiteboard, only the selected card remains visible while all other objects dim. You can also use the keyboard to navigate through the cards, creating an interactive experience.
Some users have also noted that this feature works well for presentations, as it helps keep the audience's attention on your cursor and minimizes distractions.
If you haven't tried focus mode yet, definitely give it a shot!
Recently, the YouTube channel Paperless Movement conducted another interview with our co-founder, Alan. We discussed how Heptabase has evolved over the past few quarters and what we plan to do in the coming months. If you haven't kept up with our changes for a while, this interview will be a great recap!
Use case: Learn the "Picture & Sound workflow" using Heptabase
This week's use case comes from one of our Discord community members, CrasE.
CrasE shared a flowchart showcasing a “Picture & Sound workflow” for video production.
The flowchart uses various colors to group different stages and processes of production, like orange for the music process and yellow for the sound process. It also uses solid lines to indicate normal workflows, and dashed lines to indicate special cases. The visual presentation makes it easy to understand and follow, no matter what the topic is.
Crase said, "I really enjoy creating such tables based on the material I study in the field of post-production." We also enjoy seeing these beautiful and well-organized shares!
In the past few weeks, we've rolled out our new backend, which has led to faster initialization speed and more stable sync performance. We appreciate all the bug reports and feedback you've sent us!
If you still encounter any sync-related issues, please feel free to contact us for support!
Use case: Distill a 1000+ page technical programming book into big picture thinking
This week's use case comes from one of our Discord community members, BigSnipes.
BigSnipes shared the whiteboard “Python in a Nutshell” in the Discord channel. Even though the whiteboard is big, you can still understand its structure because the section names become larger when you zoom out.
At Heptabase, we encourage you to use sections to group content within a whiteboard. You can name and color sections thoughtfully to make them easy to find and use as the whiteboard expands. You can also add subsections into sections for more advanced use. If you haven't tried using sections much, we recommend you give it a try!
