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Dear Heptabase User,

Our CEO, Alan, will host another Ask Me Anything event on our Discord community next weekend. We encourage you to prepare your question in advance and bring it up during the event. If you're curious about the previous AMA, you can find the record on our public wiki.


Whiteboard - Support Text Element in Mindmap

You can now add text elements as nodes in a mindmap, allowing you to include bullet lists, code blocks, images, video embeds, and other content directly in the mindmap without using cards!


We're happy to see Greg consistently sharing high-quality Heptabase use case videos. If you're new to Heptabase and want to use it more effectively, Greg's videos will be very helpful!

Mandarin Content

YouTube 頻道《槓桿生活 | QQ》 製作了一集關於 Insight Generator 的介紹影片,如果你還沒有用過這個功能,或者不確定怎麼用更好,歡迎參考 QQ 的詳細介紹!


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!

Best regards,

Heptabase Team

Dear Heptabase User,

If you're an Android user, you can now share content directly into Heptabase. We hope you enjoy this handy feature!


Use Case: Use Heptabase to Learn Stress Management

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This week, we want to share a use case from one of our users, fluidityZ. He shared some impressively organized whiteboards and screenshots in our Discord community. One of the whiteboards he shared focuses on the topic of stress.

In this whiteboard, fluidityZ uses different colors to represent different types of content. He shared his methodology in the Discord channel:

I started by making a Card for each sub-section of the chapter, 1.1, 1.2, etc. The idea was to put some basic info in the card then expand on the detail via mindmaps. The goal was to organize it and paraphrase it in a way that made sense to me and was condensed.

Second after I finished I just would periodically go throughout the "backbone" of it and start drawing connections, asking questions. That is what the colored lines and questions are for. Green was questions / 'i dont understand' and purple was more for research interests or ideas for my counseling practice.

If you're also proud of your whiteboard, don't hesitate to share it in the #use-case channel on Discord!

Whiteboard - Support Highlight Card in Mindmap

You can now attach highlight cards to a mindmap as card nodes, making it much easier to organize your highlights.

We're planning to support more types of content as mindmap nodes. Stay tuned!


New Import Button in Sidebar

We've added a new import button to the left sidebar. You can now add media files as cards faster in Heptabase!

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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!

Best regards,

Heptabase Team

Dear Heptabase User,

Our Insight Generator has been available for a month now. This means if you previously hit usage limits, you may be able to use it again!

If you haven't tried it yet, we'd love for you to give it a try and share your feedback with us!


Mobile: Share sheet for iOS

You can now easily capture content to Heptabase on iOS devices, making it much simpler to quickly add information. We'll launch the Android version soon, stay tuned!


Search: Improved Accuracy for CJK Keywords

In the latest version, we have refined the algorithm for our Quick Find (Cmd/Ctrl + O) feature to prioritize exact and substring matches for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) keywords. We have also removed the original type-based grouping (grouping the results by whiteboards, tags, cards, etc.) to ensure that the most relevant search results appear at the top.

If you’re have any feedback about the search results, please let us know through our in-app support!


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!

Best regards,

Heptabase Team

Dear Heptabase User,

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!

newsletter-026


Whiteboard: Drag and drop AI Insights

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!


App: Referral Reward

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!

Best regards,

Heptabase Team

Dear Heptabase User,

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!


App: Insight Generator

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.


App: Open Multiple Heptabase Windows

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.

Other product updates

We've recently implemented several quality-of-life updates:

  • Added a navigation panel to the iPad app
  • Limited highlight card source titles to 30 characters, reducing redundancy
  • Maintained visibility of the right sidebar in focus mode
  • You can now click a link to expand items in a toggle list

If you encounter any issues or find something inconvenient, please don't hesitate to reach out through our in-app support!


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!

Best regards,

Heptabase Team

Dear Heptabase User,

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!


Mobile: Split panel on iPad whiteboard

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!

Upcoming product updates

In the upcoming weeks, our team will focus on three things:

  1. Improving whiteboard experience, such as a new design for folded cards, better alignment guides, batch resizing, dotted grids, mindmap usability, and more.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.


Our friend Greg has produced another interesting and meaningful Heptabase video. We like the "thought forest" idea. Highly recommended!

Mandarin content

YouTube 頻道 Jackiesheshares 製作了一集簡潔清楚的 Heptabase 介紹影片,期待 Jackie 之後繼續跟大家分享更多關於 Heptabase 的內容!

我們的用戶朋友翰元分享了一篇《我如何用 Heptabase 整理職缺》,如果你剛好有這樣的使用情境,歡迎參考看看!


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!

Best regards,

Heptabase Team

Dear Heptabase User,

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!


Whiteboard - Large text at small zoom

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!

Mobile App - Drag and drop blocks in the editor

You can now hold and drag a block to move it up and down on mobile devices. This makes it easier to reorganize your paragraphs on the go!

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!

Best regards,

Heptabase Team

Dear Heptabase User,

Recently, another new engineer, Yo, joined the Heptabase team. He has already started shipping new features, and we are so happy to have Yo with us!


Mobile: Import Cards on Mobile Whiteboards

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!

Whiteboard: Reset Objects to Default Size

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!


Updates from the Heptabase Team

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!

Best regards,

Heptabase Team

Dear Heptabase User,

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

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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!

Dear Heptabase User,

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!